EDUCATION
FROM BREXIT TO TRUMP … CORBYN AND BEYOND?
Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues (MERD – 19) Seminar
This coming
Wednesday 3rd May
2017
10am-4pm
University of
East London
Stratford
Campus
Cass School of
Education
Room ED4.02
At this 19th MERD seminar on Wednesday, we will
review the emergent contemporary crises of capitalism. In this context, we will
focus on education and educating across the social spectrum of
institutional and wider social formation to progress class struggle, critique and
action. Our four speakers have provided the following blurbs about their
presentations:
Tony Green (UCL Institute of Education)
Educating
the Educators and the Emergent Secular Crises of Contemporary Capitalism: From
Brexit to Trump and Corbyn … to Snap Election … and Beyond?
The introduction aims to draw attention to a collection of issues and
themes likely to occupy us during the day. The broad and open-ended
agenda is intended to be suggestive of potentially ‘educative’ contexts about
how exchange values dominate use values, and where systemic shifting of value
and power upwards in support of structures of global oligarchy and plutocratic
elite class hegemony, is concurrent with ongoing secular crises of
capitalism. Is the apparent ever-rising tide of ‘prosperity’
contributing to human emancipation and flourishing? We need to address
the global capitalist system, and metabolism in its, tensions and
contradictions, with complex and dynamic ramifications at local, regional, national
and international levels. The aim of these introductory remarks is
to remind ourselves of current events and possible underlying dynamics that set
analytic, strategic and tactical challenges... not least, the performative
... during these ever-interesting times. Huge and urgent questions have to be
addressed in specific and local contexts: Are all the cards being thrown into
the air? Are there inbuilt legitimation crises playing out across the
institutional forms of politics? What are the prospects for the anthropocene?
Time to act ... now! What is to
be done...?
Hillary Wainwright (Red Pepper Magazine Editor)
The
importance of practical knowledge to the possibility of a new politics from the
left
I'll draw on themes associated with
socialist humanist work of Gramsci, Williams and, Thompson, and against a
background of recognising that evocations of the organised working class were
thwarted too many times, including by leaderships that did not actually believe
in the capacity of the supporters, to convince me. Radical social change is
surely more than workplace organisation, radical leadership and a conventional
political party of the left.
Terry Wrigley (Visiting Professor at
Northumbria University, editor International Journal Improving Schools, and
co-coordinator of the Reclaiming Schools network)
England is an epicentre and laboratory for neoliberal education policy
in advanced economies, with a unique mix of neoconservative ingredients. It has
the tightest accountability framework (tests, league tables, Ofsted,
performance pay etc.), extensive privatisation, a curriculum which
systematically excludes critical social knowledge, and hegemonic discourses
around 'choice', 'standards', 'leadership' and 'social mobility'.
For critical educators, the pressing challenges include:
·
Making critical theory and research
knowledge available to a teaching profession increasingly restricted to
short-term pragmatics;
·
Rethinking curriculum, assessment and
pedagogy beyond binaries of 'academic / vocational' and 'knowledge / practice';
·
Protecting spaces for critical
understanding and creativity;
·
Critiquing the distortions of 'social
mobility' and 'closing the gap' in socially just ways;
·
Finding educative responses to the
social futures facing young people (Austerity, precarity, migration,
militarism).
Richard Hall (De Montfort University)
On the
alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality
As one response to the secular crisis of
capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and
students, encumbered by precarious employment, overwhelming debt, and new
levels of performance management, are shorn of any autonomy. Increasingly the
labour of those academics and students is subsumed and re-engineered for value
production, and is prey to the vicissitudes of the twin processes of
financialisation and marketization. At the core of understanding the impact of
these processes and their relationships to higher education is the alienated
labour of the academic, as it defines the sociability of the University. This
paper examines the role of alienated labour in academic work, and relates this
to feelings of hopelessness, in order to ask what might be done differently. The
argument centres on the role of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful
knowledge and knowing, as a potential moment for overcoming alienated labour.
--
Organised by Tony Green and Alpesh Maisuria
The seminar is
free and open to all, no registration required. Please circulate widely and
feel free to attend as much of the day as you possibly can.
Stratford
campus is walkable from the nearest stations: Stratford (TfL line) / Stratford
International, and Maryland (TfL line).
***END***
Posted here by Glenn
Rikowski
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