Critical Education will be a partner journal with the VI Congress of the Mediterranean Society of Comparative Education, which will be held Hammame, Tunisia October 1-3, 2012.
For more information about the conference visit the website or contact:
Jelmam Yassine Ph.D
Assistant Professor
National Engineering School of Tunis
GSM : 00 216 98202093
Skype : jelmam.yassine
Mail : yassine.jelmam@yahoo.fr
Hrairi Sameh – GSM : 00 216 98656444
COCAL X Conference in Mexico City
August 9-12, 2012
The tenth annual COCAL Conference will be held in Mexico City, on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from Thursday, August 9 through Sunday, August 12, 2010.
The host for COCAL X is the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (STUNAM). Contingent faculty activists and representatives from North America will participate in the conference. Presentations and plenaries will be translated into English, French, and Spanish.
UNAM
(Photo by David Milroy)
Mexico City is about a five hour flight from Washington, D.C.; four hours from Chicago, and three and a half hours from Los Angeles. The conference arrangements include a group hotel and bus transportation to and from sessions.
We are requesting submissions for presentations at the COCAL X Conference. The deadline is June 15, 2012. Click here for guidelines for submissions.
Click here for online registration
Click here for a mail-in registration form
Below is information about registration and accommodations for planning purposes:
Conference registration fee includes:
Optional tour: Thursday, August 9th visit to Pyramids of Teotihuacan, $50
Click here for an application to the scholarship fund
Plenaries and workshop topics
Plenary at COCAL IX
(Photo by David Milroy)
Plenary 1: Changes in academic work in the context of neoliberal globalization
1. Teaching, researching, and disseminating knowledge to the larger community, including academic management of e-learning
2. Gaining and maintaining health, unemployment, and retirement benefits
3. Supporting academic improvement, evaluation processes, and recognition
Plenary 2: Organization and new forms of struggle by academic workers; challenges and strategies for the 21st century
4. Forming and building unions, associations, federations, networks and coalitions
5. Expanding employment rights: hiring, retention, tenure, wages, health benefits, and safety
6. Strengthening union rights: institutional recognition, alliances and federations, collective bargaining rights, and labor laws and regulations
7. Supporting political rights, cultural rights, and academic freedom
8. Exploring forms of struggle and achievements: campaigns, negotiations, demonstrations, work stoppages, strikes, and use of new technologies and social media
Plenary 3: Culture and identity of the new academic citizens in North America and the world
9. Creating a sense of academic culture and university identity: freeway flyers and working with multiple assignments and institutions
10. New forms of academic citizenship, new work and the changing university community: finding spaces of resistance to the corporate model of higher education
11. Fighting discrimination and inequality: multicultural identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and different capabilities
12. Building connections between the contingent academic worker and the university community: tenure-track faculty, research faculty, students, staff, and administrators
Planned Social/Cultural Events
Teotihuacan Pyramids
(Photo by David Milroy)
Optional preconference excursion day ($50 extra):
Accommodations
Hotel Radisson Paraíso Perisur
Cuspide 53, Col. Parque del Pedregal, 14020 Mexico D.F.
$82 US, taxes included, each night for a single-bed or double-bed room. Additional persons in room are $10 per person, up to 4 persons total per room.
Hotel Royal Pedregal
Periférico Sur 4363, México, D. F.
$82 US, taxes included, each night for a single-bed or double-bed room.
‘Doing and Undoing Academic Labour’
7 June 2012, 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
University of Lincoln (UK)
In recent decades, a wealth of information has been produced about academic labour: the financialisation of knowledge, diminution of professional autonomy and collegiality through managerialism and audit cultures; the subsumption of higher education into circulations of capital, proletarianisation of intellectual work, shift from dreams of enlightenment and emancipation to imperatives of ‘employability’, and experiences of alienation and anger amongst educators across the world.
This has also been a period of intensifying awareness about the significance of these processes, not only for teachers and students in universities, but for all labour and intellectual, social and political life as well. And now we watch the growth of a transnational movement that is inventing new ways of knowing and producing knowledge, new forms of education, and new possibilities for pedagogy to play a progressive role in struggles for alterantives within the academy and beyond.
Yet within the academy, the proliferation of critical work on these issues is not always accompanied by qualitative changes in everyday practice. The conditions of academic labour for many in the UK are indeed becoming more precarious and repressive – and in unequal measure across institutions and disciplines, and in patterns that retrench existing inequalities of gender, physical ability, class, race and sexuality. The critical analysis of academic labour promises much, but often remains disconnected from the ways we work in practice with others.
This conference brings together scholars and activists from a range of disciplines to discuss these problems, and to consider how critical knowledge about new forms of academic labour can be linked to struggles to humanise labour and knowledge production within and beyond the university.
Contributors
Public / Free / Open
This conference is public, free and open to everyone; we warmly invite you to attend. Please register via the website so we know how many people will be attending. If you have any questions about the event, please contact Dr. Sarah Amsler at samsler@lincoln.ac.uk.
Getting here
Doing and Undoing Academic Labour will be held in Learning Landscapes, MB1019, the University of Lincoln. Click here for a map of the campus.
We hope to see you here!
Best wishes,
Dr. Sarah Amsler
Sr. Lecturer in Education
Centre for Educational Research and Development
University of Lincoln
Lincoln LN6 7TS
BCTF’s Teacher Newsmagazine just published an essay by UBC graduate student Tobey Steeves that aims to “map the winners and losers within BC’s education policy-making arena.”
Teacher Newsmagazine (May/June 2012)
Mapping desire and power within the field of education policy in BC
By Tobey Steeves
In their overview of qualitative interviewing (QI) as research methodology, Kvale & Brinkmann (2009) insist “…knowledge is power. The social practice of research interviewing may become a form of democratic practice that can be used to help create a free democratic society.” With this generalized goal in mind, I initiated an interview-based research inquiry into education policy in British Columbia. Beginning with the question: What desires are privileged by education policy in BC?, I solicited the participation of a well-established policy maker/ analyst and organized a series of questions that were designed to elicit a rudimentary outline of education policy in BC as a field of power. Phrased more succinctly, I used targeted questions to map the winners and losers within BC’s education policy-making arena. …
Read the full article here.
The Institute for Critical Education Studies is pleased to announce the launch of Workplace Issue #19, “Belonging and Non-Belonging: Costs and Consequences in Academic Lives.” The new issue is accessible at Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
This special issue represents powerful narrative analyses of academic lives– narratives that are sophisticated and sensitive, gut-wrenching and heart-rendering. “Belonging and Non-Belonging” was guest edited by Michelle McGinn and features a rich array of collaborative articles by Michelle, Nancy E. Fenton, Annabelle L. Grundy, Michael Manley-Casimira, and Carmen Shields.
Thank you for the continuing interest in Workplace and Critical Education.
Institute for Critical Education Studies
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/
Posted in Working condition
Tagged Academic freedom, Equity, Faculty, Working conditions
Female university professors make less money than males
University faculties have become more inclusive of women in recent decades, though their salaries still trail those of their male counterparts, new data shows.
Figures from Statistics Canada show the average salary of full-time faculty at Canadian universities was $115,513 in the 2010-11 school year. That was up 2.8 per cent from the previous year.
Among male teaching staff, the average pay was $120,378, and among females, $106,970 Ñ or 88.9 per cent of males’ pay.
COCAL updates in brief and links from Joe Berry:
1. Faculty at U of OR get agreement on mixed bargaining unit recognition (it includes ALL contingents) joint AFT/AAUP affiliate
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/newsroom/2012PRs/UOAgree.htm
2. Yet another article supports what most of us in the union movement have long said, as wealth goes up, empathy declines [or “the rich are different from you and me, they have more money…” and less empathy for others.]
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-wealth-reduces-compassion
3. Ad for adjunct job specifies that the person not be teaching anywhere else and reactions.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/25/usc-job-ad-rankles-adjuncts
and http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/296957/adjuncts-alarmed-over-usc-job-posting-nathan-harden
and http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/mandatory-monogamy-adjuncts
4. More on union recognition at U of OR
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/25/faculty-union-advances-u-oregon
5. Very interesting contrast in US press coverage between French and US elections. Are there lessons here for how the press frames our issues in higher ed? (such as making the extreme privatization and casualization trends of US seem normal here, but covering them differently, if at all, overseas.) The question, of course, is how to change or challenge this press frame.
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=10095
6. Student veterans group revokes charters of locals at over 20 for-profit colleges
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/26/veterans-group-lists-profits-where-it-revoked-charters
7. Capella U (a for profit) to offer college credit (classes) online to higher school students for a fee. [Is there anything not for sale if one has enough money? Didn’t Marx say something about “All that is solid melts into the air?”]
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/26/capella-posts-25000-free-tutorials-through-sophia
8. The for-profits’ war on philanthropy
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/04/26/essay-profit-colleges-undermine-traditional-role-philanthropy
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/26/capella-posts-25000-free-tutorials-through-sophia
9. Ten Ways for a non-tenure track faculty to get fired [some of these are good, some obvious and some just plain wrong IMHO, especially the one about not trusting (some) “help” (clerical staff). They can be our best allies, individually and collectively.]
http://chronicle.com/article/10-Ways-to-Get-Yourself-Fired/131630/
10. New memo reveals union suppression at Kaplan U in NYC
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/19/1084585/-BREAKING-Kaplan-University-Suppressing-Union-Organizing-In-NYC
11. Blog from union organizer at East-West U in Chicago
http://academeblog.org/2012/03/21/shooting-itself-in-the-foot-east-west-universitys-anti-union-campaign/
12. More on new play about for-profits
http://www.campusprogress.com/articles/theatre_of_the_absurd_former_for-profit_college_advisor_takes_his_stor/
13. Update on massive Quebec student strike agains huge tuition increases
http://www.marxist.com/quebec-revolt-analysis-april-2012.htm
14. Kaplan and other for-profits were part of ALEC and their ED task force
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8766-washington-posts-kaplan-and-other-for-profit-colleges-joined-alec
15. AAUP summer institute http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/about/events/si2012.htm
16. More on Gren River CC (WA) adjunct apartheid event and disposable teachers
http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/04/disposable-teachers/
Tagged Adjuncts, Contingent labor, unions
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