Published recently by network members
Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies
Edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas and Joan C. Tronto
This book makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological and political implications of relational ethics in higher education. By furthering theoretical developments on the ethics of care and critical posthumanism, it speaks to contemporary concerns for more socially just possibilities and enriched understandings of higher education pedagogies.
The book considers how the political ethics of care and posthuman/new feminist materialist ethics can be diffracted through each other and how this can have value for thinking about higher education pedagogies. It includes ideas on ethics which push those boundaries that have previously served educational researchers and proposes new ways of conceptualising relational ethics. Chapters consider the entangled connections of the linguistic, social, material, ethical, political and biological in relation to higher education pedagogies.
"This collection is a timely and nurturing gift to those struggling to keep care alive within increasingly deteriorating conditions of work, relations, and values in Higher Education. As we also face a more-than-human crisis threatening the already uncertain futures of people, societies and ecologies on this planet, developing a shared ground between a politics of care, critical pedagogies and posthumanist thought has never felt more vital. The generous interventions gathered in this volume offer rich conceptual propositions as well as inspiring experiences and stories from the ground, to stimulate new ways for teaching and scholarship, for learning practices and methodologies, that acknowledge and support the relational webs of care on which we all depend."
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, UK and author of Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds
"This book rigorously addresses from different contemporary scholarships one of the highest challanges of our time, one of our most pressing philosophical and feminist concerns: the issue of care."
Bracha L. Ettinger, artist, philosopher, training psychoanayst (WAP, NLS, TAICP), author of The Matrixial Borderspace
"Care carries a weight, a responsibility. It is both worry and attunement to. It is caru – anxiety, sorrow, grief. It is karo – lament– and kara – trouble. Care, in this volume, risks this multilayering of sense, grappling with the uneasiness of a way of teaching that refuses to claim in advance how the living and learning happens. This is its wager: dwell in the cultivation of difference and respond to the tensions it reveals. Be in the lament, stay with the trouble. Be moved, be carried. This is what education needs today – that we become participants in a process that changes us, that attunes us to what exceeds us and the increasingly limited accounts of what else knowing can be."
Erin Manning, Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Canada
Book launch online: Serving Higher Purposes by Ihron Rensburg
11 NOVEMBER 2020 15:00 – 17:00 South African Time
Excerpt:
Serving higher purposes presents a captivating account of one of the most noteworthy events of democratic South Africa - the transformation of the university landscape. Prof Ihron Rensburg recounts both the challenges and successes of the creation of the University of Johannesburg and traces its trajectory from a muddled merger between competing institutions to a truly
African university. Weaving together personal observations, family history, socio-economic theory and even the history of a city, this is a text which offers us not only a glimpse of a particular university, but of how we can be, how we
can do, within the space of the university.
Please register here for login details.
Call for Papers: Special Issue for Educational Review entitled: 'World in Motion: Exploring the Impact of Covid-19 on Global Higher Education'
Editor: Jason Arday
Abstract deadline: 30th November 2020, with selected contributors notified by 31st December 2020.
Extract:
In many countries, the higher education landscape has already begun to change dramatically due to the spread of the coronavirus and the containment and mitigation strategies adopted by national governments and higher education providers. Travel restrictions, social distancing measures, isolation and quarantine procedures, campus closures and border closures have radically altered the nature of academic study and academic work for students and faculty around the globe, in ways that are expected to persist for some time. The financial operating models of many providers and the financial viability of some will be severely tested by the economic repercussions of the pandemic, which may mean a substantial contraction of public and private spending on higher education in the years ahead.
The consequences of post-pandemic changes to the nature of academic study and students’ experiences of higher education are beginning to be felt by new and returning cohorts, and by higher education faculty who must adapt their professional and academic labour in line with institutional responses to the crisis—including adaptations that have or threaten to heighten pre-existing exclusionary institutional practices. Governments globally remain under intense pressure to mitigate such consequences, balancing commitment to equitable access to HE against considerations of the future of public/private funding for national HE sectors. The current HE landscape therefore reflects the immediate, complex negotiations of power and priorities for individuals, institutions, National governments and international networks in the face of an unprecedented global pandemic.
Jason writes "For this Special Issue, I am keen to receive abstracts from a wide range of people at different career stages particularly early-career researchers..... Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or queries about potential abstract submissions". Jason's details are hyperlinked in the 'Contributors' section of this site.
Call for Papers links: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/early-reflections-impact-covid-19-global-higher-education/?utm_source=TFO&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPG15743
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/education/news/2020/10/educational-review-call-for-papers.aspx
Call for chapters: 'Being in shadow and light:
Academics in Conflict and Post-Conflict Higher Education'
Editors: Dina Zoe Belluigi & Tom Parkinson
14 December 2020 Chapter proposal deadline to be uploaded here
Excerpt from the concept note (download from above):
The complexities of academic identity and practice extend well beyond what is visible in our daily professional practice and that which is at the forefront of mainstream research. For higher education to play a significant role in reducing conflict and in promoting peace, justice and humanitarian action within post-conflict reconstruction and development, more knowledge is required about how academics have negotiated the complexity of such transitions. Central questions guiding the curated anthology are:
What are the conditions and trajectories that constitute academic identities and practices when academic and state authority is displaced, in contestation and transition?
What is left unsaid, off the record, outside the room, in whispers about being an academic while negotiating such conditions? What are the traces, legacies and intergenerational impacts of such differences in influence and orientation for academic cultures? This book aims to curate eclectic scholarship that draws from varied forms of knowledge and knowing, including diverse knowledge systems, methodologies and modes of presentation. It is anticipated that the text will have a reflective ethos, which will self-critically consider what is being or was learnt, while not ignoring what is lost and what is at stake. We will seek open access options. See more on section themes, working timeline, review process here.
Dina's details can be found on the contributor's page. Please contact here with questions and also for indications of interest for the editorial team. More on that can also be found on the link above.