Call for papers

Wednesday, 16 March 2016

Paper submissions for the Care and Carers in Education Conference being held this September in the UK are due by March 31.

Coloured paper

The Care and Carers in Education: Performing, imagining and resisting conference is being held on September 5, 2016 at the University of Roehampton, London, UK.

This one-day event is co-organised by  Research in Inequalities, Societies and Education (RISE), School of Education, University of Roehampton, UK, and the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE), University of Newcastle, Australia.

It is concerned with care in education, with care understood broadly as ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can continue to live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher & Tronto, 1990: 40). We seek papers which engage critically with what Kathleen Lynch has termed the ‘careless’ culture of contemporary (higher) education which she argues values subjects without caring responsibilities and is premised upon hyper-masculinized subjectivities (Lynch, 2010). Within this context, feminized labour, female subjects, and relationships and pedagogies that are (mis)named as feminized continue to be devalued, misrepresented, and sometimes denied.

We welcome papers looking at a variety of formal and informal education settings, from early years to higher education, lifelong learning and the emergence of activist and alternative educational spaces, projects and pedagogies. We encourage critical analysis that covers a variety of local and national contexts, as well as looking at care and education in the home, the workplace and alternative educational spaces.

Although this is in no way a comprehensive list, we are seeking contributions which engage with the following questions:

  • How do hegemonic subjectivities, rationalities and their affectivities impact on caring relationships and subjects who care in contemporary education?
  • What space is there for carers in contemporary education? What happens to caring labour in and outside of formal educational settings?
  • How do gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality, dis/ability interact in the production of care and carelessness?
  • How can care as an ethic, practice and performativities be put to work in critical and transgressive ways within formal educational settings?
  • How have spaces, practices and projects of alternative education politicised care?

  • What role might Freirean, feminist, queer, critical race and/or de/postcolonial traditions of radical education and epistemology contribute to the reclaiming and reimagining of a politics of care in contemporary education?

This event will bring colleagues together in critical discussions of the relationships of care and education. The overarching focus will be to analyse the ways care and carers are positioned within, at the margins and/or outside education; to contest (carefree and careless) hegemonies; and to imagine what a politics of care could look like.

Invited Speaker

Professor Kathleen Lynch, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Equality Studies in the School of Social Justice, UCD. She has a lifelong interest in equality and social justice both at the level of theory and practice. Within this context, there are three interrelated strands to her research interests: equality, education and care.

She has extensively published in these areas, including Equality: From Theory to Action (2004,
2009) and Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (2009). Her most recent book, New Managerialism in Education: Commercialization, Carelessness and Gender (2012, co-authored with Bernie Grummell and Dympna Devine), is a study of the equality, educational and care impact of new managerial and neoliberal policies on primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Submitting a Paper

Contributions will engage critically with theories but will be located within a variety of areas and subjects. Proposals will be in the form of individual papers, symposia or workshops. We welcome contributions from students, academics, activists, the third sector, and other organisations.

Your proposal for an individual paper or a symposium should be sent to Julia.Noyce @roehampton.ac.uk by 31st March 2016. Proposals for papers should give an abstract of no more than 250 words. Proposals for symposia consisting of four to five papers should give an overall summary of the theme of the symposium proposed in 250 words or less and brief abstracts (up to 150 words) of the individual papers to be included in it.

Please save your proposal for an individual paper with author name followed by CARE_2016, with a biography (2 lines) and contact details. For symposia, please give the symposium organiser’s name followed by CARE_2016, and include their contact details.

You will be informed whether your paper/symposium/workshop has been accepted by 15th April 2016.
Booking your place

This event is supported by the School of Education, University of Roehampton, and free to participants. However, it is limited to 40 participants and delegates will need to book a place.

Further information will be provided in April, once the abstracts have been reviewed.

A light lunch and tea/coffee will be provided. Delegates will need to book their own accommodation.

For further information, please contact the organisers:

Dr Marie-Pierre Moreau, RISE, School of Education, University of Roehampton (UK)
marie-pierre.moreau@roehampton.ac.uk

Dr Sara C. Motta, CEEHE, University of Newcastle (Australia)
sara.c.motta@newcastle.edu.au

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