Aviva Chomsky: Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, and the Left: A Search for Common Ground

February 9, 2017

This presentation will look at how ideas about cultural politics and class politics have clashed in recent years. From the corporate world to politics to the university, debates about social justice have asked whether and how identity politics and challenges to capitalism intertwine. Corporations, universities, and politicians like Hillary Clinton have embraced “diversity” while trying to separate it from a critique of how the economic system functions. Bernie Sanders’ class-based political project was accused of paying insufficient attention to race, gender, and other forms of diversity. What’s going on, and what can we do about it?

Donaldo Macedo: The Ethics of Linguistic Democracy in Schools and Societies

March 31, 2016

Donaldo Macedo will discuss the contradiction that often surfaces when liberal educators feel threatened by the legitimacy of a subordinate group’s struggle—a struggle that may not include them and demands that their liberal treatment of oppression be translated into concrete political action. Macedo will argue for the need to embrace a Freirean humanistic pedagogy designed to develop structures so that excluded linguistic communities can take their own initiative and chart their own course of action, thus eliminating the need for outside liberal and conservative educators’ continued colonialism through English only paradigms that often results in the suffocation of other languages.

Antonia Darder: Schooling the Flesh: The Body, Pedagogy, and Inequality

March 2, 2016

This lecture will address the politics of classroom life and the relationship between the body and the social and material processes of constructing knowledge. Key principles of a ‘critical pedagogy of the body’ are elaborated through an examination of dominant ideologies, educational practices, and questions of inequality. This work is presented as necessary for decolonizing the body within educational settings, and the transformation of educational practice. The lecture draws on essays on the body in “A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power”---a collection of essays that engages a variety of political questions rooted within the contentious terrain of culture and power.

Deborah Britzman: Melanie Klein, Early Analysis, and the Question of Freedom

January 27, 2016

Deborah Britzman’s lecture will introduce the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her theories of mental life as an emotional situation, through to problems of self/other relations in our own time. The case is made for Klein’s relevance and the difficulties her theories pose to the activities of learning and pedagogical relations. The lecture will develop the following questions: Why is learning an emotional situation? How did Klein’s life and larger history influence her views? What are her central theories of mental life? Why did Klein focus on anxiety and phantasies as making up the life of the mind? What is object relations theory? And what does Klein’s model of the self proffer to contemporary education in schools and in universities?

Brad Evans: Intolerable Violence

November 18, 2015

As fundamental questions of what it is to live and learn are increasingly filtered through aesthetic regimes of mediated suffering, such daily spectacles of violence equally reveal the bio-political contours of late liberal rule. This raises critical questions regarding both modes of representation and alternative pedagogies in our insecure times. Not least of which includes the question of how human subjects are educated to tolerate certain representations of violence produced amongst the manufactured simulacrum of media technologies and how, under such conditions, countering accepted states of normalized terror is fundamentally connected to questions of pedagogy and education in the twenty-first century.

Joel Westheimer: No Child Left Thinking: Testing, Accountability and the Threat to Democratic Life

October 21, 2015

Our cultural obsession with standards and accountability have had dramatic effects on what is and isn't taught in Canadian and American classrooms. As teachers’ hands are tied to test preparation, students' opportunities to develop the skills of critical thinking that are so vital for any democratic society are severely constrained. This presentation details what we can do about it, how critical pedagogy can be used to challenge a neoliberal education agenda, and how we can restore both sanity to the classroom and dignity and professionalism to teaching.

Henry Giroux: Where is the Outrage? Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times

October 22, 2015

Henry Giroux’s lecture addresses the larger corporate and market driven forces now shaping all aspects of education, politics, culture, and everyday life in North America. In this talk, there will be a special emphasis on the role that critical pedagogy plays in defining not only traditional spheres of schooling but also a crucial form of public pedagogy that is at the heart of contemporary politics. In this sense, Giroux’s lecture explores what might be called the educative nature of culture and politics. At the same time, the lecture considers a number of related educative and pedagogical concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy including the notion of teachers as public intellectuals, pedagogy and the project of a substantive democracy, a politics of responsibility, and finally, pedagogy as a form of resistance and educated hope.

Sut Jhally: Beyond the Ivory Tower: Cultural Politics and Public Pedagogy

March 18, 2015

During his lecture, Jhally reflected on the curious absence of resources dedicated to the development of critical pedagogies in the university – this, despite the fact that teaching remains a primary function assigned both to academics and the mission of the university more broadly. Why is it, Jhally asked, that teaching and learning still receives so little attention when it occupies such a large proportion of academic labour?