Two seminars, jointly organised by
Birkbeck Institute for Lifelong Learning and
Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice
Wednesday 15th December - Room B02, main college building in Malet Street
Registration and Coffee: 1.00pm and/or 3.00pm
1.15pm - Towards a Global Knowledge Movement
Budd Hall, Office of Community-Based Research, University of Victoria and Global Alliance for Community Engaged Research
Budd Hall is working on concepts and practices of a ‘knowledge movement’. A knowledge movement or a movement that uses knowledge as a key mobilising and organising strategy is centred within the lives and places of those who are seeking recognition of their rights, their land claims, access to jobs, ecological justice, recovery or retention of their languages. Knowledge itself within such a movement formation is most likely place-based and rooted in the daily lives of people who increase their knowledge of their own contexts and by sharing what they are learning with allies and others like themselves move, as Paulo Freire says, towards being agents in the naming of the world. The proliferation of discourse and practices within the world of community-university knowledge partnerships, in this conceptualisation, would be contributors to the broader knowledge movement. The extensive and important access to information developments would also be supportive of and a contributor towards a variety of knowledge movements, but neither the access to information developments nor the community-university engagement advancements form a global knowledge movement by themselves, but would be part of the necessary conditions for knowledge movements to gain footholds and flourish.
3.15pm - Feminist adult education: women, the arts and social justice
Darlene Clover, Visiting Research Fellow Birkbeck University of London, and Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Although the past two decades have seen a growing recognition of the arts as 'tools' of nonformal education and learning, feminists have been using them for decades. As the social and ecological fabrics of contemporary communities tear under an onslaught of neoliberalism, this work becomes increasingly more important. Using case study illustrations, this talk will examine the potential and challenges of the educational work of stubborn, brilliant and relentless women who sew, weave, paint, photograph and perform sometimes subversively but always creatively and courageously on the neo-liberal landscape.
