PURPOSE: This workshop will generate ideas for a potential network on education and global development. It builds on seed meetings to gauge broader interest, generate ideas, and plan future steps. The network is envisioned as a multi-/cross-disciplinary scholarly forum for Canadian researchers and practitioners working on issues related to education and global development, broadly aligned, to connect, share research, and collaborate. We invite faculty, early-career scholars, advanced graduate students, professional researchers, practitioners for brainstorming and a meet-and-greet with refreshments.
RATIONALE: Our times are characterised simultaneously by hyper-connectivity accelerated through intensified global flows (migration, technology, finance, media, ideas) (Appadurai, 1990), whilst in a context of de-globalisations (Yeates & Holden, 2022), anti-globalisation (Rizvi, 2022), and multiple inequities and social justice concerns. Education systems and learners at all levels face interlocking and potentially paradoxical challenges. Macro-level challenges for education in view of conflict, mass migration, climate emergency, and disease are already seen.
As idealised global calls for a new ‘social contract’ for education from a humanist perspective are proposed (UNESCO, 2021), threats to academic freedom, regressive macro-polities, mis-/disinformation networks, and advancements in artificial intelligence questioning the very nature of ‘knowledge’ are intensifying. Education at all levels must respond to a ‘VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous’ (Stein, 2021).
This requires concerted interconnected, cross-disciplinary, open collective spaces for critical scholarly exchange. There is a need to question dominant knowledges and mobilise new and ‘othered’ knowledges, synthesise insights, and collaborate amongst researchers and practitioners engaged in the numerous issues affecting education and global development. While research and practice in education and global development are growing, disciplinary and sectoral fragmentation in Canada prompts scholars and practitioners to engage in academic associations and professional scholarly communities that usually do not have a dedicated space or structure for cross-exchange. The proposed network hopes to cultivate this community.
