"Theory Lessons: Theorizing the Classroom" London Conference in Critical Thought (deadline: March 16, 2015)
full name / name of organization:
London Critical Organization
contact email:
bmclaugh@southalabama.edu and edaffron@ramapo.edu
Theory Lessons: Theorizing the Classroom

Stream Organizers: Eric Daffron and Becky McLaughlin

This stream emerges from a growing interest in the ways in which theory can illuminate not just the products and ideas of high culture but also the ins and outs of everyday life. Taking the university classroom, broadly construed, as a site of theoretical investigation, this stream asks if theory can help us to understand classroom dynamics, offer pedagogical strategies, and illuminate current pressures on higher education that find expression in the classroom. As a forum for these issues, this stream welcomes a variety of theoretical approaches, recognizing not only that these approaches are often in conflict but also that collectively they enhance our understanding of the classroom. For example, (how) can we combine a Marxist or Foucaultian emphasis on the disciplinary and hegemonic practices of educational institutions with a Lacanian or Barthesian appreciation for the disruptive pleasures and drives that the unconscious might produce within and through students, teachers, and classrooms? Which theoretical and pedagogical innovations can help teachers and students to ‘get the job done’ and to theorize ‘the job’—simultaneously practice education and imagine other forms and ends for education? How can theory help us to historicize, criticize, and re-draw the productive but sometimes-disabling lines that ‘make’ the classroom and its subjects: e.g., lines between English and Communications, Literature and Creative Writing, Consuming and Making, Reading and Viewing and Listening, Teacher and Student, Administrator and Teacher, School and State? A site for lively theoretical debate about these and related issues, this stream invites paper proposals on, but not limited to, the following in relationship to the classroom (broadly construed):

• power, knowledge, and authority
• the subject-supposed-to-know, the unconscious, and Other ways of knowing
• discipline and punish
• class, race, and gender
• confessions and examinations
• analyst and analysand; transference and countertransference
• models and mentorship; imitation and plagiarism
• sexuality and perversion; text and fetish
• performance, stage fright, and the masquerade
• cultural literacies, cultural capital
• communities, institutions, and group dynamics
• virtuality and authenticity
• non-traditional pedagogies and the fundamental pedagogical fantasy
• technology and the Luddite

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers or presentations to paper-subs@londoncritical.org with "Theory Lessons" as the subject line. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should be received by March 16, 2015.