Rouge Forum 2011 (Chicago): Call for Proposals

The Rouge Forum 2011: Call for Papers

Education and the State: A Critical Antidote to the Commercialized, Racist, and Militaristic Social Order

The Rouge Forum 2011 will be held at Lewis University. The University’s main campus is located in Romeoville, IL, which is 30 minutes southwest of Chicago, IL. The conference will be held May 19-22.

Proposals for papers, panels, performances, workshops, and other multimedia presentations should include title(s) and names and contact information for presenter(s). The deadline for sending proposals is March 22. The Steering Committee will email acceptance or rejection notices by April 1. The proposal formats available to the presenters are as follows:

Bringing together academic presentations and performances (from some of the most prominent voices for democratic, critical, and/or revolutionary pedagogy), panel discussions, community-building, and cultural events, this action-oriented conference will center on questions such as:

• Transforming the notion of “saving public education” to one of creating education in the public interest, what does teaching and learning for a democratic society look like?


• How do we educate the public and our youth to understand the implications of “saving public education” through corporate and militaristic practices, such as standardized examinations, zero-tolerance policies, charter schools, and corporate donations?


• How will educational initiatives supported by the Obama Administration and many other politicians impact teachers, students, and communities across the US?


• What does education for liberation look like compared to the more socially reproductive/dominating education we see in many of our nation’s schools?


• What debts will future generations, including the students we may teach, carry because our financial, governmental, and military endeavors have not been concerned with public goods?

SUBMISSIONS
Proposal Formats

Individual Proposal: (45 minutes)
The Rouge Forum welcomes individual paper proposals, with the understanding that those accepted will be grouped together around common or overlapping themes, Presenters will have approximately 45 minutes to present or summarize their individual papers. Individual paper submissions will be considered for panels with the same topic/theme. If you would prefer to present your paper/research individually you should consider the alternative format proposal. A 300-500 word abstract of the paper will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.


Symposium Proposal: (90 minutes)
Presenters are also welcomed to submit proposals for a symposium. A symposium is typically composed of a chair and discussant and three to five participants who present or summarize their papers. Each symposium is organized around a common theme. Each participant will have between 15 and 45 minutes to present their papers, depending upon the number of participants involved in the symposium. A 300-500 word abstract of the symposium will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.


Panel Proposal: (90 minutes)
A panel discussion is another venue available presenters. A panel discussion is typically composed of three to six participants who discuss their scholarly work within the context of a dialogue or conversation on a topic or theme related to the conference theme. Typically, each panelist is given 10-15 minutes to discuss the topic, present theoretical ideas, and/or point to relevant research. A chair should be identified who introduces the panel and frames the issues and questions being addressed. In addition to the chair, we encourage (but do not require) organizers of panels to include a discussant who responds to the comments of the panelists. Individual proposal submissions will be combined into panels with the same theme/topic. A 300-500 word abstract of the panel discussion will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.


Alternative Format and Special Interest Groups (90 minutes)
Alternative proposals that do not fit into the above categories, such as workshops, performances, video and multimedia presentations, and round-table dialogues, are encouraged. We also welcome proposals for the organization of special interest groups. A 150-250 word abstract of the panel discussion will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.

Email proposals to conference coordinator Brad Porfilio porfilio16@aol.com, by March 22, 2011.

Additional information on Rouge Forum 2011 is available at rougeforumconference.org

Ginsberg vs. NCSU on academic freedom

"Film studies professor Terri Ginsberg, similarly fired in 2008 by North Carolina State University (NCSU) in what she says was a punishment for her outspoken criticism of "Zionism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and US Middle East policy," believes that institutionalized censorship on the Palestine-Israel issue in the academic realm is eerily reminiscent of the McCarthy era of the 1950s and '60s. "So many of the dynamics and methods of discrimination perpetrated against today's scholarly critics of Israel and US Middle East policy derive from and continue, in updated fashion, practices initiated and implemented during that shameful period," she says." (quote from this article: "Uphill battle for academic freedom in US universities", 11 January 2010])

See also "Terri Ginsberg, Former North Carolina State Adjunct Professor, Files Complaint" (Tuesday, October 20th, 2009), and for recent updates and more information about the ongoing legal case, Ginsberg vs. NCSU:

ginsbergvsncsu.wordpress.com

Workplace No 17 (2010): Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor No 17 (2010):
Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/issue/view/8

Articles
--------
Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions: Special Issue Introduction
Howard Stevenson

Terminating the Teaching Profession: Neoliberal Reform, Resistance and the Assault on Teachers in Chile
Jill Pinkney Pastrana

Social Justice Teacher Unionism in a Canadian Context: Linking Local and Global efforts
Cindy Rottmann

Australian Education Unionism in the Age of Neoliberalism: Education as a Public Good, Not a Private Benefit
Jeff Garsed, John Williamson

“What’s Best for Kids” vs. Teacher Unions: How Teach For America Blames Teacher Unions for the Problems of Urban Schools
Heidi Katherine Pitzer

Gramsci, Embryonic Organic Intellectuals, and Scottish Teacher Learning Representatives: Alternatives to Neoliberal Approaches to Professional Development in the K-12 Sector
Alex Alexandrou

Pedagogy of Liminality? The Case of Turkish Teachers’ Union Egitim-Sen
Duygun Gokturk


Book Reviews
--------
Review of Industrial Relations in Education: Transforming the School Workforce
Merryn Hutchings

A Portrait of Authenticity: A Review of Carl Mirra’s (2010) The AdmirableRadical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970. Kent, OH: Kent University Press
Adam Renner

Review of Union Learning Representatives: Challenges and Opportunities
Becky Wright

Review of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
Marisa Huerta

Review of Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic-Industrial Complex
Leah Schweitzer

The Sociopathology of Everyday Business: A Review of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
Jim Rovira

Review of The Rich World and the Impoverishment of Education: Diminishing Democracy, Equity and Workers’ Rights
Paul Orlowski

Technology and (Human) Rights: A Review of Human Rights in the Global Information Society
Stephen Petrina

Review of The Developing World and State Education: Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives
Steven L. Strauss


Miscellany
--------
Connecting Teacher Unions and Teacher Union Research
AERA Teachers' Work/Teacher Unions SIG

Critical Education launches new series: A Return to Educational Apartheid? Critical Examinations of Race, Schools, and Segregation

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

This issue launches the Critical Education article series "A Return to Educational Apartheid? Critical Examinations of Race, Schools, and Segregation", edited by Adam Renner and Doug Selwyn.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,

Sandra Mathison, Co-Editor
E. Wayne Ross, Co-Editor
Critical Education

Critical Education
Vol 1, No 7 (2010)
Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/18

Articles
--------
A Return to Educational Apartheid?
Adam Renner, Doug Selwyn

Abstract: Series co-editors Renner and Selwyn introduce a special series of articles focusing on the articulation of race, schools, and segregation. Each of the articles in this series will analyze the extent to which schooling may or may not be returning to a state of educational apartheid.

A Separate Education: The Segregation of American Students and Teachers
Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley

Abstract: Despite the obvious connection between the two, student and teacher segregation are rarely examined together. To help fill that gap, this essay explores what is known about the extent of interracial exposure for students and teachers in U.S. public schools. This article reviews evidence underscoring the paramount importance of school integration. A description of the legal landscape governing desegregation follows, as well as a discussion of why current patterns of racial isolation persist. The essay next describes the demographics and segregation of today's students and teachers. In particular, the essay focuses on the growing segregation of students of color, the lingering isolation of white students, and the ways in which the overwhelmingly white teaching force reinforces patterns of student segregation. We close with a discussion of the implications of these trends.

A video about the University Reform in Finland (and elsewhere)

hello everybody! Here's a message from the edu factory list - it's at once sad and yet encouraging to see the determination to continue the struggle for universities for the common good. A story from Finland. Best wishes, Claus
- - -

Greetings all,

A little late to the party, but wish to acknowledge all about a video we made to a good, ambitious seminar held in United States in April, "Beneath the University". The video, and a presentation given by Juuso Tervo, describe the finnish university reform process, what we can learn from it and possible paths forward. E-mail me ( antti . jauhiainen AT gmail . com ) with any comments or ideas for co-operation and follow-up, would be glad to hear comments and ideas for the future.

The video is available here: http://vimeo.com/10778562

**
Speech for the Beneath the University -seminar in Minneapolis, April 9th 2010.

University reform in Finland, it's background, progress and current situation. We discuss what can be collectively done to overturn the disastrous effects that market driven, managerial reforms continuously impose on us and our communities. We end by collecting the themes we've discussed, and summarize some central issues we've learned through our struggle in Finland.

Full text available here: bit.ly/university_reform_in_finland

Our presentation was done to compliment a talk given by Juuso Tervo from Aalto University (former University of Art and Design).

Text from his talk available here: bit.ly/tervo_presentation_text

And his presentation slides: bit.ly/tervo_presentation_slides
**

In solidarity,
Antti Jauhiainen
Finland

Academic freedom lost - and found?

There was a short article on academic freedom in the Times Higher Education on Thursday the 6th of May 2010. The article would have perpetuated some misconceptions on academic freedom (e.g., that it cannot be defined, or that it should not "give scholars the right to criticise the running of their own institutions"), had it not been for the detailed intervention of Terence Karran who made an extensive commentary just below the article, a comment I think is a must reading. Karran states that

"There are international differences in the interpretation of the concept, but most scholars of academic freedom agree it has four elements: two are substantive, and two are supportive. The first substantive element is research freedom (the right to choose the subject for research and the methodology used, and to publish and disseminate research findings). The second substantive element is the teaching freedom (including the right to determine the curriculum, the mode of teaching, the method of assessment, etc). The supportive elements are academic tenure and the right to participate in academic governance."

See Karran's commentary on the Times Higher Education site here (or a pdf copy here). In many countries, such as Denmark, there is an urgent need to promote a higher awareness of all the dimensions of academic freedom.

The other really useful knowledge: revalorising critique in the university

The other really useful knowledge: revalorising critique in the university
by Sarah Amsler

After UK universities were subsumed into the newly formed Department of Business, Industry and Skills in June of last year, it seemed that few changes in academic life could be any further surprising. Until the Times Higher Education featured a hot-pink guide on ‘20 steps to increase your ranking – ways to rise in the league tables without breaking the bank’. Neither the wisdom of the rankings nor the belt-tightening rhetoric was out of the ordinary: performance indicators, league tables and the spectre of radical budget cuts have become the grit of academic life. The banks, of course, have already been broken. But the framing of this consequential and contested political agenda as a playful popularity contest again pushed the boundaries of belief.

The guidance seemed simple, almost commonsense: hire good researchers, give them autonomy and power, and keep them happy. They bring prestige, money and networks. And if they can be transformed into managers, they can shape institutional culture and extract high levels of productivity from others.

But there was a more troubling message is in this guidance, in Tip No. 6: ‘no pain, no gain’. You must cut losses and losers to win. While elite researchers, institutional managers and ambitious young scholars are poised to accept this agenda as common sense, it is argued, ‘it is unlikely that everyone else will’. The reason? ‘We all tend to prefer the status quo.’ Within this logic, alternative positions are impossible. You can play hard and win or lose fairly, or you can win at all costs and take out whoever is standing in the way. But you cannot stop to question the rules of the game and still be included, or seriously suggest that we might all play another.

The problem is that this is not an idiosyncratic narrative. It is part of the wider and increasingly hegemonic discourse that diminishes democratic processes, marginalises opposition to the transformation of universities into fully integrated economic and political enterprises, and legitimises the withdrawal of public funds from higher education. It goes to the top. After releasing a controversial blueprint for education reforms in late 2009 and threatening what now appear confirmed as radical incisions into many university budgets, Peter Mandelson has caricatured critics as ‘people who don’t like change’, who ‘don’t want reform’ and who embody a ‘desire to maintain the status quo’.

You can be either in or out now; either for a prefigured, market-oriented vision of ‘progress’, or charged with advocating anti-values of stagnation and mediocrity. To criticise present trends in higher education policy – the institutionalisation of political-economic ‘impact agendas’ for research, the rapprochement of industry and academe, the hypocrisy of ‘raising student expectations’ while simultaneous slashing their financial support, not to mention other problems of campus surveillance and academic freedom – means to take up a position of either mediocrity or ridicule that exists beyond legitimate recognition.

Speaking when you anticipate criticism is possible, if hard. But speaking into a conversation where your positions are already discredited is absurd. This is why the pre-empting of critique and diminishing of public debate are such effective forms of disciplinary power within UK universities today. Here, academics are increasingly beholden to external validation, as skills of self-valorization give way to endless rankings by public opinion surveys and performance indicators. The prohibitions on critique are also strategically disorienting, for many academics have been tooled to expect – however so naively – that it can be recognised as a value within the university itself.

But this power throws sticks and stones as well as names. It is political; anchored outside the discursive realm in the new performative regimes of legitimacy and economic regimes of value now being embedded across the sector. Fixed prerequisites of professional participation are being defined, imposed and monitored for compliance (or in the softer language of power, for performances of ‘cooperation’ and ‘commitment’). But the particular politics of these terms remain unsaid, and can thus be performed as democratic and in the interests of the imagined common good. For what self-respecting scholar could possibly oppose change, progress, flexibility or public and social engagement? The problem is framed as the solution to the ‘other’ problems created by an (imagined) autonomous and democratic educational system. It might be called Orwellian, if the concept was much less oldthink.

From any alternatively reasonable perspective, the question is not about whether one supports a generic process of social ‘change’, but rather how the articulation of alternatives becomes framed as a generalised objection to progress itself, and as a danger to the general will. The problem is the suppression of political spaces in which this framing might itself be contested. Despite the proliferation of localised conversations and committees, genuinely public spaces for dialogue, critique and opposition are negated by pre-emptive threats of misrecognition and marginalisation. And on a more material level, critique is quietened by internalised fears that in the competitive ‘race’ for rankings and institutional survival, with jobs and reputations on the line, now is ‘not the time’ for asking such questions.

Fortunately, this logic exposes its own ironic contradictions. By legitimising technologies of control that foreclose debate, plurality and democratic process from the bottom up, the fear of the alternatives is revealed, and the stakes of the game made clear. By working so visibly to justify the restoration of elite education and research, to integrate these fully into business and industrial productivity, and to minimise or eliminate opposition to the agenda, the programme is exposed as the political struggle it is rather than the meritocratic movement it claims to be. It is known that the ‘reforms’ now being imposed on universities are divisive, disreputable and unjust. For if the proposals are so obviously progressive, why would they be impeded by public debate? And if this re-visioning of the university is so widely compelling, why is there so urgent a need to reshape academics’ perceptions and behaviour? What and whose is this pain that must be suffered in order for whom to gain what? And although it is assumed to be self-evident, it must be asked – why?

This is a time for questioning and for critique. However, provided that people can muster the will to speak into the absurdity of a discourse of foreclosure, concern and resistance must develop into acts of reclamation. We need to reclaim the commons within the university, to establish it where it has never been, to clarify in which intellectual and professional values we should defend and which should be transformed, to articulate and build alternative relationships between universities and other social institutions, and subject all of this to ongoing public and professional scrutiny. These things must be asserted collectively, despite whatever sort of name-calling and marginalisation might ensue. It is probably not a task well-suited to anyone whose self-respect, professional identity or intellectual relevance imbricate with the ratings game, and it is not the sort of programme that can be summarised, as recommended in ‘Raise your game’, in a ‘simple list of key priorities’. But that’s okay. It could be really useful knowledge.

Links

BIS (2009) ‘New Department for Business, Innovation & Skills to lead fight against recession and build now for future prosperity’, online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/bis-announcement. The department was created by combining the departments of Universities, Innovation and Skills, and Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Goodall, A. (2009) ‘Raise your game’, Times Higher Education, 18-24 February, pp. 32-37 and online at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410392.

Thirft, N. (2010) ‘It’s now or never’, Times Higher Education, 4 March, p. 41.

BIS, Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions.

Morgan, J. (2009) ‘Defenders of the academy? More like the status quo, says Lord Mandelson’, Times Higher Education, 18-24 February, p. 8 and online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions.


Dr Sarah Amsler
Lecturer in Sociology
Aston University
s . s . amsler [at] aston . ac . uk