International Critical Education Conference:
Critical Adult Education and Learning for Social Change
Malta, May, 9-12, 2023
It is common knowledge that, for ordinary working and precariously employed or unemployed people, as well as socially sensitive persons in general, the world is in a state of crisis, in a dire situation especially in terms of dignified living conditions for many and also with regard to the environment. Criticism has long been the staple of critical education. It is high time we revert to critique in its old sense of combining criticism with the ability to dream of a world not as it is but as it can and should be. We need to dream of plausible alternatives. Adult Education and learning offer us possibilities in this regard as long as people, individually and collectively, engage their different faculties and senses such as reason, emotions, imagination, intuition, experience, physicality in all its varieties and deeply felt sense of social justice. It also necessitates the ability to learn to work collectively in a creative manner. Many entities including a variety of social- justice oriented organisations and movements are engaged in different pockets struggling for a world at odds with that perceived as currently thriving on greed, lack of solidarity and compassion, individualisation and the glorification of profit by any means necessary.
This conference, hosted by the University of Malta through its Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education and its UNESCO Chair in Global Adult Education, is meant to offer an antidote to what Paulo Freire called a world that is feio, malvado e desumano ( ugly, mean and inhuman).The organisations, movements and other agencies, offering this antidote, have different forms of learning at the core, sometimes overt and organised, sometimes informal and implicit. This is why the emphasis is on education and learning in their broader contexts.
The International Conference in Critical Education, previously held in Athens (2011, 2012, 2017), Ankara ( 2013), Thessaloniki (2014, 2022), Wroclaw ( 2015), London ( 2016, 2018) and Naples ( 2019), is a forum for scholars, educators and activists committed to social justice and social emancipation.
It refutes the idea that there is no alternative (TINA) to the present Capitalist driven way of life. It seeks to elaborate ideas for an education and process of learning that meets the needs of working people, with all their different identities, and the rest of their natural environment in the spirit of emancipation from global “immiseration”.
The 11th ICEC will take place at the Valletta Campus of the University of Malta.
Important dates
13 March 2023 - last day for submission of abstract
15 March 2023 - announcement of accepted papers
01 May 2023 - deadline for registration and payment of conference fees
Language of Conference
English
