Saturday, March 31, 2007

It's the Season of Conferences

Or, at least, it feels like a season, there are so many in the next couple of months - and i'd like to go to all of 'em. Conferences are where we get to do some important collective thinking, some community building, some celebrating. It is always my hope and ideal that conferences committed to social justice, popular education, resisting oppression and so on will also imagine-embody-enact the very worlds we are trying to bringing into existence - walk the talk, as it were. Alas. Ideal's are, as ever, hard to realize. As Carl Schurz said: "Ideals are like the stars. We never reach them, but we chart our course by them."

2 comments:

RS said...

Another conference of interest.

CONFERENCE: WORKERS’ SELF-MANAGEMENT

The University of Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, the Center for Global Justice and the Argentina Autonomista Project are excited to invite you to:

The First International Gathering to Debate and Discuss Self-Management – "The Worker's Economy: Self-Management and the Distribution of Wealth"

July 19-21, 2007
University of Buenos Aires
217 - 25 de Mayo Avenue
Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Workers' struggles have reemerged with force in the last decade in numerous forms--union-based struggles, self-managed workspaces, rural movements, unemployed workers' movements...These are responses to the hegemony of neoliberal globalization imposing itself throughout the world with absolutist pretensions after the debacle of so-called "real socialism." At the same time, the old methods and strategies of struggle--class-based parties and traditional unions, amongst others--have by now shown themselves to be, at minimum, insufficient.

For more information about this conference please visit: http://www.globaljusticecenter.org
or http://www.autonomista.org .

RS said...

And another conference...

PANEL: TOWARDS A CANADIAN COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH NETWORK?

April 12, 2007
4-6 pm ~~
Room 7-105 OISE/UT
252 Bloor Street West, Toronto (St. George Subway stop)

Community-based research (CBR) is experiencing a new wave of energy in Universities across Canada. Building on traditions of participatory research, feminist research, anti-oppressive research, SSHRC and other research councils such as Canadian Institutes for Health Research now fund various forms of CBR. There have been two large meetings in Canada on Community University Partnerships, Policy, and Progress (Cuexpo 2003 and 2005), with a third planned for May of 2008. There is a growing interest in more intentional networking across the country. Should this be done? How can it be done? What pre/cautions need to be taken into account? What are the existing building blocks? What can be learned from others?

Panel Members

· Pramila Aggarwal, Community Worker Program, George Brown College
· Sarah Flicker, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
· Budd L Hall, Office of CBR, University of Victoria
· Ted Jackson, Centre for Community Innovation, Carleton University
· Peter Levesque, Knowledge Mobilisation Project
· Sarena Seifer, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health

Co-chairs: D’Arcy Martin (Centre for the Study of Education and Work) and Daniel Schugurensky (Transformative Learning Centre)

Co-Sponsors:
Centre for the Study of Education and Work, Transformative Learning Centre, Ontario HIV Treatment Network, and Community Development Collaborative Program