Call for papers: Geographies of Public Pedagogy
AAG Annual Meeting
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
April 10-14 2018
Session sponsors: Cultural Geography Specialty Group, Political Geography Specialty Group
Session description: For as much as geography has had to say about public space, it has had relatively little to say about public pedagogy. The latter has more typically been covered in cultural studies and educational studies, but even there it has been approached either in scattershot fashion, or as a concept in need of clarification. In those cognate fields it has come to mean everything from the Progressive Era movement to make primary education public and accessible, to popular culture as an educative force, to informal spaces of pedagogy like museums, parks and public art, to the dominance of certain discourses, to public intellectualism (Sandlin et al, 2011). As we can see, quite a lot falls under what might be termed ‘public pedagogy.’ In geography, Gert Biesta (2012) has usefully distinguished between pedagogy of the public, for the public, and in the interest of publicness. In some ways this distinction grafts onto the vast geographic literature on public space (For example Cassegård, 2014; Castree et al, 2008; Domosh, 1998; Light and Smith, 1998; Mitchell, 2003; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2007; Terzi and Tonnelat, 2017), but the publicness of pedagogy must necessarily involve its own contingencies, difficulties, and particularities. What would a truly public pedagogy look like? In what ways does pedagogy by its nature challenge or limit the notion of publicness (or vice versa)? In what ways would the publicness of pedagogy vary according to context, either spatial or historical? How is it complicated by race, gender or class? How does pedagogy both reflect and construct the public, or better yet publics? Counter-publics (Fraser, 1990)?
This proposed session is exploratory in nature. It is intended mostly to sketch contemporary geographic scholarship on public pedagogy. Thus, most papers loosely related to public pedagogy will be considered. Possible topics include:
- Historical movements re: public pedagogy
- Pedagogical aspects of public monuments, public art, museums and other public spaces
- Issues in public education, including higher education
- Current efforts to make education widely available, including free universities and other radically open spaces
- Critical or radical pedagogy
Depending on the number of submissions this session might have a discussant, so presenters should be prepared to have something to send to said discussant in advance of the meetings.
Please send, title, abstract, contact information including institutional affiliation, and your 9 digit AAG PIN to Kolson Schlosser (Kolson@temple.edu) by midnight, October 12th, 2017.
Kolson Schlosser
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Department of Geography, Urban Studies and Environmental Studies
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA 19122
References:
Biesta, G. 2012. Becoming public: public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere. Social and Cultural Geography 13: 683-697.
Cassegård, C. 2014. Contestation and bracketing: the relation between public space and the public sphere. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 689-703.
Castree, N., Fuller, D. Kobayashi, A. Merrett, C., Pulido, L. and Barraclough, L. 2008. Geography, pedagogy and politics. Progress in Human Geography 32: 680-718.
Domosh, M. 1998. Those “gorgeous incongruities”: polite politics and public space on the streets of nineteenth-century New York City. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88: 209-226
Fraser, N. 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to actually existing democracy. Social Text 25/26: 56-79.
Light, A. and Smith, J. (Eds). 1998. Philosophy and Geography II: The Production of Public Space. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Mitchell, D. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: The Guilford Press.
Sandlin, J., Schultz, B. and Burdick, J. (Eds.). 2010. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling. New York: Routledge.
Staeheli, L. and Mitchell, D. 2007. Locating the public in research and practice. Progress in Human Geography 31: 792-811.
Terzi, C. and Tonnelat, S. 2017. The publicization of public space. Environment and Planning A 49: 519-536.