Internationalization, corporatization, the impoverishment/diminishment of government funding, and legacies of religious involvement are among the challenges that are having an impact on Liberal Arts education. Such realities challenge the autonomy, accountability and perhaps even the integrity of Liberal Arts education. The focus of this conference is multidisciplinary; it will be of particular interest to faculty, students, and universities with a strong Liberal Arts component.
Four outstanding keynote speakers:
• Ronald Wright (Friday evening banquet and conference keynote)
• Henri Giroux
• Dorothy Smith
• Phil McShane
Groups rates are available - please contact the conference organizers at the co-ordinates below.
If you are having problems registering, please contact Heather Mann at laconfhosting@stu.ca.
Agenda:
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| bold - Highlight activity | | Thursday, September 30, 2010 | | 6:30 PM-10:00 PM | Opening Registration |
| | 7:00 PM-9:00 PM | Keynote Presentation - Henry Giroux - “Beyond Bailouts: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject Higher Education”
This paper will argue that while neoliberalism is under attack as a result of the current economic and financial crisis in the United States, it appears that very little is being said about the ideas, social relations, and values that are at work in higher education to produce what might be called the neoliberal subject. Bailouts speak to the crisis of finance, but say little about the underlying values that produced the economic meltdown, especially the role that higher education has played as part of the neoliberal order. While the structural transformation of higher education under a neoliberal disciplinary apparatus has transformed the nature of governance, the curriculum, the role of faculty, and how students are defined and treated, too little has been said about neoliberalism as a mode of cultural pedagogy and the influential role it plays in producing a particular kind of neoliberal subject. In this talk, I will argue that if higher education is to reclaim its democratic mission and offer a site of resistance to the ongoing reproduction of a market-driven society, it will have to rethink and challenge both the role of the university as a corporate entity and the pedagogies it produces as part of its alliance with the forces of market sovereignty. |
| | 9:00 PM-11:00 PM | Reception and Fine Arts Presentation |
| | | | Friday, October 01, 2010 | | 9:00 AM-10:30 AM | Keynote - Phil McShane - "Liberal Arts: the Heart of Future Science"
The title points us to the most up-to-date findings of neuroscience. Genuine science, which is a source of creativity and innovations in global humanity's life-style, is grounded in the neuromolecular transformations that are most familiar in the domain of aesthetic experience, of fantasy in the best sense. The present economic crisis, at root, is a failure of operative fantasy. Such moves as financial bailouts are unimaginative moves based on the stale and nominalist sciences that surround present failed economics: they have no lasting benefit. The long-term need is for the deep bailout that is to come from the salvific presence of liberal arts education. |
| | 11:00 AM-12:30 PM | Presentations/Workshops |
| | Workshop 1 |
| | 1:30 PM-3:30 PM | Presentations/Workshops |
| | 3:30 PM-5:00 PM | Presentations/Workshops |
| | 6:30 PM-9:00 PM | Banquet and Keynote - Ronald Wright - "The Future of the Past: Escaping the Parochialism of the Present"
Ronald Wright is a Canadian author who has written books of travel, history and fiction. He gave the 2004 Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, looks at the modern human predicament in light of the 10,000-year experiment with civilization. His latest work - What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order - examines what Wright calls "the Columbian Age" and consequently the nature and historical origins of modern American imperium. |
| | | | Saturday, October 02, 2010 | | 9:00 AM-10:30 AM | Keynote - Dorothy Smith - Thinking it Through"
At a time when many universities in Canada are yielding to pressures to orient their educational practice toward serving the economy, St Thomas University persists in its commitment to social conscience, to critical thinking and to educational practices that orient to these. On an occasion that honours St Thomas’s centenary of these commitments, I want to draw on a couple of deeply transformative experiences of the power of critical thinking in my own life. These are: my experiences in the women’s movement particularly in the 1960s and 70s, and my reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism which transformed my understanding of racism.
It’s hard now to recover the depth of women’s exclusion from the intellectual, cultural and political life of western societies that survived until the period of the women’s movement. It was not men’s misogyny that brought this about, but the historical development of gender divergences in domesticity versus the newly developing public life in which men of a certain class participated (v. Habermas). Subjects and agents in the public realms were men and being a woman automatically excluded and silenced. Breaking with this in practices with other women and in my very self as an internalized mode of thought and belief was a major transformation in my life.
The second introduced me to myself as racist in a way I could never have anticipated. I probably thought I was clean until I read Edward Said’s Orientalism and learned of how just by partici |
| | 11:00 AM-12:30 PM | Presentations/Workshops |
| | 1:30 PM-3:00 PM | Presentations/Workshops |
| | 3:30 PM-5:00 PM | Closing Plenary: The Economics of the University |
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Maps:
Contact Us
For more information on this event, please contact:
Dr. John Coates (Chair, Conference Planning Committee)
Phone: (506) 452-0502
Email: jcoates@stu.ca
Heather Mann (Conference Hospitality Manager)
Phone: (506) 452-9672
Fax: (506) 452-0611
Email: laconfhosting@stu.ca
Ms. Jeananne Knox (Department of Social Work)
Phone: (506) 452-0540
Fax: (506) 452-0611
Email: jknox@stu.ca
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