Plenaristit

Speaker bio

Lou Harvey is Lecturer in Language Education in the School of Education, University of Leeds. Her research focuses on how learning and communication take place at the intersection of language and the arts, particularly in intercultural and post-conflict contexts. Lou’s research is based on cross-sector collaboration, co-production, and public engagement, and on the theorisation of these as processes of learning and education in their own right. She also sings in a choir, plays the piano, and writes fiction in the spaces between.

Title

Peace education beyond and besides language: Voice, (non-)understanding, and communicating the incommunicable

Abstract

This keynote will address the question How can research look at and beyond language in education with the goal of being a catalyst for critical thinking, democracy, equity, and peace? I will consider the role of language in peace and post-conflict education which, like many fields of education in the global West and North, is chiefly a modernist field with an agenda of autonomy, democracy and so-called ‘progress’, often based around the nation-state. Language has been, and continues to be, representationally central in peace education, the route to accessing meaning and social participation through dialogue. However, I posit that this representational orientation to language puts language at the top of an ontological hierarchy which ultimately maintains a ‘colonising logic’ (Barad 2014: 169) in which rational, mind-centric ways of knowing are privileged. In this talk I offer frameworks for a transrational approach to peace education (Cremin et al. 2018; Kester 2018) which enables space for the emotional, embodied, collective, aesthetic, and metaphysical aspects of learning, and for the entanglement of these with the rational, the psychological, the cognitive and the analytic. Drawing on research data from a participatory arts project with young people in South Africa, and on insights from a range of intercultural arts projects,, I consider the concepts of voice and understanding, and whether these might offer useful lenses for seeing beyond and besides language in the complexities of communication and expression, in their relationship with learning, knowing and being, and in the communication of the ‘otherwise incommunicable’ (Rowe and Reason 2017: 57). I conclude that a transrational approach engaging these lenses can enable acknowledgement of the complexity of learning in ways which may contribute to unsettling the dominant forms of knowledge produced and privileged in the global West and North (Hall and Tandon 2017; Zembylas 2018).

References

Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax 20 (3), 168-187.
Cremin, H., EchavarrÍa, J. & Kester, K. (2018). Transrational Peacebuilding Education to
Reduce Epistemic Violence. Peace Review 30 (3), 295-302.
Hall, B. L. & Tandon, R. (2017). Decolonization of Knowledge, Epistemicide, Participatory Research and Higher Education. Research for All 1 (1): 6-19.
Kester, K. (2018). Coproducing Peace: Beyond Psychologized Approaches - Toward a Transrational Onto-Epistemology and Dialogic Learning Community as the Foundations of Peace Education. In Factis Pax 12 (1), 1-24.
Rowe, N. & Reason, M. (2017). Participatory Research in the Participatory Arts. In M. Reason & N. Rowe (Eds.), Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact in Music, Theatre and Art (pp. 48-59). London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Zembylas, M. (2018). Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education. Journal of Peace Education 15 (1), 1-23.

Dr. Birgul Yilmaz, UCL Institute of Education.

Speaker bio

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL Institute of Education. My postdoc project entitled “Translanguaging as a means of survival in refugee settlements: The case of asylum seekers in Greece” aims to contribute to the theory and practice of translanguaging in times of emergency and survival by drawing on empirical data collected from the refugees who have experienced war and violent conflicts and are now residing in Athens, Greece.

I hold a PhD in Linguistics from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London as well as an MRes in Language Discourse and Communication from King's College London and a BA in English and Linguistics from Queen Mary University of London.

My recent research interests are language and migration, language in humanitarian settings, language learning and teaching, language ideologies and linguistic /ethnography.

Before joining University of Westminster, I worked as an MA tutor in Language Education for Refugees and Migrants and previously as a field researcher (Project P.R.E.S.S.) on Lesvos Island at Hellenic Open University. I also worked as a visiting scholar at University of San Antonio in Texas, United States in 2017. As well as my academic work, I worked with refugee children in a school funded by UNICEF in Athens.

Title

Language and Humanitarian Governmentality in a Refugee Camp on Lesvos Island

Abstract

Separated from Turkey by a ten-kilometre channel, Lesvos Island has received 45% of the refugees who arrived in Europe in 2015. An agreement called the EU-Turkey deal signed in March 2016 has led to the containment of refugees in hot spots, camps and shelters. Through this deal, the so-called Balkan route has been closed and refugees including children and young people have been immobilized in refugee camps. Drawing on a nine-month ethnography on Lesvos island, this keynote investigates the processes of language teaching and children’s rejection of learning the Greek language within a refugee camp called Eastside camp, hosting ‘vulnerable families’, operating with the logics of humanitarianism namely the deployment conflicting moral sentiments such as compassion to govern the refugees. To do this, I question the ambivalent techniques such as ‘compassion’, feelings for the suffering and misfortunes of others in ‘conducting’ the refugees and Foucault’s (2007) notion of ‘counter-conduct’ that emerges from the specific conducts of humanitarian governmentality. I deal with this issue, by asking what role language teaching and learning play in humanitarian governmentality and the ways in which entanglements are manifested in this type of governmentality. In order to analyse the specificities of this kind of governmentality, I move away from the power/resistance dichotomy, that is dealt with in much of the sociolinguistic literature and instead focus on how subjects ‘struggle’ diagonally -namely ways in which individuals move away from direct confrontations to create new forms of conducting themselves, which become evident in the struggle of language teaching and learning. By focusing on the entanglements occurring in language education, I demonstrate the contradictions of this type of governmentaliy (Tazzioli, 2020) that is underpinned by immobility, political economy, biopolitcs and security and which, in return, denies refugees’ legally enshrined right to education. The data involve my ethnographic fieldwork comprising fieldnotes, interviews, a report written by the Ministry of Education in Greece, documents from nongovernmental organisations’ websites and visual material involving photos of texts and images found in the research settings.

Assistant professor Venla Bernelius, Helsingin yliopisto

Speaker bio

Ph.D. Venla Bernelius is an Assistant Professor in Urban Geography at the University of Helsinki. She specializes in research of urban segregation and development, as well as social and spatial educational dynamics. Her writing and research projects include themes such as the links between socio-economic segregation of urban neighbourhoods and the educational outcomes in comprehensive schools, immigration and housing choices of highly skilled migrants, as well as social cohesion in the context of the Nordic welfare state. Alongside the academic field, Bernelius has worked extensively with the societal networks, for example with constructing a needs-based funding allocation model for urban schools in segregated neighbourhoods. She is also the chairwoman of the Finnish Geographical Society.

Title

Social justice in divided cities: Socio-spatial segregation, migrant communities and educational opportunities in Finnish cities

Abstract

In public discourse, large cities are often presented as economically successful, culturally vibrant hubs of international flows. Other debates depict cities as places of complex social problems, many of which are attached to low-income neighbourhoods or schools labelled as “immigrant schools”. In this keynote, I focus on these divisions between urban wealth and concentrations of disadvantage, and their relationship to basic education and ethnicity in Finnish cities. My main questions are how socio-spatial segregation affects educational opportunities in cities, how ethnicity is tied to questions of spatial and social barriers in education, and what we could learn from this to support social justice through education.

The talk is based on my long-term research in urban geography and several projects dealing with segregation and education through quantitative and qualitative datasets. Finnish cities have been traditionally relatively unsegregated in both socio-economic and ethnic terms, and the Nordic welfare state and its egalitarian educational policies have supported high educational outcomes combined with small learning differences between students and schools. However, both socio-spatial segregation and gaps in educational outcomes have been growing during the past decades, and international assessments have shown an unusually large learning difference between students with Finnish and non-native origins.

Our research shows particularly worrying trends related to spatial processes in ethnic segregation and education. Families with a non-Finnish origin are often in a vulnerable position in the housing market, which results in them being overrepresented in neighbourhoods with high unemployment, low educational status and heightened risks for social exclusion. Compared to adults, children are even more strongly segregated by their socio-economic and ethnic background, resulting in diverging paths in educational opportunities. The results highlight the need for structurally intersectional approaches, which are sensitive to the intertwined nature of socio-economic marginalization and questions of ethnicity and language, and the need to consider educational policies together with urban planning and supporting neighbourhood communities.

Dr. Aminkeng A Alemanji, Helsingin yliopisto

Speaker bio

Aminkeng A Alemanji researches on issues of race, racism, antiracism and antiracism education. His research focusses on developing different strategies of antiracism education in and out of schools. He has also researched the Ethnic Profiling in Finland, as well as Hate Crimes in Finland. He is currently the Head of program for the Masters of Social Exclusion and Docent in Sociology with specific expertise in Studies in Diversity at Åbo Akademi University. He is currently working on developing the first antiracism mobile application in Finland in a project (KNOWACT) funded by Academy of Finland (2018-2022) and situated at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki.

Title

Spiral trajectories of racism and possible antiracist interventions in Finnish education.

Abstract

Around the world, Finland is known for having the best or one of the best educational systems. This debatable view of education in Finland often hides a lot of weaknesses and shortcoming in this educational system especially regarding issues around racism and other forms of discrimination. Issues of race, racism and other forms of discrimination in Finland is often hidden, silenced and ignored for strategic motives that only benefits a racist agenda. Making it difficult to establish an antiracist culture both at policy and practice level.

Each educational level in Finland has easily identifiable or common racist, antiracist or missing antiracist features. These different racist features/practices are produced and recycled within that educational level or at different educational levels both in and out of schools. The goal of this presentation is to examine selected instances of what I identify as racist practices within Finnish education and possible interventions to these selected practices. I am always mindful of the fact that education alone is not the solution to issues of racism in Finland. I am also mindful of the fact that Finland is a white supremacist society where antiracism can only survive if it establishes a strong enough system to combat the powerful racist system called racism.

Commentator

Dr. Mel Engman, Queen's University Belfast

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