Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz and I coordinated the following event on 16th July 2020:
In the current neoliberal model of higher education (HE), the disciplining effects of the market have resulted in an ongoing reduction of spaces for educators to envision alternatives. In a precarious Covid19 climate, we asked how we can carve serenity and quietude to develop creative, ontological approaches? How can we bring together emotion and vulnerability to broach discussions with students as potential allies? How can we activate hope to slowly imagine other futures for university education?
We invited eight contributors to came together to address the question: How can we seize this critical moment to imagine a pedagogical space in which teaching happens differently?
Contributors: Judith Suissa (UCL); Darren Webb (University of Sheffield); Sarah Amsler (University of Nottingham); Carol Azumah Dennis (The Open University); Carly Guest, Rima Saini, Sheila Sobrany and Georgina Cox (Middlesex University).
The emphasis was on hope as the locus of possibility, drawing on a long history of radical pedagogies (Freire 2017 [1973]; bell hooks 1994, 2003, 2010) and subsequent approaches in the UK HE context to query the university qua institution (Amsler 2016). Hope - understood as this place of epistemological incompleteness (Bloch 1996) - may offer creative re-imaginings of pedagogy that are ‘not yet’. Taking different approaches, papers proposed radical questions and imaginaries around what the university ‘could be’ as a site ‘for learning and practices of hope on the edge of what is yet not possible’ (Amsler 2016: 21).
Papers focused on:
Judith Suissa (Professor of Philosophy of Education, University College London)
What are we critical with, and what are we hopeful about?
Darren Webb (Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Sheffield)
Spaces and Pedagogies of Hope in the Age of Coronavirus?
Carly Guest (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Middlesex University)
Teaching on the edge of time: critical pedagogies and precarious utopias in the sociology classroom
Carol Azumah Dennis (Senior Lecturer in Education, The Open University)
Speculative pedagogies of hope: a decolonising intervention
Sarah Amsler (Associate Professor in Education, University of Nottingham)
Unsticking hope: orienting beyond modern-colonial horizons of higher education
Rima Saini (Lecturer in Sociology, Middlesex University)
The decolonisation project in higher education: where do we go from here?
Sheila Sobrany (Lecturer in Nursing) and Georgina Cox (Lecturer in Nursing), cofounders of HAREDIN (healthcare academics race equality diversity inclusivity network), Middlesex University
Building an Internationalised, Anti-Racist Curriculum in Nurse Education at Middlesex University