FW: Disruptions, Interventions and Liminalities: Critical Performative Pedagogies organised by Dr Lee Campbell

The 7th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster 29th & 30th June 2018, will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with critical traditions and concerns. Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration. The conference is divided into thematic streams, each coordinated by different researchers and with separate calls for papers http://londoncritical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/LCCT-CFP-2016-2.pdf

Submissions are welcome for the stream: Disruptions, Interventions and
Liminalities: Critical Performative Pedagogies organised by Dr Lee Campbell

In any pedagogical situation, you want the learners to feel safe. On the other hand, you must know that you may be faced with a group where there isn't a lot of dynamics, there's a lot of sleepiness and so on, and you [the teacher] want to somehow make them active, challenge them. Performative arts would have a lot of strategies (Manfred Schewe, 2016)

This stream asks: 'What happens when performative arts meet pedagogy?' and explores the possibilities of the emerging field of 'performative pedagogy' and its potential as useful and applicable to enabling learning across a range of artistic and possibly other disciplines. We welcome submissions from individuals and groups across all creative disciplines who deploy pedagogic approaches with an emphasis on performativity to drive learning. We invite papers that theorise, articulate and demonstrate some of the possibilities of using a critical performative pedagogy which may showcase good practice of making positive usage of performative teaching and learning.
Joe L. Kincheloe describes critical theorists as 'detectives of new theoretical insights, perpetually searching for new and interconnected ways of understanding power and oppression and the ways they shape everyday life and human experience'. (Kincheloe, Joe L., 2008. Critical Pedagogy. Peter Lang: New York) With a similar curiosity around power plays, we are most interested in receiving submissions that reflect upon how power may be understood in critical pedagogy in relation to 'the effects of power on shaping and misshaping the pedagogical act' as a means of (re)thinking how power relations may operate in teaching practice. Applying Michel Foucault's understanding of social power (1980), we envisage performance as a tool to make power relations visible (making performance as mirroring power plays that take place in all forms of daily human existence).

Raphael Hallett has suggested that students' work tends to be valued in terms of a very circumscribed, clean, clear presentation.
Disruption, intervention, liminalities are forms of expression that do not necessarily correspond with conventional criteria that lean towards focus, precision, clarity, coherence and structure. We encourage submissions where the strategies of performative pedagogy relate in some way to 'disruption', 'intervention' and 'liminality'. Performance Art (and Art per se) is predicated on rule breaking, even on discomforting audiences, especially the elitist audiences of Live Art and Performance. As Dr Jane Munro recently pointed out at Tactics of Interruption, (Toynbee Studios, London, June 2016), interruption is about 'creating new forms – allowing interruption to shape the work – not hiding them'. We are most interested in receiving papers that advocate the power of risk in teaching and learning, that explore disruption/interruption as a 'risky' pedagogic strategy to not only provoke students' participation but also to demonstrate how performative pedagogy can be effectively deployed to break implicit rules surrounding the exchange of power relation between student and teacher.

Please send submissions to: paper-subs@londoncritical.org londoncritical.org / twitter: @LondonCritical. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should be received by Monday, 26th March 2018.

Participation is free (though registration is required).