Stadtgespräch Metropolitan Perspektives #10

Wednesday, April 15, 2015, 7 pm

Strategies for Interim Spaces.
Pedagogizing Politics and Repoliticizing Pedagogy

Nora Sternfeld (Professor Curating and Mediating Art, Aalto University, Helsinki)

In German language.

The pedagogizing of politics is connected with slogans such as “lifelong learning” and “economizing education,” which are regarded as essential driving forces of neoliberalism. But isn’t pedagogy, as a discipline that uses analytical methods to develop concrete proposals for action, always a technology of power and simultaneously a strategy for liberation? From the perspective of the Brazilian pedagogue, liberation theologian, and theorist of education Paulo Freire, there is no “neutral” education: education is always political, either in the sense of a consolidation of existing relationships or with an eye to changing them. Freire could still assume that there could be something like a tactics within the system and a strategy for outside the system – with an eye to overcoming it. Today the question arises what this could mean within the logics of a globalized neoliberalism under conditions in which we can no longer assume there is an “outside”. Against this backdrop, Nora Sternfeld will address the possibilities for repoliticizing pedagogics today.

Nora Sternfeld is Professor for Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki and is active in various projects concerned with research and mediation at the intersection of education, art, and the critical production of knowledge. Other focuses of her work and publications are the theory and practice of exhibiting, contemporary art, the politics of history, and antiracism. In 2016 she will be curator of the Bergen Assembly together with the group freethought.