NERA 2022 Day 3

 The third day of NERA 2022 consisted solely of plenaries. The first one was the second sociologist plenary speaker at this conference;: Guy Standing: "The Precariat: Recovering the Soul of Education". He claimed that we are living in a period of constant uncertainty, with "unknown unknowns". (Already, I guessed that I would need Hans Rosling here on my shoulder to keep a balance.) He blamed "neo-liberal" capitalism for leading to a new class structure, where both economic goods and security are concentrated among those who possess assets. The "salariat" (those with secure salaries) are shrinking. The precariat is growing. He defined the precariat with three dimensions: 1) a status of unsecure labor, they don't have a occupational narrative (which in Skovsmose's words would be part of their foreground), they have an education above the level demanded of the jobs they are getting (while the education demanded to get a job is increasing). The precariat do not know what is needed to change their situations. 2) The precariat gets wages but not the extras that the salariat gets (such as paid holidays, health care...) and are "systematically exploited by debt". (It would be fun to do a discourse analysis of how he talks... It feels like he is pointing to important issues in a language that is so out-there that it gets in the way of the message.) 3) They are systematically losing rights of citizenship - not seeing political parties that can address their position. 

 

Three factions of the precariat: 1) those not having much education, and feel that the present is worse than the past - voting for Trump, Urban, Putin...) 2) the nostalgics, have no current time, mostly don't vote at all. 3) the progressives, who have been promised a future if they do their studies, coming out of college with debt and jobs that will lead nowhere. These are looking for a new sense of the future. 

 

Finally, he got to the role of education (which happens to be the theme of this conference). He claims there has been a commodification of education, which used to be viewed as a common good. He rallied against relevance, employability, human capital, arguing that education is not about that. He claimed that education is failing to teach history, to prepare for democracy and so on. (Really?!)

 

The lack of nuance in this lecture is astounding. He talks about a "disease" and the importance of curing it, but curing a disease usually depends on an understanding of the disease, not just slogans. If his "diagnosis" is right, we might just as well just close down the entire educational system and start again, as nothing good gets out of it at the moment. (To his credit, in one of his last sentences, he recognized that his picture is less accurate in some countries than in others.) I miss Hans Rosling.

 

To summarize, I did enjoy parts of Standing's discussion of the precariate - I see that the growth of short-terms jobs is a problem in the rich world. But his discussion of education was painted with an enormously broad brush. Moreover, such plenaries tend to occur regularly in education conferences. It is a bit surprising that organizers do not invite people who can say something a bit new about education, rather than some sociologist who can only offer an often-repeated, caricatured image of education policy. 

 

The third plenary was by Dennis A Francis, talking about "Precarious bodies, affect and education". This was yet another sociologist. They started by story-telling about an incident in a Durban classroom, with sexuality education, homophobia, CIS-normativity interweaved. Vulnerability is not an individual characteristic, but a result of societal factors. COVID-19 shows how the rich and the poorer world are interdependent, but not more than there is a huge vaccine inequality. (That is, even when vaccinating everyone is of interest to the rich world, it is not enough to actually provide vaccines.) Even COVID-19 has not been an equalizer.

 

Images from the war in Ukraine is shown in African newspapers, as was the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack - supporting the long-standing impression that lives of white European are more valuable and news-worthy than lives in other parts of the world. How can anti-oppressive education respond to injustice and precariousness to those both in proximity and at a distance? How can educators be actors in addressing precarity, inequality and social action?

 

They noted that there has been an explosion of reported hate crimes due to homophobic or transphobic hate crime in the UK and the US. The pandemic has been bad in this regard. Transgender women of color are especially hard hit. The same can be seen in South Africa. They also gave examples of schools explicitly condoning homophobia and forbidding the support of pride.

 

They argued that education has to understand the mechanism of inequality, and that all people are grievable. We need a critical analysis of precariousness and oppression. We need to disrupt the hyper-individualisation of education. "You are because we are" (Ubuntu). (I feel a need to stress to our students that their task is not to study and get their individual qualifications, but to work together so that the group learns as much as possible.) Maybe knowledge is not the answer - rather questioning "How did I learn racism?", "Where did my attitudes towards LGBT come from?".

 

(Why do I appreciate this talk so much more than the previous one? Francis also paints a dire picture of the situation. However, it is filled with concrete data and examples, and the intersectional references makes it more nuanced.)

 

This marked the end of the NERA 2022 conference on my part. There was a plenary panel as well as a closing ceremony left, but I did not feel a need for more intellectual input at the time, wanting rather to spend some quality time with my notes from the conference to summarize a little.

 

Conferences are about content and people. In terms of content, I have of course attended a lot of presentations, and some of them have included interesting food for thought which I will take with me. In terms of people, I have spent most of the "free time" with people I already knew, strengthening existing relationships. Most of the scheduled time has been spent in various networks, where discussions go on for three or four minutes before the next presentation meets. The format of CERME, for instance, in which you spend most of the day for several days in a room with a limited number of people, is much more conductive to establishing contacts that may lead to friendships, collaborations, research stays and so on. But I must also admit that I'm not of the strategic kind - I do not draw up a list of people I want to get in touch with beforehand, and then seek them out. There are probably quite a lot of people I should have tried to meet in that way. For instance, I could have read up on Jón Ingvar Kjaran's work, approached him in the conference and tried to make him interested in collaborating on something LGBTQ-related in the future (as I know his name as an important figure in the field). But that is so far out of my comfort zone that I'll just add this to the already long list of opportunities missed...

 

On the fringe of the conference, however, I have had meetings with Icelandic colleagues in mathematics education, so I do have some bright moments. 

 

As to NERA 2022 as a conference, I think it has delivered on its promises - for me, it has not been any major flaws when comparing to the programme posted. I do have some issues with the organization of the conference, though. I think the plenaries should provide new perspectives for many participants, and that they should be earlier in the conference, making it possible to refer back to them in discussions throughout the conference. I also think the networks should be strengthened and people being encouraged to stick to a network.

 

Finally, some random reflections at the end of the conference: 

• "Reading a paper" is, these days, not meant to be taken literally.
• Some people seem to think that not using Powerpoint is a wonderfully creative practice and a subversion of the norm. It is, rather, a practice of exclusion when the oral presentation is partly inaudible. When a presentation is given in a monotonous voice, a Powerpoint presentation can give welcome ideas of what are the headings and key points of the presentation.
• "As mentioned above" has a wonderfully surreal quality when uttered in an oral presentation -  especially when we are on the top floor of the building.
• Braun & Clarke is often mentioned, but more rarely used. (As Braun & Clarke are the first to point out.)
• For people asking questions: the fact that you have fallen in love with a particular theoretical viewpoint, does not mean that it is a weakness when others do not use it.