University News Last updated 24 March 2011
Professor in Sociology, Joyce Canaan from the Faculty of Education, Law and Social Sciences will be giving an Inaugural lecture next week.
This is just the beginning’: Exploring the possibilities of the English student movement’ will take place on Monday 28th March at 6pm in Kenrick Lecture Theatre, City North Campus.
In her lecture Professor Canaan will discuss her views on the today’s turbulent times in the English student movement, making reference to the parallels with Dickens’s observations that the French Revolution was ‘the season of Light...the season of Darkness’.
Prof Canaan said: “The present on the one hand appears to be a ‘season of Darkness’, in which there is a growing fear and realisation that what the welfare state once offered is threatened by cuts and the effective privatisation of already weakened public services. And yet a ‘season of Light’ could be dawning as students (and some lecturers) have begun expressing anger, outrage and resistance against government plans to destroy their futures and those of generations that might otherwise have followed.
“From November 2010 these young people have organised demonstrations, flash mobs and teach-ins/outs; occupied university buildings, supported by sixth form and school students, in which together they are forging new educational processes and relationships and begun to build links with other public sector workers facing cuts and privatisation. The wider trade union movement has been rhetorically utilising the student movement to mobilise members’ resistance to privatisation.
“My lecture frames students’ action in the context of recent and growing protests/occupations against threatened collective bargaining rights and public sector cuts in some.”
Professor Canaan has published extensively on the possibilities and challenges of utilising critical pedagogy in the Higher Education classroom today. Her current research interests include students’ growing class consciousness and politicisation.
Attendance to the lecture is free, and open to all with an interest in creating a more socially just and critically engaged higher education system.
For further information, please contact Sally Greaves on ext 7318 or email sally.greaves@bcu.ac.uk.