BAICE CONFERENCE 2024

Transgression and transformation: (re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises

University of Sussex

3rd – 5th SEPTEMBER 2024

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Education systems ricochet from one global crisis to the next with increasing frequency, with each one impacting in different ways and disgorging new challenges. The years 2023-2024 may well be remembered as a time of unparalleled and intersecting global conflict and crises. According to the latest Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), 258 million people faced acute hunger in 58 countries, while fifty million people in 46 countries were on the brink of starvation at the start of 2023 alone. Already undergoing severe economic crises, many of these countries are locked into cycles of inflation and currency depreciation, with IMF-mandated austerity and structural adjustment programmes as a condition of accessing emergency loans, substantially cutting spending on education and healthcare. Created through inequitable neocolonial policies, poor distribution of global and regional food and goods and lack of action on the root causes of climate change, these ‘crises’ are disproportionately borne by the people in and from the Global South, especially poor women and girls.

In 2023, approximately 117 million people, more than half of them children, were forcibly displaced or stateless, more than double the number of a decade ago (UNHCR 2023). As we near climate tipping points and increasing environmental injustices, the capacity to respond and adapt to climate shocks decreases. This climate fragility is a key driver of displacement and of conflict, which in turn exacerbates the underlying socio-ecological crises. We are living through a period of intense production and reproduction of borders: the closing down of national borders and violent push backs of the uninvited; the outsourcing of bordering from territorial to institutions and local communities through micro-level bordering practices gives rise to profound concerns of access to equitable and socially just education for displaced populations. Often presented as racially ‘neutral’, these borders give rise to racialized mobility, immobility, inclusion, and exclusion which have their roots in the productive technologies of colonial empires.

BAICE 2024 will engage with these global developments and crises with the aim of fostering dialogue across borders in a variety of understandings: disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, international, South-North as well as geographical, planetary and political. We invite engagement on how these various crises are shaping and transforming the work of educators and stakeholders, and the lives of those we work with and query whether and how our own work in international and comparative education might reinforce borders. We also look to where and what are the spaces for transgression which resist or challenge increasingly hegemonic knowledge systems and power structures in education. This calls for a radical reimagining and rehumanising of the work of education, one that goes beyond rhetoric and towards a radical re-bordering of education.

Conference Sub-themes
The conference will have five sub-themes. Each sub-theme will be led by three co-convenors: one from the BAICE Executive Committee, one from CIE, and one from the wider BAICE community (an academic, doctoral scholar or practitioner from an external organisation or institution, or an independent researcher active in the field of international and comparative education). The sub-themes are:

• Just learning: teachers, curriculum, pedagogies and literacies
• Global education policy and the politics of governance
• Coloniality and education: gender, race and difference
• Education, conflict and displacement within and across borders
• Borderless theme

MORE ON THE SUB-THEMES

Call for Papers

We look forward to welcoming you to Sussex in September!