SPPA conference - IN PERSON

The topic for the in-person conference this year is Social Pedagogy as a Catalyst for Change: Transgressing the status quo in different national contexts

Inspired by reading bell hooks’ ‘Teaching to Transgress’ (1998), the SPPREAD (Social Pedagogy Practice, Research, Education and Development) network will be presenting research, reflections and ideas from soon to be published works at the in-person SPPA conference on 22nd August 2023 at 106 Gordon House  (29 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PP, University College London).

Established in 2018 as a space for dialogue between academics and practitioners from Brazil, Denmark and the UK, the SPPREAD network (which includes SPPA members & trustees) explores how social pedagogy operates in these diverse contexts, what similarities and differences we have, with the broad aim of learning from and with each other and growing understandings.

For our London event, we will continue exploring how bell hooks’ writings on education relates to social pedagogy, particularly around her thinking on transgression. We are concerned with how recent global and local events indicate rising inequality and polarisation, so questioning and transgressing the status quo seems more and more necessary. bell hooks provides a welcome, nuanced, feminist, anti-racist approach that both chimed with and inspired us in diverse ways. The presenters at our conference represent some of the contributing papers to a bell hooks Special Issue of the International Journal of Social Pedagogy that will be published at the end of 2023.

SPPA will follow this theme of social pedagogy and transgression into the online conference on 17th November where we would like to aim for a more practice-based exploration of the same theme.

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