Description:
As the chairperson of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Desmond Tutu, reminds us, we must be prepared to “[look] the beast of the past in the eye … in order not to allow it to imprison us” (1998, p. 22); we must be prepared to look ourselves in the eye. How can we bring memory forward so as to inform the future? This workshop gathers thirty leading and new scholars (including doctoral students), predominantly from Canada, but also from China, Southern Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, and who are studying memory, place, or story in the context of social themes and social action.
The workshop is organized into working sessions around five topic-centred nodes, with small group sessions on methodology and social action that cut across those nodes. The five nodes are: childhood, place & space, generations, embodiment, and legacies of political conflict. The node of childhood considers investigation of ways in which children experience childhood and adults remember childhood; it includes discussion of shifting boundaries between childhood and adulthood, given cross-over texts and new technologies. The node of place & space looks at how we embody memory in particular places and spaces as well as the ways in which we carry, express and represent that embodiment. It looks at the relationships between individual and collective memory. It also considers how the methodologies that we bring to an investigation of place and space can contribute to new understandings. The node of generations includes investigation of continuity and change between young people and older people, between people within a given culture, gender or sexual orientation, or between past and present generations. It likewise considers relationships between individual and collective formation. It looks critically at the artifacts in which to embody our understandings, why those artifacts have been privileged and alternatives that can speak across generations. Embodiment includes issues of sexuality and construction of sexual and gendered identities, particularly in the age of HIV and AIDS. It considers how methodologies that exclude memory (personal; collective) strip away a meaningful understanding of situated contexts of individuals and groups, which methodologies can instead elicit those histories for the purpose of social change, as well as the risks and complications attendant on such memory-work. Legacies of political conflict looks at how traumatic past and continuing events of war and conflict (e.g. the Holocaust; the Rwandan Genocide; religious conflict in Ireland; the impact on Muslims in the wake of 9-11) influence individual and collective memory and identity formation, and approaches and methodologies that can critically counter their adverse effects so as to productively bring memory forward. For each node, presenters will briefly discuss their paper (15 minutes each) followed by a 30 minute discussion. The Methodologies working session offers an opportunity for participants to gather in new permutations, according to methods that criss-cross the topics. There will be six methodology groups. Possible foci will be visual; self-study and material culture; collective memory-work and literary anthropology; excavation of childhood texts; and ethnography; phenomenology/hermeneutics, action research, critical approaches.
The workshop offers a critical space for advancing scholarship and practice in the area of productive remembering. Because the participants come from different areas of expertise within and outside of the field of education, they have sometimes been engaged in parallel discussions confined to their own fields and discourse communities. By bringing an interdisciplinary, national as well as cross-border perspective to bear on the research theme of productive memory, the workshop explores the rich body of work on memory itself, and provides the needed time and space in which to anchor collective deliberation on productive remembering so as to inform future directions in scholarship, policy and practice.
Format:
To maximize discussion and exchange around a common theme (memory) and collective goal (social action), we have chosen a workshop rather than conference format. The strength of the workshop format is that participants can present in an intimate setting in which all thirty presenters can hear, respond to, and discuss one another’s papers with the goal of contributing to a subject of common concern. Our collective purpose in the workshop will not be to come up with definitive answers that can apply across different contexts but, based on the multiple knowledge sources and methods brought by the participants, to open interdisciplinary spaces within which to generate future directions of study. These directions can then guide, shape, move and mobilize debate, research, and teaching around remembering productive of social action.
The 2.5 day event will begin with an evening plenary at 5:30 pm on Wednesday October 22. The plenary will be open to the public. The workshop will conclude after lunch on Friday October 24.
Organizing Committee:
Claudia Mitchell has been an organizer of a number of conferences including the Getting the Word Out conference (2002) (75 participants) in partnership with CIDA and the Centre for Book, the First Teacher Education Conference, South Africa (2004) (250 participants), the Putting People in the Picture Conference (2006) (40 participants) and the National Colloquium on Teacher Education and HIV and AIDS (2008) (75 participants). These have resulted in edited books (Balfour, Buthelezi and Mitchell, 2005; de Lange, Mitchell and Stuart, 2007) and conference proceedings. She has been using web-based forms of research dissemination (see for example the use of the Gendering Adolescence and Aids Prevention website for disseminating the results of the Getting the Word Out conference, and the www.yahanet.org website on youth, the arts and HIV and AIDS as a prime site for dissemination. She is the co-author or co-editor of 10 books.
Teresa Strong-Wilson has been conference organizer for an American Association of the Advancement of Curriculum Studies conference (2006). She has been involved in the dissemination of Indigenous student digital video productions and as well as draws on web-based forms on research sharing (e.g., wikis) within university-school partnerships, such as a SSHRC-funded project on teachers learning with laptops. She has authored and co-authored articles in peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Educational Theory, Changing English, Teachers and Teaching, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Canadian Journal of Education), chapters in books, as well as published a book on storied remembrance, teachers and social justice education within the Canadian context (Peter Lang, 2008). She has guest edited two themed issues of journals (Theory into Practice, 2007, published by Lawrence Erlbaum; and English Quarterly, in press, published by [National Canadian Association of Teachers of English])
Kathleen Pithouse was the conference administrator for the Rural Teacher Education Conference, South Africa (2006) and the organizer of an international 2-day symposium on Self-Study for Social Change, South Africa (2007). She has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited books and has been an editorial assistant for a number of edited books. She is presently working on a book based on publishing papers from the Self-Study for Social Change symposium that she led. The outcomes of this book process will also be electronically disseminated via the website of the Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change, http://cvm.za.org/. Additionally as part of her work as a postdoctoral fellow on the SSHRC Partnerships for Change project, she has led the team in relation to publications.
Susann Allnutt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University who will assist in the overall organization of the workshop. She brings extensive experience as an administrator, and has herself been involved in organizing many events for the Office of First Nations Education at McGill University.
Contacts:
For queries about travel and accommodation:
Susann Allnutt
Administrative Assistant
School of Information Studies
McGill University
Tel.: 514-398-6387
FAX: 514-398-7193
susann.allnutt@mcgill.ca
For other queries:
Kathleen Pithouse
Postdoctoral Scholar
Department of Integrated Studies in Education
McGill University
kpithouse@gmail.com
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