Cath Lambert

Entrepreneurialism and critical pedagogy: reinventing the higher education curriculum

This paper presents an analysis of the ways in which UK higher education (HE) has become increasingly commercialised and commodified in the post-1980s. It critiques the strategies adopted by successive UK governments to reinvigorate the relationship between educational and economic life, and to facilitate a more corporate and entrepreneurial spirit within the academy in line with the pressures of a ‘knowledge-based economy’. Arguing for a more critical exploration of teaching and learning within HE, the paper presents evidence from work carried out by the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching in Learning (CETL) which adopts a research-based learning approach to teaching and learning at undergraduate level.1 Within the context of ongoing debates surrounding the relationship between teaching, learning and research in UK HE, the paper advocates a reinvention of curriculum design through an engagement with the broader principles of critical pedagogy, and in so doing, presents a critical engagement with the commercialisation of HE.

Pedagogies of Participation in Higher Education: A Case for Research-Based Learning.

This article addresses the question of the role and function of contemporary higher education in western industrialised nations through a focus on the participation of undergraduate students. The discussion examines some of the dramatic changes brought about by neo‐liberal educational policy, in particular the hierarchical division of teaching and research and the negative construction of students as consumers. Drawing on critical debates within the fields of art and education, what it means to participate – in both theory and practice – is interrogated. Research‐based learning is then presented as a participatory form of pedagogy. Combining evidence from the wider literature with that provided by the recent activities of a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in the UK, it is suggested that research‐based learning has the potential to reconfigure students as intellectual producers through their active engagement with research and their participation in the research cultures of their departments and disciplines. In so doing, such pedagogies present scope for critical and constructive intervention in relation to some of the damaging trajectories of educational reform in the UK and elsewhere.

Imagination, hope and the positive face of feminism: pro/feminist pedagogy in ‘post’ feminist times?

This article presents an analysis of the way in which a group of students at one UK university mobilised their interest in and commitment to pro/feminist values and ideals through the establishment of a student society geared towards combating anti‐sexism. Placing the students at the centre of the discussion, the article describes the various strategies adopted by the group to proselytise their views and how, through the utilisation of a range of resources, they sustained a programme of political activism around issues of gender inequalities. Highlighting the possible connections between pedagogic practice, classroom experience and extra‐curricular activity, the article demonstrates the ways in which the teaching and learning process might facilitate student engagement with a broader set of ideas about life both inside and outside of the university setting. Within the context of ongoing change surrounding UK higher education, and the heavily gendered institutional climate which this supports, the article provides evidence to suggest that curricular design and delivery can impact upon student motivations towards a contemporary and, it is argued, transgressive and transformative, reworking of feminist principles and ideals.

Redistributing the sensory: the critical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière remains neglected within educational debates. In this paper I examine the potential of his philosophies for enacting critical interventions in relation to contemporary (higher) educational concerns. Rancière argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a point of departure for social and pedagogic encounters. He also emphasises the importance of aesthetics and the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a mechanism for understanding who is un/able to be seen, speak and produce knowledge. These arguments are examined through an analysis of two research-based art installations: Sociologists Talking (2008, 2009) and The Idea of a University (2010). I consider the potential for ‘alternative’ forms of knowledge production and communication to enact different pedagogic methods and re/distribute the sensory spaces in which research and teaching take place.

Psycho classrooms: teaching as a work of art

Taking its title from Psycho Buildings (2008), an exhibition of architectural sculptures at the Haywood Gallery, London (UK), this paper explores the complex relationship between pedagogy and space. Specifically, it aims to re/conceptualise teaching and learning as ‘aesthetic encounters’, paying attention to the haptic, experiential and participatory aspects of spatialised pedagogic practice. Drawing on examples taken from pedagogic art, a field of practice hitherto neglected within critical pedagogy, it is argued that the design, construction and critique of teaching and learning spaces needs to engage with the aesthetic distribution of what can be seen, said, and experienced by teachers and learners. These ideas are explored through one example of a psycho classroom, The Reinvention Centre at Westwood at the University of Warwick (UK). It is suggested that as spaces of creative dissensus and ruin, psycho classrooms can work to disrupt and reconfigure the distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004) and as such represent spaces of potentiality.

New Labour, new leaders? Gendering transformational leadership

Transformational leadership is widely recognised as being central to the implementation of educational reform. In this paper I draw on selected educational speeches made by New Labour politicians in order to locate shifting discourses of leadership within the broader accountability framework through which the terms of the relationship between central government and head teachers have been re/configured in the United Kingdom. The gendered politics of transformation are examined, highlighting new and renewed forms of masculinity embedded within new leadership ideals. It is suggested that a gendered critique of transformational leadership offers an important contribution to critical analyses of the neo‐liberal and managerialist educational project.

Gender transformations in higher education

This paper offers a critical perspective on issues around gender and sexual transformation within the context of UK Higher Education. Drawing on qualitative data carried out by undergraduate and postgraduate students, the analysis explores some of the diverse and often challenging ways in which young/er women and men are thinking and talking about gender, sexuality and feminism, as well as their strategies for turning ideas into political action. The research focuses on the activities and opinions of students belonging to an anti-sexist organisation within one UK university, who are engaged in campaigns to raise awareness about the damaging effects of gender and sexual inequalities, as well as promoting the popular appeal of contemporary feminisms. Locating the voices and research findings of the students themselves at the centre of the discussion, the paper is produced collaboratively between students and teachers who are involved in both the activist and research elements of this project. The paper also argues for (and provides evidence of) the transformative potential of alternative and critical forms of student engagement and student/ staff collaboration in relation to gender informed academic activism.

Live Art as Urban Praxis: The Political Aesthetics of the City

This article examines the political possibilities for an aesthetic disruption of urban space and time. Locating the discussion within debates about the neoliberal city, selected art-works from Fierce live art festival in Birmingham, England are used in order to examine how, in a specific and localised context, normative spatial patterns and temporal rhythms can be challenged and subverted. The analysis draws on, and contributes to, a sociological account of the centrality of aesthetics to political and social organisation.

The affective work of art : an ethnographic study of Brian Lobel's fun with cancer patients

This article demonstrates the sociological possibilities of using affect. In particular the discussion rises to the methodological challenges posed by affect theories when attempting to undertake empirical research. Drawing on ethnographic data from a study of Brian Lobels Fun with Cancer Patients art exhibition, it is argued that the development of critically entangled methods, attentive to fleeting, partial, complex and often ‘inaccessible’ knowledge and experiences, is necessary. In Fun with Cancer Patients the aesthetic event offered opportunities for art participants and visitors to engage with different discourses and subjectivities around cancer. An affective lens makes this engagement intelligible. The analysis contributes to ‘live sociology’, demonstrating that developing live methods attentive to affect can provide insight into the political potential of aesthetic encounters.

Queering Identity: Becoming Queer in the Work of Cassils

This chapter explores the work of genderqueer artist Cassils in order to address the question of what it is to be human from a queer perspective. The challenges from queer and postmodern scholarship to the “identity politics” so central to earlier activist and academic agendas have been well documented. Yet, notwithstanding these valid critiques, identity remains a powerful organizing concept in contemporary experience. These contradictory stances on identity serve as a prompt for thinking about what queer brings to our understandings of being human now and in the near future.