Hopeful Matters: A 1000 Little Fires

5-6 July, City South Campus, Birmingham City University

The Centre for the Study of Practice and Culture in Education (CSPACE) is pleased to welcome everyone to their 2022 Annual Summer Conference, which will take place on City South Campus (BCU) on the 5th and 6th of July 2022.

This year’s event is an open invitation to think about past, present, and possible futures of education with bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress as a guiding light.

In a bid to commemorate her recent passing and revive her engaged pedagogy, we symbolically re-start from the classroom as ‘it remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy’ (hooks, 1994).

In this spirit, we ask: how can we reimagine and reinvent classrooms in physical spaces, digital spaces, locked-down spaces, or liminal spaces? Most importantly, what do ‘transgressions’ within these spaces look like and offer? And, finally, how can they be (re)-ignited as a thousand little fires of hope?

We, therefore, invite deliberations that, whilst grappling with bell hooks’ legacy, will hopefully forge new, transgressing paths grounded in, and nurturing ethics of care, solidarity, and love for education.

Conference Highlights

The opening keynote will be delivered by Prof. Heather Smith (Newcastle University), who will address anti-racism in ITE/T and in education, on the 5th of July.

Prof. Rob Smith will deliver his Professorial Inaugural Address, titled ‘What do we talk about when we talk about education?’ on the 6th of July.

The conference will host two book launches:

• Mandy French will present and discuss her forthcoming publication A Philosophical Approach to Perceptions of Academic Writing Practices in Higher Education: Through a Glass Darkly, 2022, Routledge (5th July)

• Pete Bennett, Lou Lambert & Rob Smith will present and discuss their forthcoming publication Rethinking and Reviving Subject English: The M**der and the Murmur, 2022, Routledge (6th July)

The final programme will be announced in due course.

Conference format and Call for Blogposts:

The event will experiment with a ‘flipped conference’ format, which means that speakers will do short oral presentations (5-7minutes) underpinned by their ‘position statements’ (blog posts) that will be published on the CSPACE blog and made available to read prior to, and during the conference.

We invite contributions that will respond to the conference theme, addressing the lines of inquiry (or introducing new ones) in the form of 500-1200 words blog posts/position statements. These are intended to be short, provocative and/or reflective pieces that should be read more as (informal) conversation starters than fully developed papers, intended to foster a meaningful discussion between presenters and audience. To this end, they will be circulated to the attendees and shared on social media platforms (Twitter), prior to the conference.

MA, EdD and Ph.D. students are warmly invited to submit their blog posts alongside members of staff.

The format of the blog posts can be conventional (written blog post) or experimental (e.g. comic strips; poetry; experimental writing; use of visuals).

Please, send your blog posts to [email protected] by the 5th of June 2022.

(blog template and confernce details to be circulated separately)

Contacts:

Conference convenor: [email protected]

Conference team: tbc

Host or Publisher CSPACE