Oct 29, 2016 | 10:40 AM - 12:10 PM | MAIN LOFT

Dr. Lisa Taylor, PhD

From Studying History to Pedagogies of Critical Heritage: What kinds of Presents and Futures do we make as we study the Past?

A key field concerned with thinking about the past in public and social spaces is that of Heritage Studies. While this might traditionally refer to commemorating sites and dates of significance or conserving artifacts from the past in museums, the emergent field of Critical Heritage Studies focuses on cultural practices that articulate a claim to collective significance that extends before and beyond the present moment (Smith&Campbell,2015)

Heritage making is inherently pedagogical, bringing the past to bear on the present in ways intended to create the conditions for desired futures (Simon,2006b). Roger Simon reminds us of the ways the ‘doing’ of heritage is constitutive of the social. He argues that heritage practices of recognition and proprietorship are regulated and potentially contested through power relations that constitute ‘bounded socialities through discourses of what is to be included in a common past’ (2010,p.247); He contrasts practices of recognition & proprietorship with heritage practices as an ‘event’ of what Craig Calhoun calls ‘publics-in-formation’. Framing a public as “a mode for generating new social forms … [and] connections essential for the continual renewal of democratic life”, he concludes that the practice of making publics is “inherently a site of learning … in its very activity of formation” (2010,p.249).

I bring Simon’s thought to bear on the project of making decolonial heritage through pedagogies of remembrance, heritage practices that demand reconsideration of contemporary socialities and terms of affiliation, their ongoing violence and the learner’s complicity and responsibilities within these. I situate my own research within the TRC Calls to reform curriculum and teacher preparation. At stake are the ways pedagogies of decolonizing heritage might provoke and enhance the reformation of publics in settler colonial social and institutional processes, identifications, and imaginaries (Simon,2010,p.250).

Ms. Maja Lovrenovic, MSc

Knowing and Living the Truth in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina

Truth, justice, reconciliation – these three interconnected notions and demands are shaping the transitional postwar debates and social realities in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, two decades after the Yugoslav wars, neither the established facts about the violent past, nor the efforts of bringing to justice those who committed acts of violence, seem to bring about the closure required for reconciliation. To the contrary, they are often met with resentments and rejections which flare up publicly, such as the celebrations of convicted war criminals as heroes illustrate well.            

These social phenomena point to the question of how the official knowledge about the violent past folds into and plays out in the social knowledge of everyday life. How do ‘ordinary’ people in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina give meaning and make sense of the historically established facts about the violent past? How does the demand for transparency and objectivity in knowing the truth intersect with the subjectivities of living the truth? This everyday life dynamics of truth, lies, victimhood and remembering unfolds between paradoxical narrations and silences, between the explicit knowing and the implicit ‘knowing what not to know’ (Taussig), raising questions about the limits of the assumptions underpinning the notions of “facing the past” and reconciliation. This paper explores some of these unaddressed questions and the challenges they pose to an ethnographer and a writer.

Dr. Marcia Blumberg, PhD.

Performing Truth and Lies, Exploring Trauma:  Ubu and the Truth Commission

Performing Truth and Lies, Exploring Trauma: Ubu and the Truth Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a foundational body for the new democratic South Africa. The hearings, which ran from 1996 – 1998, were held throughout the country and constituted a national drama, where victims and perpetrators came forward to tell stories and expose their truths. From 1996 plays and other art forms responded to and challenged the TRC; they eschewed simplistic scenarios such as those that ‘forgive and forget’ and instead examined the vehicle, its limitations, and the ramifications in South African life.

One of the first plays that focused upon the TRC, Ubu and the Truth Commission,(1996) was created by the artists William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company and written by Jane Taylor.  The production was invited to Canstage’s Spotlight on South Africa Festival in 2015 and performed at the Berkeley Theatre after completing two world tours. This multimedia theatre production includes actors, puppeteers, animal puppets and solemn puppet witnesses, music, documentary clips, and animated drawings. Conceived as a South African re-visioning of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, this play represents the bombastic and absurd misadventures of Pa and Ma Ubu.  Pa, an Afrikaner “foot soldier,” perpetrates brutal torture and killings in the name of apartheid patriotism yet appears before the TRC to give an account that spectators know is a tissue of lies; the Ubus then sail off into the sunset, scot free.  This spectacle acknowledges and radically disrupts generic, cultural and political categories. My paper will interrogate issues such as truth and lies, testimony and witnessing, and the politics of violence and trauma through this powerful theatre piece.

Biographies

Dr. Lisa Taylor

BIO Lisa K. Taylor is Full Professor of Education at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada. Her research and teaching are in the areas of critical literacy, antiracism, anticolonial and social justice teacher education, critical global education, pedagogies of remembrance, postcolonial perspectives in TESOL, and transnational feminist literature. She has published in TESOL Quarterly, Intercultural Education and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She is co-editor with Jasmin Zine of Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy (2014, ROutledge).

PUBLICATIONS Taylor, L. K. & Zine, J. (Eds.). (2014). Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in post-9/11 Cultural Practice. Routledge (Role: 1st Editor).

Taylor, L. K. (forthcoming, 2016). What does it mean to story our shared Historical Present? Listening to Testimonial Oral and Life Histories through the Play of the Personal. In N. Ng-a-Fook & K. Llewellyn (Eds.), Storying Historical Consciousness in times of Reconciliation: Oral History, Public Education, and Cultures of Redress. UBC Press. Taylor, L. K., Rwigema, M. J., Sollange, U., & Kyte, S. (forthcoming, 2016). Learning with and from Survivor Testimonies in the High School History Class: Oral History as Relationship. In N. Ng-a-Fook & K. Llewellyn (Eds.), Oral History and Education: Theories, Dilemmas, and Practices. UBC Press. Khoo, S.M., Taylor, L. K., & Andreotti, V. (forthcoming, 2016). Ethical internationalization, neoliberal restructuring, and 'beating the bounds' of Higher Education. In Lynette Shultz and Melody Viczko. Democracy, Social Justice and Leadership in Higher Education. Palgrave MacMillan. Taylor, L. K. (2015). Curation as public pedagogy: Roger Simon, A pedagogy of witnessing. JCACS, 12, 3, 175-196. Taylor, L. K. (2014). Inheritance as intimate, implicated publics: Building practices of remembrance with future teachers in response to residential school survivor testimonial media and literature. R.I. Simon: A pedagogy of public possibility; Special Journal issue of Canadian Social Studies. Taylor, L. K. (2014). From empathy to estrangement, from enlightenment to implication: A pedagogical framework for (re)reading literary desire against the ‘slow acculturation of Imperialism.’ In L. K. Taylor & J. Zine (Eds.), Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in post-9/11 Cultural Practice (218-245). Routledge. Taylor, L. K. Collaboration. Going Public. Available February 1, 2014 at http://dev.mat3rial.com/goingpublic/content/lisa-taylor/ . Taylor, L. K. (2014). Contra el corriente: Navigando la marea afectiva en la educación para la justicia social y mundial. Rizomo Freireana, Xàtiva, Spain: Instituto Paulo Freire. Available from http://www.rizoma-freireano.org/index.php/a-contracorriente-navegar-el-f.... Taylor, L. K., Rwigema, M. J., & Sollange, U. (2014). The Ethics of learning from Rwandan survivor communities: The politics of knowledge production and shared authority within community-school collaboration in genocide and critical global citizenship education. In S. High & Concordia University Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (Eds.), Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence (103-141). Vancouver: UBC Press. Taylor, L. K. (2013). Against the Tide: Working with and against the affective flows of resistance in Social and Global Justice Learning. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 7, 2, pp. 58-68. Available from www.criticalliteracyjournal.org. Taylor, L. K. & Hoechsmann, M. (2012). Why Multicultural Literacy? Multicultural Education Inside  and Outside of Schools. In H. K. Wright, M. Singh & R. Race (Eds.), (2012). Precarious international multicultural education: Hegemony, dissent and rising alternatives (Chap. 17; pp. 315-332). Sense Publishers.    Taylor, L. K., Rwigema, M. J. & Umwali, S. S. (2012). What you see depends where you stand: Critical anticolonial perspectives on Genocide Education addressing the Rwandan Genocide. In P. P. Trifonas & B. Wright. (Eds.), Critical Peace Education: Difficult dialogues (Chap. 8; pp. 115-134). New York: Springer. Taylor, L. K. & Zine, J. (2012). Contested imaginaries: Reading Muslim women and Muslim women reading back: Transnational feminist reading practices, pedagogy and ethical concerns. In L. Tepperman & A. Kalyta (Eds.), Reading Sociology: Canadian Perspectives, Second Edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Taylor, L. K. (2011). Feeling in Crisis: Vicissitudes of Response in Experiments with Global Justice Education. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 9, 1, pp. 6-65.    Taylor, L. K. (2011). Global Justice Education as a pedagogy of loss: Interrupting Frames of War. In H. Smits & R. Naqvi, (Eds.), Thinking about and enacting curriculum in Times of War (Chap 8; pp. 139-156). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Taylor, L. K. (2011). Beyond Paternalism: Global Education with Preservice Teachers as a Practice of Implication. In V. Andreotti & L.M.T.M. de Souza (Eds.), Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education (177-199). Routledge. Taylor, L. K. & Hoechsmann, M. (2011). Beyond Intellectual Insularity: Multicultural Literacy as a Measure of Respect. Canadian Journal of Education, 34, 2, June. Available from www.cje-rce.ca. Taylor, L. K. & Hoechsmann, M. (2011). ¿Por qué la alfabetización multicultural? La educación cultural dentro y fuera del ámbito escolar. Special Issue on Democracy and Education of Postconvencionales, 3. Available from http://saber.ucv.ve/ojs/index.php/rev_post/article/view/6308#.U-zpm1YYEpE. Andreotti, V., Jefferess, D., Pashby, K., Rowe, C., Tarc, P. & Taylor, L.K. (2010). Difference and Conflict in Global Citizenship in Higher Education in Canada. International Journal on Development Education and Global Learning, 2, 3: 5-24. Taylor, L. K. & Boutilier, K. (2010). I walk Bathurst Street until it come like home’: Studying Black Canadian Literature and Critical Citizenship in the English Classroom. Special Issue: Anti-racism education: Missing in action (Ed. Charles C. Smith), Our Schools/Ourselves, 19:3, pp. 353-365. Taylor, L. K. (2010). Multimodal archeologies of storied formation as palimpsestal inquiry. In C.  Mitchell & T. Wilson (Eds.), Memory and pedagogy: Productive remembering in changing times (114-129). New York: Routledge. Taylor, L. K., Bernhard, J., Garg, S. & Cummins, J. (2008). Building on Students’ Family-Based Cultural and Linguistic Capital through a Multiliteracies Curriculum. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 8, 3, pp. 269-295. Taylor, L. K. (2008). Of mother tongues and other tongues: The stakes of linguistically inclusive pedagogy in minority contexts. Special Issue: Multilingual Literacies. Canadian Modern Language  Review, 64, 5, pp. 89-123. Taylor, L. K. (2008). Transcreation, Transformance and the fertility of Difference: Reading ESL students’ negotiations of language difference through the lens of translation. In P. Trifonas (Ed.), Worlds of difference: Rethinking the ethics of global education for the 21st century (pp. 103-136). Boulder: Paradigm. Taylor, L. K. (2008). From critical literacy to recursive embodied affective relations of knowing: Reading literature Through Other Eyes. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, Vol. 1, Issue 2. pp. 58-73, available from www.criticalliteracyjournal.org. Taylor, L. K. (2008). Beyond ‘open-mindedness’: Cultivating critical, reflexive approaches to democratic dialogue. In P. R. Carr & D. E. Lund (Eds.), Doing democracy: Striving for political literacy and Social Justice (Chap 8; pp. 159-176). New York: Peter Lang. Burwell, C., Davis, H. E. & Taylor, L. K. (2008). Reading Nafisi in the West: Feminist Reading Practices and Ethical Concerns. TOPIA A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Special Issue: Islam  and Cultural Politics, 19, pp. 63-84. Taylor, L. K. (2008). Normalizar la diversidad, diversificar lo normal: Modelos canadienses de educación inclusiva en contextos de alta diversidad etnolingüística (Normalizing Diversity, Diversifying ‘Normal’: Canadian models of inclusive education in ethnolinguistically diverse settings). Conference Proceedings, 5th Simposium on Language, Education and Immigration, Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de Girona, Girona, Spain. Taylor, L. K. (2007). Developing critical affective imagination: Building feminist anti-colonial embodied reading practices through Reader Response. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 1, 2, pp. 58-73. Zine, J, Taylor, L. K. & Davis, H. D. (Guest Editors). (2007). CONTESTED IMAGINARIES / Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns, Special Issue of Intercultural Education, 18, 4. Zine, J, Taylor, L. K. & Davis, H. D. (2007). Editorial Introduction. Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns, Special Issue of Intercultural Education, 18, 4, pp. 271-280. Taylor, L. K. (2007). Reading desire: From empathy to estrangement, from enlightenment to implication. Intercultural Education, 18, 4, pp. 297-316. Zine, J, Taylor, L. K. & Davis, H. D. (2007). Interview with Zarqa Nawaz. Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns, Special Issue of Intercultural Education, 18, 4. Taylor, L. K., Davis, H. D. & Zine, J. (2007). Interview with Jamelie Hassan. Reading Muslim Women And Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns, Special Issue of Intercultural Education, 18, 4. Davis, H. D., Zine, J. & Taylor, L. K. (2007). Interview with Mohja Kahf. Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns, Special Issue of Intercultural Education, 18, 4. Taylor, L. K. (2007). Taking Diversity Seriously through Multiliteracies Pedagogy. Proceedings of International Conference on Intercultural Education, Teacher Training and School Practice.  National University of Distance Education. Madrid, Spain. Taylor, L. K. (2006-2007). Glocal rural: Home in the world and the worlding of home. Journal of Eastern Townships Studies, 29-30, pp. 19-26. Taylor, L. K. (2006). Cultural Translation and the Double Movement of Difference in learning  ‘English as a Second Identity’. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 3, 2, 101-130. Taylor, L. K. (2006). Wrestling with Race: Implications of Integrative Antiracism Education for Immigrant ESL Youth. TESOL Quarterly, 40, 3, 519-544. Taylor, L. K. (2004). Creating a Community of Difference: Understanding Gender and Race in a high school ESL Anti-discrimination Camp. In B. Norton & A. Pavlenko (Eds.), Gender and TESOL (pp. 95-110). TESOL Publications. Taylor, L. K. (2004). Terms of Engagement: Cultural Translation and the Dream of Educational Inclusion. In A. Ibrahim (Ed.), Special Issue: Thinking Critically, Choosing Politically: Anti-racism and/or Multiculturalism Education, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Discipline, 22, 2, pp. 33-44. Taylor, L. K. (2002). Indians Shooting Indians: 'Imaging back' and Re/membering Communities in a Polyvalent Postcolonial Text. Trans/forms: insurgent voices in education, pp. 37-54. Taylor, L. K. (2001). More Perils of Talking About Culture: Constructs of 'Race' and Culture Circulating in Multicultural Educational Discourses. Trans/forms: insurgent voices in education (5), pp. 81-7. Taylor, L. K. (1997). `Canadian Culture', Cultural Difference and ESL Pedagogy. TESL Canada Journal 15,  1, pp. 70-6.

Maja Lovrenovic

Maja Lovrenovic is a PhD candidate at the Social and Cultural Anthropology Department of the VU University Amsterdam. Her research interests include history, heritage, memory, narratives and everyday life. More specifically, her work examines how the past is narrated, perceived and dealt with in the everyday life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Publications:

(2016, forthcoming) “Uncanny Landscapes of Memory: ‘Bosnian Pyramids’ and the Contemporary World-Making in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, in R. Ganzevoort & S. Sremac (eds.) (2016, forthcoming)

Lived Religion and the Politics of (In)Tolerance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (2002) “Bosnia and Herzegovina: boundaries and permeation”, in: S. Resic & B. Törnquist-Plewa (eds.) (2002) The Balkans in focus: cultural boundaries in Europe, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pg. 113-119.

Dr. Marcia Blumberg

Marcia Blumberg is an Associate Professor in the English Department at York University and is cross  appointed to the Theatre and Performance Department.   She has presented many international conference papers and has published numerous articles on contemporary theatre, especially plays and performance pieces from South Africa. She teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses.  She co-edited with Dr Dennis Walder a book:  South African Theatre As/And Intervention.  .Her recent work particularly focuses upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the theatrical material inspired by that necessary but flawed body.