Neoliberalism and Education Workshop

NEOLIBERALISM AND EDUCATION WORKSHOP

BISA IPEG/BLT Workshop and Film Screening: Education Meets Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Precarity
Location: University of Middlesex (MDX), Hendon. Town Hall, Committee Room 3
Date and time: 14 February, 2014, 10.30 – 19.00

Co-sponsors: BISA-International Political Economy Group (IPEG, Convenor Phoebe Moore) and BISA- Learning and Teaching Working Group (BLT, Convenor Steven Curtis, London Metropolitan University, Higher Education Academy)
Local organisers: Phoebe Moore (MDX Law), Elizabeth Cotton (MDX Business), Merilin Nurmsalu (MDX Law)

All welcome. Please email Merilin Nurmsalu merilin.nurmsalu@gmail.com with interest in attending for catering purposes.

Website: http://www.bisa-ipeg.org/uncategorized/education-meets-neoliberalism-and-the-political-economy-of-precarity/

This workshop will critically examine the political economy of current changes in education policy in the United Kingdom and internationally as it has impacted and impacts marginalized groups as well as educators. Discussions will touch on the political economy of precarity and ask difficult questions about the flexilisation of the labour market and how it is reflected in every level of education from early schooling to adult, community, higher and trade union education and training. Participants will look at changes to education in all levels of education from secondary to University, adult, community and trade union education including the depoliticisation of pedagogies and curricula. Further challenges are brought about through introduction of new technologies including distance learning, online administration and new performance indicators, all of which we will argue can be appropriated for critical use.
The changing role of educators will be assessed as we look at critical pedagogies, the seen purpose for private involvement in education and the concept of ‘employability’, internships and possibilities for critique and intervention. In that light we invite educators, public intellectuals and trade unionists who look at the need for specific absences to be revisited. This also includes critical investigations around the understanding of the dangers of precarity for mental health, the costs of precarity for educators and students, political trade union education and the waning of working class and disability representation in recent education policy as well as the classroom.

This event is intentionally set to run the day after a very important event on similar themes run by Maureen Spencer, Heather Clay and Alan Durant entitled  ‘The state, the university and liberal education: a complex relationship between piper and tune’ on Hendon campus on 13th February. Please email Christiana Rose for more details about this c.rose@mdx.ac.uk .

14th February programme:
10 – 10.30 Coffee/tea, registration

10.30 – 11.30 Plenary speaker: Matthew Watson University of Warwick, 'Taking the Classroom into the Community'
Chair: Phoebe Moore

11.30 – 12.30 Plenary speaker: Mike Neary University of Lincoln, 'Pedagogy of Excess: an alternative political economy for student life'
Chair: Steven Curtis

12.30 – 1.15 Lunch. Over lunch, Steven Curtis, Politics and Economics Lead for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) will take the opportunity to chat to participants about the support that the HEA offers university educators.

1.15 – 3.15 The Future of Trade Union Education (Workshop one)
Plenary speaker: Jo Cain, Head of Education for Unison, on the future of trade union education: perspectives from Unison
Chair: Elizabeth Cotton
Participants: Ian Manborde, Elizabeth Cotton, Martin Upchurch, Education for Action (Phoebe Moore, Kirsten Forkert, Miguel Martinez Lucio), Industrial Officer PCS, NUT, organiser for domestic workers

3.15 – 5.15 Community Education and beyond (Workshop two)
Plenary speaker: Joyce Canaan, Birmingham Radical Education (BRE(A)D) on critical thinking and practice and countering capitalist 'realisms'
Chair: Steven Curtis
Participants: Annabel Kiernan, Dave Hill, Johnna Montgomerie, People’s Political Economy (Laura Hill and Sarah Kunz)

5.15 – 7.00  Film screening We will screen, and Director Luke Fowler will lead a discussion about his incredible 61 minute film ‘The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott’ which is a beautiful documentary about the Marxist historian Edward Palmer (E. P.) Thompson, who was employed by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) from 1946, aged 24, to teach adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding. These WEA classes were open to people for whom university education was not previously available.
See: http://lux.org.uk/collection/works/poor-stockinger-luddite-cropper-and-deluded-followers-joanna-southcott

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'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The New Left Book Club: http://rikowski.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-new-left-book-club-call-for-papers/

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: https://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski   

Social Change and Education in Greece by Spyros Themelis - Book Launch Event

SOCIAL CHANGE AND EDUCATION IN GREECE

BOOK LAUNCH EVENT

Social Change and Education in Greece: A Study in Class Struggle Dynamics

Dr Spyros Themelis, Senior Lecturer in Education, Middlesex University

MONDAY, 22 April, 2013

5:00pm to 7:30pm

Middlesex University, Hendon Campus, College Building, C219/C220, The Burroughs, London NW4 4BT

Event highlights:

Opening/closing chaired by Waqar Ahmad, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, MiddlesexUniversity

Guest Speakers

Confirmed Speakers:

Tony Green, Palgrave Macmillan Marxism and Education Series Editor, University of London, Institute of Education

Professor Joyce Canaan, Professor of Sociology, Birmingham City University 

Dr Eva Gamarnikow, Department of Policy Studies, University of London, Institute of Education

Dr Stathis Kouvelakis, Reader in Political Theory, King's College London

Who should attend: Research active staff, readers and professors from all Schools and Institutes at Middlesex University and other universities, educationalists, research students, media and policy makers.

This event is free to attend, but participants must confirm their attendance by email by 15^th April. RSVP by 15^th April to Daniela Pantica on D.Pantica@mdx.ac.uk 

About the Book

Social Change and Education in Greece: A Study in Class Struggle Dynamics (2013, Palgrave

Macmillan, New York). A New Book by Spyros Themelis, Middlesex University

The post-war orthodoxy postulated that education is both a mechanism for upward social mobility and an engine for economic growth. This book takes a challenging and refreshingly novel approach to the way education and social mobility are researched and theorised. The key message it delivers goes against the dominant post-war orthodoxy, which has postulated that education is both a mechanism for upward social mobility and an engine for economic growth in liberal capitalist countries. The conclusion the author reaches flies in the face of mainstream political consensus that perceives social mobility as panacea for the provision of occupational opportunities and an instrument for the levelling of the playing field. Much of what lays beneath social mobility, Spyros Themelis argues (apart from a great deal of sophisticated number-crunching) is a celebration and acceptance of an unequal system of allocation of opportunities.

This is one among very few studies that explore social mobility and attendant processes with the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. The author views social mobility not merely as the outcome of the movements of individuals from one income or occupational group into another, detached from their societal, community and family context, as in conventional mobility studies. Instead, he examines social mobility as a complex process, where socio-economic (e.g. migration), cultural (e.g. marital practices and community values) and political (e.g. political patronage) forces, experiences, arrangements and strategies interact and interconnect in impeding or enhancing individuals' and families' social mobility movements.

The book makes some contribution to the ongoing debate about the economic crisis that has hit Greece since 2009. It suggests that the failure of education to promote equality of opportunities is symptomatic of the failure of the wider system to prioritise fair and equitable arrangements. If Greece's current situation is to teach us a lesson, this is to urgently rethink about the whole system, not only in Greece but in the rest of the Western world too. The myth of education-based meritocracy and unfettered social mobility has anaesthetised Western societies to the multitude of social inequalities with which they are permeated. These might be hard times, but all the more appropriate to urge us to think about positive social change.

Dr Spyros Themelis is a Senior Lecturer in Education, Department of Education, Middlesex University, UK.

The book can be ordered from this link: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=537469 

It is published in the Palgrave Macmillan Marxism and Education Series: http://www.palgrave.com/products/SearchResults.aspx?s=ME&fid=3658 and http://us.macmillan.com/series/MarxismandEducation

Details on the book were originally provided at: http://rikowski.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/social-change-and-education-in-greece-a-study-in-class-struggle-dynamics-a-new-book-by-spyros-themelis/

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Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Higher Education in Crisis

HIGHER EDUCATION IN CRISIS: CRITIQUING ALTERNATIVES TO THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

Call for Papers

This is a stream of the London Conference in Critical Thought 2013

For full details on the conference, see: http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/lcct-2013-call-for-papers.pdf

Stream organiser: Joyce Canaan

Numerous critical authors have recently observed that higher education is: in ‘crisis’ (Thorpe 2008); under ‘assault’ (Bailey and Freedman 2011); at its ‘end’ (Vernon 2010) or ‘in ruins’ (Readings 1996). These observations capture critical academics’ efforts to evaluate how processes of privatisation, marketisation and financialisation have impacted northern and southern university systems during the past 40 years and have led to a nearly ‘complete subordination of intellectual life to instrumental values and, most brutally, to the measure of money’ (Thorpe 2008).

Recent resistance to government policies on university has taken two forms: student-led demonstrations, occupations and actions and the emergence of ‘free’ or ‘alternative’ universities. This stream seeks to explore the latter, less explored alternatives, guided by Brown’s (2005:5) observation that the concept of critique comes from the Greek word ‘krisis’, used to explain the processes of ‘judging and rectifying an alleged disorder in or of the democracy’. The contemporary meaning of critique as ‘temporal rupture and repair’ (2005:7) contains elements of this earlier meaning; it entails and presumes a certain urgency to reconsider and rebuild, or to create an alternative to, that which has been torn asunder. Critique might also benefit from insights from historical materialism. Brown (2005:13), building on Benjamin, notes that the historical materialist reroutes ‘by rethinking the work of history in the present, stilling time to open time’. Stilling the seeming inevitability of the trajectory from past to present opens up the present and past to: ‘act[s] of reclamation’, re-viewing and thereby potentially reworking for a more emancipatory future.

Papers for this stream are thus asked to explore how emergent alternative universities today can be seen to operate as acts of reclamation—and might do so more effectively in future. Questions for consideration include:

·        What perceived limits of the public university impel a group to build an alternative?

·        Which theoretical and activist traditions inform their project?

·        What vision(s) of critical theory and/or historical materialism guide them?

·        What understandings of critical education shape their efforts to overcome/avoid perceived limits to the public university?

·        What theories of radical pedagogy inform their practices?

·        To what degree do insights from social movement theories and practices inform their theories / practices? And, in addition, contribute to the social movement literature?

·        What kinds of spaces do they seek to meet, teach and act in? Why?

·        How do they negotiate problems? What theories and practices inform these negotiations?

·        What are their strategies for reaching others as teaching and/or researching partners and how effective are they?

·        How central is praxis to their project?

Please send abstracts for 20-minute papers to londoncriticalconference@gmail.com with the subject as: ‘Higher Education Submission’.

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

A paper on the crisis in higher education, by Glenn Rikowski:

Rikowski, G. (2012) Life in the Higher Sausage Factory, Guest Lecture to the Teacher Education Research Group, The Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, 22nd March, online at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=articles&sub=Life%20in%20the%20Higher%20Sausage%20Factory

For more on this paper, see: http://rikowski.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/life-in-the-higher-sausage-factory-the-paper/