21st Annual York University Graduate Student Conference in Education
con-currents
Wednesday, February 19th at The Tranzac Club
Revisit concurrents part 1: View full program here
And Online Wednesday, March 19th
York Graduate Students in Education is pleased to present an opportunity for graduate students to meet, share, and discuss the concurrent tensions and possibilities encountered in our scholarship and pedagogical relationships. Read more about our conference theme, con-currents, below.
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Presenting: con-current(s)
“Sometimes I need both to be strong and to be held. My own mysterious strength of quantum genetics, of cape and revolution, of spin and stripe. What if it is the world being the world that makes the sky the sky? What if the sky rushed in all directions to meet us here, connect us to everywhere? What if the ocean has my back? Could I trust that?” (Gumbs, 2021, p. 32)
This method versus that one; those traditions over another; their word against theirs — constantly asked to choose between one or the other, staying in the tension of the in-between is a challenge. But what is constant if not the push-and-pull of currents, which are constantly moving? What might it mean to be with — learn with — these currents? What is it to be swept away by the force of a theory, an observation, or even a pedagogue? When have we been rocked by the waves of knowledge that upend established notions of ‘what works’ and ‘what matters’ in education? How does it feel to be pulled under, surprised by the undertow that was there all along, running below the surface?
This year’s conference theme extends an invitation to linger with the con-currents of tensions and possibilities encountered in our own scholarship and in our pedagogical relationships. Whether these are methodological, ethical, historical, epistemological — compared with the familiar ‘concurrent sessions’ found at a typical conference (which split attention and attendance into separate spaces, apart from the whole) — we are designing a space where what is experienced as con-currents may be the varied practices we animate across our scholarship. And what might that con-currents tell us about the questions we ask in our inquiry?
With con-currents, the first half of the hyphenation, “con”, means ours is a place for being “with” one another, and our ideas, to explore the possibility of holding estranged, or seemingly dichotomous ideas, in the same hand. The latter half, “current(s)”, expresses our intention for this conference to be a place for recognizing what is already “existing and happening at the same time” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2024). Our ‘happening’ alongside one another requires us to engage with what tensions we meet, and through that, make new waves.
Extending the 2022 conference and its theme, re: alongside the 2024 conference’s desires for thinking other worlds, anyways, we situate con-currents as a way to think and re:imagine otherwise worlds that are with us, here and now, from then and there. As Ellyn Lyle, Jodi Latremouille, and David Jardine (2021) write: “We often hear that we are living in extraordinary times. This gives us pause as we wonder, has there ever been a time that was not extraordinary? … now is the time. Just as now has always been the time” (p. 3, emphasis in original).
Mirroring the dynamic push-and-pull of currents, our desire is for these dialogues to shape what we imagine, even as we are pulled toward the depths in the face of despairing events and contradictions. As we do this, we approach the in-between as a place of possibility, not stuckness. This may allow us to find, as Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon (2006) suggest, an ability to tolerate the disruption of binaries and move our questions towards those needed to carry out careful, ethical research and pedagogy. As they write, “It is the both/and of these stories that we turn to discover that we are both working in an oppressive regime that silences us and we are the wild women who will laugh at it, and name its absurdity and violence” (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 86). In such a “both-and proposition” writes adrienne maree brown, “Doing the work reveals more of the work to be done in us” (p. 81). We invite graduate scholars to join us in this work, so that we might reveal, analyze, and create con-currents, together.
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References
- brown, a. m. (2021). Holding change: The way of emergent strategy facilitation and mediation. AK Press.
- Cambridge Dictionary. (2024, September 20). Concurrent. Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/concurrent
- Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2006). Doing collective biography: Investigating the production of subjectivity. Open University Press.
- Gumbs, A. P. (2021). Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals. Soundings, 78(78), 20-37. DOI: 10.3898/SOUN.78.01.2021
- Lyle, E., Latremouille, J., & Jardine, D. (2021). Now has always been the time. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18(2), 1-5.
