Critical Pedagogy
During the course of organising the conference "Spaces of Alterity: Conceptualising Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Practices and Narratives" (which took place in April 2011 at the University of Nottingham), Dr Michael Eades, Dr Adity Singh and I were approached by colleagues at the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy group (mediated through David Bell) who secured funding to run a partner conference called "Educational Spaces of Alterity." The event attracted a great range of speakers who participated in workshops to consider those spaces (both inside and outside the academy) that could challenge the dominance of neoliberal logics, alienated practices and Eurocentric hegemony in contemporary educational practice, and in so doing contribute to radical social change. The event also featured a keynote workshop from the Marxist philosopher and sociologist and author of Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010), John Holloway, and delegates came from a variety of disciplines inside and outside the academy.
Panels were organised around the following core questions:
- How can critical education respond to the crisis in higher education and wider societal crises?
- Do these crises close down or create spaces of hope for critical education?
- Defending the university? Transforming the university? Abandoning the university?
- The role of hope in critical education
- Challenging the borders between HE and community.
- The role of non-traditional educational spaces (art galleries, social centres, etc).
- Challenging hegemonic and Eurocentric perspectives.
- How can we introduce the subaltern into the classroom?
- What can we learn from past experiences, experiments and struggle?
- The role of art and music in critical education.
- Resonances between critical education and contemporary theory and practice in art and music.
Image by Matthew Peoples under a CC BY-NC license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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