Faculty of Education Summer Institute explores commemoration and remembrance

Teacher standing in a classroom

“Pedagogy and the Arts of Memory” is the title of this year’s Faculty of Education Summer Institute taking place May 20 and 21 in 519 Kaneff Tower on York University’s Keele campus.

The summer institute offers graduate students an opportunity to explore a range of commemorative-pedagogical forums, remembrance practices and aesthetics interventions. Students will grapple with how to come to terms with past atrocities. The 2015 Summer Institute will also inquire into the pedagogical dynamics that are unleashed through artistic and counter-memorial practices. The institute takes a trans-disciplinary and nuanced approach for engaging issues in commemorative-pedagogies, memory-studies, memorial-art and social-justice, exposing students to a range of scholars, artists, curators and filmmakers generally working in and around the summer institute’s teme.

Students registered in one or both of the two Summer Institute courses (EDUC 5035 Pedagogy & Commemoration & EDUC 5430 Curatorial Controversies in Traumatic History) will participate in a range of aesthetic experiences including the screening of a film, viewing photographs and visiting the current exhibit at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding, to introduce them to the main theoretical, aesthetic and political themes that confront the field and provoke artists.

The summer institute will culminate with a series of talks and dialogues with a cohort of distinguished scholars and speakers who will engage with the tensions, methods and ideas in the area of the “Pedagogy and the Arts of Memory.”

Speaking at the summer institute are:

Paula Salvio
Paula Salvio

Paula Salvio, professor of education at University of New Hampshire. Her teaching and scholarly interests include studies in psychoanalysis and education, material culture, feminist theory and multi-media based life writing practices. She is the author of Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance (State University of New York Press, 2007); Love’s Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Early Childhood, Teaching and Learning (Routledge, 2006 with Gail Boldt), and numerous essays and book chapters Dr. Salvio is currently the Julius Silberger Fellow at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.

Avner Seagall
Avner Seagall

Avner Segall, associate professor of teacher education at University of Michigan. He is interested in how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible during preservice teacher education as well as what they make possible for students learning to teach. His research interests focus on secondary social studies education, critical theory and pedagogy, cultural studies, media education, and qualitative research methods.

Angela Failler
Angela Failler

Angela Failler is Chancellor’s Research Chair, and an associate professor and department chair of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She is also co-director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, project leader for the Cultural Studies Research Group, and teaches for the MA Program in Cultural Studies. Her current research is focused on public memory of the 1985 Air India bombings. She is interested in phenomena at the intersection of culture, embodiment and psychical life and has published writings on anorexia and self-harm.

Cristina Sharpe
Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe, associate professor in the Department of English and programs in Africana, American, and women, gender, and sexuality studies, and was director of American Studies at Tufts University. Her book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, was published in 2010 by Duke University Press. Her current book project is titled In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. She has recently published in American Literary History, the premiere issue of Lateral (the online journal of the Cultural Studies Association), on the Sound Studies Sounding Out! and the Social Text blogs, and has reviews, articles, and/or chapters in The Black Scholar, The New Inquiry, Black Studies Papers, and in Ethical Confrontations with Anti-Blackness: Africana Studies in the 21st Century.

For a full schedule, visit the Pedagogy and the Arts of Memory website.