[csaa-forum] NDP seminar series: NEOLIBERALISM IN UNIVERSITIES AS A METHOD OF UNDERMINING INTELLECTUAL WORK: COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY AS A PRACTICE OF RESISTANCE, and PRECARIOUS LISTENING

[Cristyn Davies]

Narrative Discourse and Pedagogy seminar series 

 
Wednesday 25th October 2006

4-6pm

Building 5, lower ground, room 12 UWS Bankstown campus

 

NEOLIBERALISM IN UNIVERSITIES AS A METHOD OF UNDERMINING INTELLECTUAL
WORK: COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY AS A PRACTICE OF RESISTANCE

Professor Bronwyn Davies

 

The revival of liberalism, in the form of neoliberalism, in the last 15
years, has taken a disturbing form in universities, where its methods of
control are extreme and where its capacity to undermine intellectual
work can now be demonstrated. We are interested in developing a range of
collaborative strategies through which the effects of neoliberalism can
be resisted. The research practice of Collective Biography is discussed
as one such strategy. In the book just published by Davies and Gannon,
Doing Collective Biography, there are numerous examples of such work.
How this form of research can function as a form of resistance will be
discussed and analysed.

 

Professor Bronwyn Davies is perhaps best known for her international
bestselling 1989 book   Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Preschool
Children and Gender, which has been translated into German, Spanish and
Swedish, and has come out in a second edition with Hampton Press. One of
Bronwyn's interests is in making poststructuralist theory accessible and
usable in the social sciences. Her theoretical writing has recently been
published as a collection of essays with AltaMira Press, called A Body
of Writing. And her interest in writing, in poststructuralist theory and
in embodiment led to a book called (In)scribing Body/landscape
Relations, also published by Alta Mira Press. Bronwyn's classroom
research and on critical literacy has been published in numerous
articles and books. She is nationally and internationally highly
regarded for her work on gender, on poststructuralist theory, on
research methodologies, and on collective biography. Her book with
Susanne Gannon Doing Co!
 llective Biography has just come out with Open University Press. At the
moment she is working on a critique of neoliberalism as it impacts on
academic work and on the subjectivities of workers more broadly. 

 

PRECARIOUS LISTENING

Sheridan Linnell, Dr. Constance Ellwood, Peter Bansel, and Dr. Susanne
Gannon

 

This paper is an attempt to hold thought open in a textual space that
often forecloses thought.  We present arguments but we work them through
poetry, memoir and pictures, as well as through exposition. We frame
this work in particular as an improvisation around - and intervention
into - our more familiar practices of collective biography, narrative
and art therapies, and situate it as a new pedagogy for collective
academic practice. The paper emerged from a project in which we produced
an aesthetic practice in which we attempt an ethics of listening while
recognising that our academic experiences more often venerate speech. We
write a collective text, but sit apart within it as well as together,
thus emphasising singularity as well as collectivity, locatedness and
the body. We take our work and ourselves within that work as precarious,
tentative, uncertain, and are concerned to ask questions that might keep
thought open rather than provide answers. 

 

BIOS

Sheridan Linnell, M.A (Art Therapy), is a lecturer in the School of
Social Sciences at University of Western Sydney (UWS). She is also a
postgraduate student of the School of Education, where she is writing a
doctoral thesis about ethics and aesthetics in therapy. Peter Bansel, M.
Ed, is a researcher at UWS. His work is shaped by an interest in
biographical narrative that draws on theories of embodied subjectivity,
memory and relationality. Dr Constance Ellwood is a postdoctoral
research fellow in the School of Education. Her research interests
include the discursive construction of teacher and student
subjectivities, and the ethics of speaking and listening, particularly
in relation to language learning, intercultural communication and youth.
Dr Susanne Gannon is a lecturer and researcher in the School of
Education. Her interests include poststructural theory, subjectivity,
and the creative possibilities and ethical implications of alternative
modes of writing in the social!
  sciences. 

 
Cristyn Davies
Research Officer
Narrative, Discourse and Pedagogy Research Concentration University of
Western Sydney- Bankstown AUSTRALIA Ph. 61 2 9772 6784 Fax. 61 2 9772
6738
Email: c.m.davies at uws.edu.au 






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