21st Annual York University Graduate Student Conference in Education
con-currents
Wednesday, February 19th at The Tranzac Club
plus a follow-up conference event Wednesday, March 19th online
York Graduate Students in Education are 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.
Register to attend at: https://forms.gle/FgEuvTK3hAqxRFucA
Details about ‘part 1’, our in-person event at The Tranzac Club, February 19th:
- The Tranzac Club is located at 292 Brunswick Ave (in The Annex, at Bloor Street West and Brunswick Ave.) and is fully accessible.
- 9:30AM to 4:30PM program featuring PhD Keynotes, performances, and workshops designed to stimulate our thinking and dialogue in a shared space.
- Reception at The Southern Cross Bar 4:30PM-6PM.
Our in-person event will be a “colloquium”, a chance to spend time with each other and with our ideas. We will all share the same space for the duration of the day, and encounter the works offered altogether. Compared with the familiar ‘concurrent sessions’ found at a typical conference (which split attention and attendance into separate spaces, apart from the whole) ours will be a space where what is experienced as concurrent may be the varied practices we animate across our scholarship. And what might that con-currents reveal to us?
Plus! At Part 2, online on Wednesday, March 19th we’ll continue our conversations, witness graduate student papers, participate in workshops by alumni and professors from the Faculty of Education, and more. We are still accepting submissions for online presentations until Friday, February 28th.
Registration closes Friday, February 14th. Contact us at gradconf@edu.yorku.ca if you have questions.
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Submissions are now closed for our in-person event. We are pleased to continue accepting submissions by graduate students wishing to present papers at the March 19th online event until Friday, February 28th. Details on preparing your submission follow the description of our conference theme: con-currents.
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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For students seeking to present at the online March 19th event, we are pleased to accept submissions until Friday, February 28th.
Submission requirements:
- 250-word Abstract
- Reference list
- Word or PDF document
- Must be anonymized for peer-review (no mention of author name in abstract or reference list; see further instructions here)
We invite papers, artwork, and workshops that will invite scholars studying across the field of education to think together. We invite you to consider the following questions as you prepare your proposal:
- What is ‘happening’ concurrently in your scholarship (e.g. mixed methods and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks; the both/and you encounter and navigate, etc.)
- How does the language our scholarship takes (our questions, methodologies, knowledge mobilization efforts) reveal concurrent meanings — when does our ‘data’ mean more than one thing at once; what are its contrasting yet converging meanings…
We further invite you to situate your work in the spaces in-between, guided by any of the following questions:
- What con-current(s) as tensions do you encounter in your work? What do these encounters do? Where might they lead?
- Where do you see, or see possibility for, ‘new waves’ in your scholarship? Where could, or do, these waves draw us to? What holds us back from entering these new waters?
- How have interdisciplinary approaches opened you to possibility in your scholarship or teaching?
- What might it mean to see or make con-current(s) through our methodologies, our pedagogies, our interventions?
All abstracts/proposals must be anonymized for peer review and submitted through the YUWrite student journal portal at: https://yuwrite.journals.yorku.ca/ (you will need to register to submit).
Submissions may be any of the following (please make sure work is suited for online delivery):
- Workshop/Collaborative Activity/Facilitated Discussions: Workshops and collaborative activities designed to provoke discussion of central topics of concern, perhaps by co-producing an artefact, listening to something together, etc.
- Artistic Intervention, Display, or Performance: Presentation or re-presentation of arts-based educational scholarship or works of research-creation. May also include co-production of arts-based works with conference attendees.
- Paper Presentation: Short papers (15 minutes) that essay, intervene, explore, or animate ongoing scholarship in the realm of education (broadly conceived)
- Works in Progress: An opportunity to propose questions or provocations related to ongoing challenges you may be encountering in your scholarship and have peers respond. You may also wish to submit a section of a paper already in the works or submitted to an upcoming, large-scale academic conference. We welcome the opportunity to witness new scholars practice/prepare to share work; please indicate this in your submission (ours is a space for practice, in the company of fellow graduate students)
Submit your proposal today! Please note all submissions must be made through the YUWrite journal portal and will be anonymously peer-reviewed by graduate students at York University in the Faculty of Education.
For more information, please contact: gradconf@edu.yorku.ca
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.
