Hosted by the Centre for Culture, Identity & Education (CCIE),
co-sponsored by the Department of Language and Literacy Education (LLED)
and the Department of Educational Studies (EDST)
Thursday, November 23, 2017
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Ponderosa Commons Oak House Room 2012
Social movements, community organizing and activism for social, political and environmental justice are vital forces to change the world. But they are also important, if contested and sometimes contradictory terrains of learning and knowledge production. What is the relationship between informal, often incidental learning, and the more intentional education work that takes place in activism? Drawing from both historical and contemporary examples, I suggest that in order to understand what it actually takes to organize for change, we must take seriously the learning and the production of knowledge that occurs in the intellectual work of daily struggles, as people come together to discuss problems and injustices, debate strategies, and act.
Aziz Choudry is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in social movement learning and knowledge production in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, and visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg. He is author of Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements (2015), and co-editor of Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History’s Schools (2017), Just Work? Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today (2016), Unfree Labour? Struggles of migrant and immigrant workers in Canada(2016), NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books, 2013), Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), among other books.
