[ecrea] cfp: Global Critical Pedagogies

*Call for papers  - Fifth Annual ACGS Conference*

*Global Critical Pedagogies*


*Amsterdam, 18-19 October 2018*

**

*Extended deadline: 10 May 2018*

*Keynote speakers:*//

Maggie Berg (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada) and Barbara Seeber 
(Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada)

Jack Halberstam (Columbia University, New York City, US)

Elisio Macamo (Zentrum für Afrikastudien Basel (ZASB), Basel, Switzerland)

Françoise Vergès (Collège d’études mondiales, FMSH, Paris, France)


In a time of fake news, internet memes, and a global information 
overload, questions of education and pedagogy have become all the more 
pressing. Globally, institutes of higher education are under threat, 
facing budget cuts and an increasing demand for directly and immediately 
applicable knowledge instead of open-ended critical reflection. In the 
context of discussions about the Anthropocene and current geopolitical 
changes – including the upsurge of populisms and nationalisms worldwide, 
and the alleged rise of Asia – there is a renewed urgency to re/thinking 
knowledge production and dissemination. How to re/think pedagogy in the 
midst of all these developments? And what specific role can the social 
sciences and the humanities play in this?

The fifth conference of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies 
(ACGS), organised in cooperation with the Humanities across Borders 
network of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), focuses 
on critical global pedagogies. It does so along the lines of four 
interrelated themes:

(1)Pedagogies beyond the classroom

The secluded environment of the classroom is a privileged space. 
Increasingly, the need to move beyond and outside the classroom is 
articulated. How can everyday practices, such as craftsmanship and 
vernacular knowledge, be integrated into the curriculum and how can the 
boundaries between the teacher and the student be destabilised – as 
propagated, for example, by Rancière in his /The Ignorant Schoolmaster/ 
(1987)? We are particularly interested here in two domains that may help 
to blur the boundary between theory and practice, and between the 
university and the everyday: art and activism. Action research and 
artistic research have slowly gained momentum in curricula across the 
world, but how do we transform these research practices into critical 
pedagogies? And how do we forge creative synergy between academic 
knowledge and artistic and activist practices?

(2)Decolonizing knowledge and worlding pedagogies

The spectre of Europe continues to haunt knowledge production worldwide, 
with its implicit claims of universalism. As Chen writes in his /Asia as 
Method/, “Universalist arrogance serves only to keep new possibilities 
from emerging, since
it allows only one set of accepted analytic 
language to enter the dialogue and is itself a product of a specific set 
of historical experiences”(2010: 245).While postcolonial scholars like 
Chakrabarty call for a provincialization of knowledge, Chen’s plea for 
inter-Asia referencing suggests an even more radical turn away from ‘the 
West’ as the primary interlocutor. Simultaneously, in the West, 
universities are proving very stubborn in their refusal to allow 
different forms of knowledge from different locations to be integrated 
in curricula. Indeed, most curricula continue to center on Western 
knowledge and Western cultural forms, with "the rest" being relegated to 
at most a case to prove Western theory. How can we decolonize our 
universities and pedagogies, and how can we move towards more worlding 
pedagogies geared towards resisting the danger of intellectual parochialism?

(3)Contesting the neoliberal university

In the past years, we have witnessed different protests at universities 
across the world, ranging from the Sanctuary movement at NYU to the 
Rethink movement at the University of Amsterdam, and from the Umbrella 
protest movement in Hong Kong to Fees Must Fall in South Africa. Both 
students and teachers are asking for structural reforms in education and 
research. While universities increasingly focus on making profit – 
through attracting more and more students, through real estate 
speculation, or both – on increasing productivity, and on global 
rankings and H-indexes, the call for a sustainable, workable, 
slower-paced, and less neoliberal alternative is getting louder and 
louder (Berg and Seeber 2016). What strategies have been developed to 
work towards this alternative, and how do these strategies explore 
different critical pedagogies?

(4)Pedagogies of failure

The global, and arguably neoliberal, mindset of higher education 
institutions has excluded the possibility of failure through the 
constant validation and celebration of notions of progress, development, 
innovation, excellence, and improvement. But is more always really 
better? How can we rescue failure from its negative connotations? How 
can we bring it back in and beyond the classroom as a valuable tool for 
thinking, for knowledge production, and also for creative production as 
well as political activism? According to the late Marc Karlin, politics 
is a learning process about how to live with pessimism and how to work 
on yourself in relation to that pessimism. We may think the same of 
failure. In the words of Jack Halberstam, “…failing, losing, forgetting, 
unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more 
creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” 
(2011: 2). How can we bring failure back into our pedagogies?

We invite papers that explore the complexity of critical pedagogies in 
their interaction with processes of globalisation and world-making 
through theoretical and empirical analyses.

Contributions from fields from across the social sciences or humanities 
are invited.

Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and short bio (max. 100 words) 
by 10 May 2018 to (acgs-fgw /at/ uva.nl) <mailto:(acgs-fgw /at/ uva.nl)>. Panels can 
also be submitted with a maximum of four papers. Please indicate to 
which of the four themes your contribution belongs.

Notice of acceptance will be given by 1 June 2018.

Conference fee: 50 Euros (25 Euros for PhD students). Conference dinner: 
25 Euros.

Organisers: Jeroen de Kloet, Esther Peeren, Leonie Schmidt (University 
of Amsterdam) in cooperation with the International Institute for Asian 
Studies.



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