Session Information
17 SES 11, Impulses for Innovation and their Provocations: Historical Analytics from Latin America, Asia, and Europe
Symposium
Contribution
The 2013 ECER Conference’s invitation is to engage with innovation and creativity bearing in mind “the challenges facing societies and economies.” The call is to “find solutions” to such challenges and problems. This symposium accepts the invitation by analyzing how particular challenges have been defined historically in China, Guatemala, Turkey, Luxembourg, and Europe more generally, and the creative and innovative impulses that have emerged in conjuction with those challenges. The innovative initiatives—be these the promotion of cultural tourism, the promotion of literacy and indigenous languages, the modern university, educational policies of scientification, or PISA—have engendered complex educational, political, and social landscapes that the papers in this session will elucidate. In offering a reading of these complex landscapes, the five papers ask questions of the impulses for innovation, their desires, and aspirations. The symposium will offer provocations for what innovation means and the actual educational implications.
The five papers are theoretically and methodologically historical analysis of projects of educational innovation in China, Guatemala, Turkey, Luxembourg, and Europe at large. The historical in this symposium entails recent history, and what is more traditionally called ‘the present.’ This is a present that is both historical and makes history as is the case of China and Europe. The archival sources include curriculum and policy documents, syllabi, teachers’ journals, newspapers, annuals, reform laws and regulations, statutes, inaugural speeches, mass media. Archival sources are also ethnographic data such as fieldnotes, interviews, and classroom observations. Both archival research and ethnografic fieldwork in the five papers range in duration from four months to four years.
Theoretically the papers draw from intellectual thought on the horizon of Foucault’s regime of truth, power/knowledge, governmentality, and spatial politics; Derrida’s critique on phono- and logo- centrism; Chakrabarty’s provincializing Europe and decentering the West; Anderson’s imagined communities; and Wittgenstein's family resemblance.
The symposium offers an exchange of temporalities from the turn of the 20th century, and perspectives from multiple modes of ‘innovation’ meant to alter societies, economies, peoples, and world views. The detailed accounts and analyses promise a dialogue grounded in rigorous educational research. The papers are in conversation with, simultaneously historical and current, matters of concern vis-a-vis social justice, indigenous and rural revitalization, and ‘new’ cognitive capital. Intertwined, the five papers offer context specific accounts that analytically travel beyong defined national and supranational frontiers.
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