[SSC] [ssc-members] Suggested SSC talk at our conference

[Sarah Amsler]

**Apologies for cross-posting, if you receive both 'SSC-discussion' and 
'SSC-members' messages**

I am organising a free symposium on 'prefigurative politics' in/and 
education at the University of Lincoln in early May. Please see below 
for details if you are interested, and get in touch if would like 
further information.

Best wishes,
Sarah

***

Symposium: Prefiguring Democratic Education
University of Lincoln
May 8, 2014
9:30am – 4:00pm

http://cerd.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/04/01/symposium-prefiguring-democratic-education/

This seminar, hosted by the Centre for Educational Research and 
Development, will explore the possible role of prefigurative politics 
in, for and through the democratisation of education in neoliberal 
societies.

What’s it about?

For several decades, educators across the UK have been reporting a sense 
of contracting possibilities for critical, democratic and progressive 
work. The decades-long process of transforming educational institutions 
into market-oriented competitive businesses, teaching and research into 
market activities, and pedagogical relationships into commodity 
exchanges has transformed conditions of work and study in all sectors of 
education. Shared concerns include the intensification of labour, the 
subordination of professional debate and critical judgment to managerial 
authority and technological rationality, the dominance of quantitative 
metrics over qualitative definitions of quality, and the marginalization 
of commitments to democratic life and social justice by the logics of 
profit, prestige and competitive power. Shared concerns also include the 
state of critical education, the possibility of teaching with integrity 
and love, and the connection between learning and social justice.

While popular media and ‘hallway talk’ in schools, colleges, 
universities and informal educational organisations can be dominated by 
despair, the need to alter this state of affairs has also generated new 
interest in more critical forms of educational practice, policy and 
politics. The traditions of ‘prefigurative politics’ have seized 
educators’ imaginations as offering theories of transformative social 
change that can open spaces of possibility both within and beyond 
neoliberalised educational institutions. For some, these traditions 
suggest that we must build and struggle for alternatives within existing 
institutions, and through this transform them; for others, that we can 
plant seeds and build foundations for other ways of working and being in 
autonomous spaces. But the politics of prefiguration are also highly 
contested, seen on the one hand as a mode of analysis and activity that 
undoes hegemonic systems of power by cultivating counter-hegemonic 
alternatives from within, and on the other as a feel-good genre of 
piecemeal reformism or co-optation.

Programme

9:30–10:00
Coffee, tea and introduction

10:00–11:30
Vital Perception (Jamie Heckert)

11:30–1:00
Against ‘Facts’ – the significance of Ernst Bloch’s concept of the 
not-yet for alternative
pedagogical experiences (Ana C. Dinerstein)

1:00–1:30
Lunch (provided)

1:30–3:00        ‘
Some changes have to start now – else there is no beginning for us’: on 
the moral necessity and enduring possibility of radical democratic 
public education (Michael Fielding)

3:00–4:00
Reflections and closing