CANCELLED Visiting Speaker - Prof. Jason Beech
Room: Community Room (1139)
PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
Join us for a public talk about "Development and its Discontents: A South American Perspective" by Prof. Jason Beech from the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Prof. Beech is hosted by Dr. Marianne Larsen and the Researching International and Contemporary Education (RICE) research group.
Notions of development, Third World and, more recently, Global South have been used to justify and promote certain visions about how to attain wellbeing and progress, based on a unitary idea of history, the human subject and the adequate modes of social organization, including education. Current developmental discourses in education have been colonized by extreme market driven ideologies visible, for example, in the PISA-Pearson partnership. In an effort to balance the power of this hegemonic vision, UNESCO is working on an alternative model of development through its Education for Sustainable Development for 2030 Framework.
Yet, do we need development alternatives or rather alternatives to development?
South America has been prolific in critiques to hegemonic views of development, exemplified by dependencia theories in the 1950s/70s; Escobar’s notion of development as discourse; and the principle of “buen vivir” (well living) derived from Quechua world views. In this presentation, I will analyze hegemonic development discourses in education, the construction of UNESCO’s alternative model for education development, and alternatives to development from a South American perspective.
Jason Beech teaches Comparative Education and Sociology of Education in Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. He is researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina, and has taught in several universities in the Americas, Europe and Australia. He is interested in the globalisation of knowledge and policies related to education and in exploring the link between cosmopolitanism, citizenship and education.
