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Book Review: Jandrić, Petar and Damir Boras (eds). 2015. Critical Learning in Digital Networks.
No full textIn academia and beyond it is fashionable to claim to be critical and to name one’s own approach critical or even to take the form of critical theory. For example, searching in the Social Science Citation Index for the term critic (which includes search terms such as critical, critic, criticism) in the title of academic outputs for different timespans indicates this trend: 1986-1995 = 6,815 hits, 1996-2005 = 7,918 hits and 2006-2015 = 15,224 hits. Critique is a widely used and accepted term in academia. But what do we mean by critique, critical thinking and critical theory? There are several definitions of critique, and these vary in their understanding of critical thinking and come to quite different conclusions on both theoretical and political levels
Re-visiting the Community Development Projects of the 1970s in the UK
Get PDFResearchers in Tyneside and Coventry have been re-visiting the Community Development Project (CDP) of the 1970s as part of an Economic and Social Research Council funded project – Imagine: Connecting Communities through Research (2013-17). The Community Development Project (CDP), a Home Office-funded experimental, anti-poverty initiative of the 1970s, was located in 12 areas in the UK. Three of these areas are the focus of the Imagine study: Benwell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne), North Shields and Hillfields (Coventry). The programme of research has been co-ordinated by Durham University’s Centre for Social Justice and Community Action in partnership with Warwick University, and 15 community partner organisations.
Solidarity Activism, Campaigning and Knowledge Production: Challenging Refugee Inc. The Case of G4S and Corporate Asylum Markets.
Get PDFActivist research is a powerful tool to resource popular education and mobilisation in social movements. Since 2012 I have been researching and campaigning alongside tenants in asylum housing contracted to G4S, the world’s largest private security company, in Yorkshire and the North East of England. Data collected from fighting housing cases and from discussions with asylum tenants has been the basis for campaign articles published on https://www.opendemocracy.net/ and the Institute for Race Relations news http://www.irr.org.uk/; for reports, press releases and written evidence and briefings for the Westminster Parliamentary Home Affairs and Public Accounts Committee investigations into asylum housing in 2013 and 2014
Bullshit Jobs: A Critical Pedagogy Provocation
Get PDFI precede the ‘provocation’ —a word I first heard used by my colleagues Gordon Asher and Leigh French—below with the following caveats. First, I produced this provocation as part of a workshop on Critical Pedagogy that Gordon Asher, Leigh French and I co-organised preceding a day conference on Critical Pedagogies. Second, the provocation that follows, like those of Asher and French, sought to spark off debate; it used David Graeber’s rhetorical argument about paid work today, with its explicit use of the ‘b’ word, to encourage academics at the event to re-contextualise regimes of accountability in the university that they are experiencing and to consider how critical pedagogy could help them do so. Finally, I have been lucky enough to leave full time employment when voluntary redundancy was on offer (being already off work on stress-related sick leave, for the first and last time in my full-time, paid working life). This allowed me to stop being a wage slave and become, instead, as one of my colleagues put it, like Tony Benn who left Parliament to take up politics; I was leaving the university to take up education
Forum Theatre: Fishbowl of the Oppressed?
Get PDFForum Theatre as a technique is increasingly being drawn upon within research with marginalised groups. However the degree to which it’s underlying philosophical approach of emancipatory participation is being incorporated into the use made of it across services and sectors is debatable. Forum Theatre uses drama techniques to draw a group into discussion and reflection about embodied and structural dynamics that otherwise may go unarticulated. As such it is a process that explores the inter-relations of language, materiality, silence, and speaking. This article reflects on a research process that sought to gain the views of people with complex needs about new protection policy in Scotland using Forum Theatre to explore the moment by moment negotiations that people with complex needs face when their life plans and choices come under scrutiny. Participants made compelling use of embodied expression to highlight issues around decision making and dynamics that can act to silence them within protection processes. However the degree to which professionals were unwilling to enter themselves into embodied deliberations through participating in Forum Theatre activities, we argue, sealed the process in a bubble not unlike a fishbowl
Finding Our Voice: The Power of Community Education, Organisation and Development. Charlie McConnell
No full textCharlie McConnell Finding Our Voice: The power of community education, organisation and development. Published by Samizdat Publications, pp238, £10.0
Radicalizing Community Practice and Education
Get PDFWe write this article on radicalizing community practice and education in the midst of an ongoing global economic crisis related to the neoconservative and neoliberal strategies that have dominated the world stage for more than thirty years. As the Scottish referendum recently demonstrated, participatory forms of grassroots social change have become a possibility again. The referendum revealed that making the case for democratic initiatives which recognize the failures of neoliberal policies has become easier in the contemporary context. We are not, however, naïve about the prospects of change. Crises can result, as with the origins of neoliberalism in the 1970s, in simply new forms of a reasserted class power. And crises can, and certainly do, bring about surges in reactionary and xenophobic (usually anti-immigrant) politics and social movements. The lessons we proposed five years ago in Contesting Community are timelier than ever. The opportunity exists for the development of new theories and practices in and about community efforts.
Community Education in Scotland, A Tale of Two Anniversaries: The Alexander Report (1975) and the Birth of the Performance Indicator (1985)
Get PDF2015 sees the passing of two significant anniversaries for community education. The first is well known, namely the 40th anniversary of the publication of the AlexanderReport, which brought together adult education, youth work, and community development, in the form of the Community Education Service. The second anniversary is a lesser-known event, but one I would argue - and I am being deliberately provocative here which is just as significant as Alexander in terms of its impact on the work of community educators. The second anniversary occurred in 1985, the year the Conservative Government introduced performance indicators into the NHS, education services and local government. The birth of the performance indicator in 1985 heralded the arrival of a new era in the public sector, the era of performance management, and in this article I want to argue that the implications for the community education field of practice has been profound
Workers’ Educational Association: A Crisis of Identity? Personal Perspectives on Changing Professional Identities
Get PDFThis paper presents some of the key findings from a qualitative study I conducted between 2005-2014 which explored the impact of a dramatically changed educational landscape on informal adult educators who had been working with and for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) since the 1980s. The WEA - a voluntary organisation established in 1903 to \u27promote the higher education of working men\u27 (Doyle, 2003, p.6) - has grown to become the UK\u27s largest voluntary adult education provider with an organisational mission to educate for \u27a better world, equal, democratic and just\u27 (WEA, 2013)