DIVISION B PRECONFERENCE SEMINARS 2015 Wednesday, April 15, 1-5 pm, and Thursday, April 16, 9 am-12:00pm AERA, Chicago, IL
We are announcing our 2015 AERA Division B (Curriculum Studies) Annual Preconference Seminars. Please encourage your students and junior faculty members to apply to the seminars below and disseminate this call in your local institutions.
1. Black Intellectual Traditions: The Life and Work of Dr. William H. Watkins 2. Emergent Perspectives in Curriculum Studies: Making Revolution Irresistible 3. Introduction to Postcolonial Theory and Methodology 4. Vice-Presidential Graduate Student Seminar: Diving into Life, Writing into Contradiction--Liberating Dissertation Writing 5. International Curriculum Research Graduate Student Seminar 6. Early Career Curriculum Scholar Seminar: Becoming A Public Intellectual
Deadline for Student Applications: Saturday, Jan 31, 2015, at 11:59pm (Eastern Standard Time).
Background
The Division B Preconference Seminars are an important tradition within the AERA annual meeting structure to which AERA and Division B devote significant resources. This year for each of the graduate student seminars there will be six $200 scholarships available and a maximum of six unfunded positions also available. Early Career Curriculum Scholar Seminar is self-funded as per the past. All preconference seminars run for two half-days before AERA begins and participants are responsible for finding their own transportation and accommodation. The evening meal at the end of the first day is included and is an official part of all the preconference seminars.
Seminar abstracts, co-facilitators, and participation information including application materials and deadlines are below.
Cynthia Cole Robinson ([email protected]), Purdue University Calumet Pauline Williams ([email protected]), Illinois State University Horace Hall ([email protected]), DePaul University, Chicago
This two-day session will focus on philosophical orientations of Black intellectuals and other scholars, such as W.E.B. DuBois and Karl Marx, who influenced Professor William H. Watkins’ perspectives on race, class, education, politics and economics. The facilitators will share their experience of having Dr. Watkins as a professor, scholar and mentor, as well as his impact on their scholarship. Watkins’ work will be used as a lens through which to view their experiences as African American faculty and administrators in predominantly white institutions. The purpose of this workshop is to provide mentoring and guidance to doctoral students and new faculty with similar research interests on navigating the doctoral process, research and publishing, obtaining professorial appointments, navigating tenure and promotion, and balancing scholarship, teaching, and service.
Facilitator Bios
Denise Taliaferro Baszile ([email protected]), Miami University, Oxford, Ohio Cheryl E. Matias ([email protected]), University of Colorado, Denver
Native American activist Russell Means opened his most famous speech--“For America to Live Europe Must Die”--with the following protest:
The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance denied the spoken. It is one of the White world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.
Means’ protest against writing is his protest against the ways in which European cultural thought and behavior have worked to define “legitimate” writing/thinking as that which objectifies and neutralizes, that which represents the superiority of the Rational mind over the emotional body, that which is the conflation of reason with whiteness, that which is despiritualized, that which undergirds legal rationality, scientific rationality, techno-rationality, that which has--despite its triumphs--often worked to hinder democracy and maintain white supremacy.
In Literacy and Racial Justice, Catherine Prendergast makes a similar argument, but extends it to encompass the ideology of literacy--or the use of reading and writing to protect the privilege of some and to deny it to others. Looking both historically and into the present moment, Prendergast argues quite convincingly that, literacy has been and continues to be understood primarily as white property used to maintain “White” identity and the conception of America as a White nation under the guise of progress and justice for all.
Means’ protest and Prendergast’s argument help us to understand the ways in which dominant power gets exercised epistemologically—framing if we know, how we know, what we know, and how we can “legitimately” express what we know. In short, literacy is the Master’s tool. And yet those of us who have chosen to work for justice from the space of academia have given up the possibility of protesting the abuse and misuse of literacy by refusing to write. Our responsibility instead is precisely to write; it is to write revolution; it is to write as if the tools no longer without question belong to the/a/any master. As such, we must contemplate how to open up spaces not only to pursue social justice in the content of our writing/reading but also through the very act of writing/reading.
Writing/reading as an act of social justice is summed up in the sentiment that poet June Jordan expressed when she noted that her job as a poet was to make revolution irresistible, that is to call people to the collective work of social justice. In what ways have written texts contributed to socially just change? Is it possible to write/read poetically given the politics of academic publishing? What are some strategies for writing in a way that not only informs but also inspires? What are some of the challenges involved in writing/reading for social justice? What are some creative responses to those challenges? How do we remain committed to social just writing despite the socially unjust world of academia? How do we cultivate writing habits that remain true to the revolution? How do we find a collective revolution amidst the isolation of writing? This preconference seminar will offer insight, examples, and strategies for how young scholars might engage writing/reading as an act of social justice while keeping sight of the politics that govern academic publishing.
Cameron McCarthy ([email protected]), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Suzanne Choo ([email protected]), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Within the past decade and a half or so, there has been a steady expansion of scholarship calling attention to the rethinking of center-periphery relations between the third world and the first world. This body of scholarship, most often identified with literature studies, but which has expanded well beyond to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, has come to be known as postcolonial theory. Proponents of postcolonial theory have sought to address a wide range of topics related to the historical and contemporary relationship between metropolitan and periphery countries as well as the spatio-temporal impact of colonial and neo-colonial relations on dominant and subordinated groups in the metropolitan countries themselves. These topics include the historical and geographical evolution of colonial relations and post-independence developments in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; patterns of identity formation, cultural representation, translation and cross-cultural connection between the metropole and the periphery in disciplinary areas such as literature, popular culture, music and art; and concerns bearing upon the redefinition of the nation state in the light of globalization or the intensification and rapid movement of cultural and economic capital across national borders. Postcolonial scholars have also foraged into the area of methodology insisting on interdisciplinarity and the critical integration of scholarly methods across social science and humanities paradigms.
The first day of this seminar is intended as an overview of the major currents of thought in this emergent body of scholarly work. After considering some preliminary issues of the history, definition, and terms of reference of postcolonial theory, we will explore the major themes and substantive theoretical and methodological claims and interventions of postcolonial theorists. This seminar should have broad appeal to students pursuing critical studies in the humanities, social sciences, education, the communications fields, and in the emerging field of globalization theory. Every effort will be made in this seminar to explore interdisciplinary connections between postcolonial theory and other related bodies of thought such a cultural studies, postmodernism, globalization studies, feminist theory, and research in the areas of development and dependency theory and modernization studies.
This second day of the seminar builds on the first. Specifically it explores the idea of postcolonial art as a source of theory and philosophy. Participants will consider some key arguments regarding the relationship between postcolonial aesthetics and the emancipatory imagination. Contemporary critical thinking on the status of art tends to favor one of three approaches—anti-populism (e.g., Adorno, Horkheimer, and more recently, Habermas), populism (e.g., Benjamin and, more recently, scholars working within the Birmingham tradition of Cultural Studies), and finally postmodernism (e.g., as realized most especially in the work of Jameson and Jencks). These approaches, however, have tended to generate critical apparati that silence the historically specific work of the colonized inhabitants of the third world and the periphery of the first. In sharp contradistinction, the work of the postcolonial imagination dynamically engages with systems of domination, authority over knowledge and representation, destabilizing received traditions of identity and association, and offering, in turn, new starting points for affiliation and community that draw on the wellspring of humanity, indigenous and commodified. The seminar will introduce key motifs of postcolonial art. These are discussed under the following organizing categories or new aesthetic genres: counter-hegemonic representation; double or triple coding; and utopic and emancipatory visions. The seminar will consider the relevance of postcolonial aesthetics for classroom pedagogy.
Ming Fang He ([email protected]), Division B VP, Georgia Southern University Bill Ayers ([email protected]), Former Division B VP, Deinstitutionalized Activist/Scholar Isabel Nuñez ([email protected]), Division B Secretary, Concordia University Chicago
This seminar creates a space for curriculum inquirers to explore creative ways to push methodological and representational boundaries to liberate dissertation writing by diving into life and writing into contradiction in schools, families, and communities in the U.S. and around the world. The facilitators will work with the seminar participants to explore forms of inquiry and modes of representation and expression that challenge traditional ways of engaging in, interpreting, and writing about research. Together they will explore diverse forms of dissertation research and representations such as critical race narrative inquiry, critical geography/critical dis/ability studies, critical multiracial/mixed racial fictional auto/biographical inquiry, multiperspectival poetic inquiry, multiperspectival cultural studies, womanist currere, critical portraiture, memoir, fiction, oral history, documentary film, and painting. They will share their innovations in inquiry and writing through autobiographical writings, poetry, story, oral histories, critical portraiture, memoir, fiction, documentary novel, reader’s theatre, spoken word, drama, singing, rapping, dancing, painting, digital story telling, graphic novels, multimedia representations, and documentary film which reflect the life they live in-between contested race, gender, class, and power in the U.S. and around the world. They will explore creative ways to engage in activist oriented research and writing, transcend inquiry boundaries, raise challenging questions, transgress orthodoxy and dogma, and research silenced narratives of underrepresented or disenfranchised individuals and groups with hearts and minds. They will discuss how diverse forms of curriculum inquiry and modes of representation and expression help address pressing issues and contemporary concerns; make impact on practice, policy, and historical, social, political, economic, geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ecological contexts; and advance curriculum theorizing toward social justice. Potentials, challenges, and future directions of such inquiries and representations will also be discussed.
Suniti Sharma ([email protected]), St. Joseph’s University Wangari Gichiru ([email protected]), Central Connecticut State University
The International Curriculum Research Graduate Student Seminar is for graduate students who are interested in international/comparative curriculum studies that focus on the complexities and contradictions of internationalizing curriculum in relation to race, ethnicity, class, and gender issues in educational contexts. The major purpose of this seminar is to share the characteristics and examples of inquiries that explore the life of diverse schools, families, and communities with the intent to foster equity, equality, and social justice in international and transnational contexts. The facilitators will work with seminar participants in seeking ways to negotiate, question, and advance disruptive and emergent theories, methodologies, and epistemologies within local, national, international, and transnational spaces. This seminar draws upon and creates connections among forms of oppositional consciousness, feminist, critical, postcolonial, poststructuralist, ethnic, indigenous, intercultural, postfoundational, and many others, to encourage diverse ways of conceptualizing and acting upon curriculum as a project of inclusivity in knowledge production under the changing imperatives of global forces that influence and are influenced by how we “do” curriculum research. Facilitators and participants will explore creative ways to engage in international/comparative curriculum inquiry; transcend epistemological, methodological, and representational boundaries; amplify silenced voices; and transform inquiries into positive social and educational change in international and transnational contexts. Contributions, potentials, and challenges of international/comparative curriculum studies are also explored. Doctoral students who are interested in human rights and social justice issues are strongly encouraged to apply.
Crystal T. Laura ([email protected]), Chicago State University Nicholas Hartlep ([email protected]), Illinois State University William Schubert ([email protected]), University of Illinois at Chicago
“Becoming a Public Intellectual” has been designed for early career scholars to meet the challenges of the first years of their careers. As we know, the challenges of beginning a new university position, earning tenure or contract renewal, establishing research agenda, seeking internal and external research funding, finding academic outlets for publications, and thriving in teaching and service, are not easy feats. In addition, new faculty members are often expected to navigate the idiosyncrasies of institutions with historical patterns of power relations and interactions. The goal of “Becoming a Public Intellectual” is to support and mentor new faculty members through the forest and the trees of academe by drawing upon the experience of faculty who have gone through tenure and promotion processes successfully in diverse university settings. During the seminar, early career scholars and scholar-mentors from Division B will gather at roundtables and focus on various topics related to research and scholarship, teaching, and service. Topics to be discussed at the seminar include but are not limited to the following: developing worthwhile career goals and research agenda; recognizing and positioning one’s inquiries within traditions in the field of curriculum studies and seeking creative ways to move beyond the traditions; navigating creatively, courageously, and wisely in one’s university and the larger academy; and developing strategies to thrive in teaching, inquiry, scholarship, and service to become a public intellectual in the contested and troubling world.
Deadline: Saturday, Jan 31, 2015, at 11:59pm (Eastern Standard Time).
Send the following application materials via email to the Lead Facilitator or requested contact for each Preconference Seminar:
Black Intellectual Traditions: The Life and Work of Dr. William H. Watkins Cynthia Cole Robinson ([email protected]), Purdue University Calumet
Emergent Perspectives in Curriculum Studies: Making Revolution Irresistible Denise Taliaferro Baszile ([email protected]), Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
Introduction to Postcolonial Theory and Methodology Cameron McCarthy ([email protected]), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Vice-Presidential Graduate Student Seminar: Diving into Life, Writing into Contradiction--Liberating Dissertation Writing Ming Fang He ([email protected]), Division B VP, Georgia Southern University Isabel Nuñez ([email protected]), Division B Secretary, Concordia University Chicago
International Curriculum Research Graduate Student Seminar Suniti Sharma ([email protected]), St. Joseph’s University
Early Career Curriculum Scholar Seminar: Becoming A Public Intellectual Crystal T. Laura ([email protected]), Chicago State University
Isabel Nuñez ([email protected]), Division B Secretary, Concordia University Chicago