“Toward Re-imagining Education and Cultural Work in Precarious Times”
A symposium in celebration of James Baldwin’s Centenary
October 23, 2024 | 12:00 – 5:00pm
519 Kaneff Tower, York University – Keele Campus
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
— James Baldwin
On occasion of his centenary year, this Faculty of Education symposium celebrates the transformative African American writer and public intellectual James Arthur Baldwin, (August 2, 1924—August 2, 2024). We gather faculty members and scholars to engage in conversations to highlight Baldwin’s prodigious 40-year literary and political life, and to advance study about how his work speaks to us today. Provoked by select readings from Baldwin’s fiction and essays, panelists will offer diverse perspectives toward re-imagining education and cultural practice in our contemporary moment of national, transnational, and planetary crisis.
Schedule
| 12:00 | Lunch Introduction with Opening Remarks by Dr. Warren Crichlow |
| 12:30 | James Baldwin: On Educational Thought and Compassion Moderator: Atreyu Lewis (York) Panelists: Dr. Luis Miron (Holy Cross, New Orleans; Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Dr. Aparna Mishra Tarc (York), Dr. Molade Osibodu (York), Dr. Mario Di Paolantonio (York) |
| 2:15 | Baldwin in the Archives with Jennifer Grant (York) |
| 2:45 | James Baldwin: On Representation and Cultural Practice Moderator: Dr. Pablo Idahosa (York) Panelists: Dr. Daniel Yon (York), Felicia Mings (York), Dr. Paul Lawrie (York), Dr. Jumoke Verissimo (Toronto Metropolitan) |
| 4:15 | Closing Remarks and Engagement |
Panel #1 – James Baldwin: On Educational Thought and Compassion
Atreyu Lewis (they/he) is an Anishnaabe Ojibwe Racialized Master of Education Student at York University, public speaker, workshop facilitator and community worker based in Toronto. Atreyu is the project lead and founder of the organization Rising from our Roots, a youth led organization that prioritizes redistributing resources and providing safe spaces for youth mobilization. Lewis’s work focuses on Indigenous knowledge reclamation, intersectionality studies, anti-oppressive frameworks, Canadian history exploration and building grassroots momentum.
Dr. Luis Miron is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Holy Cross, New Orleans and Professor (Emeritus) of Social Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Miron has served as Dean of Social Sciences at Loyola University (New Orleans), Director of Chicano-Latino Studies, and Chair of the Department of Education at UC Irvine. An immigrant of Guatemala and “native” of New Orleans, Dr. Miron has lived on an off in the city, advocating, and at times activating, for racial and social justice on behalf of, and in collaboration with, the Black community in the city. Dr. Miron is most recently co-author of Resisting Racism and Promoting Equity Through Community-engaged social Action: Challenging Big Lies (Routledge, 2023).
Dr. Molade Osibodu is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at York University located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Osibodu’s research critically examines the experiences of Black youth in mathematics education with specific focus on examining ways to decolonize mathematics education for liberatory futures. Engaging with social justice issues, and exploring African Indigenous mathematics practices, Dr. Osibodu’s work is supported theoretically by decolonial theory, critical theories of race, and Black geographies. Her most recent publications include “Racialization through Coloniality in Mathematics Curricula: Problematizing the Cambridge Assessment International Examination in Sub-Saharan Africa” (2024); “Challenging ‘dem European teachings in my African school’: Burna Boy’s music as resistance (2023); and (co-author) “A participatory turn in mathematics education: Tensions and possibilities” (2023).
Dr. Aparna Mishra Tarc is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education and former Director of the Graduate Program in Education. Her work examines the impact of literacies and literary histories on subject and social formation. Author of two books, Literary of the Other: Re-narrating Humanity (SUNY 2015); and Pedagogy in the novels of J.M. Coetzee: The Affect of Literature (Routledge 2020), Dr. Mishra Tarc’s scholarly interests include philosophy of language, education and the humanities, race, ethnicity, diaspora and personhood, literacy & literature, teacher education, equity & social justice, adolescent and children’s literature. Dr. Mishra Tarc’s current research project engages children’s “knowledge”: expression, dreamwork, lyrical lives and testimony as a profound and compelling form of social and political thought.
Dr. Mario Di Paolantonio is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University where his research and teaching spans the fields of philosophy of education, social and political thought, cultural memory and the arts. Dr. Di Paolantonio is an International Research Associate at the Centro de Estudios en Pedagogías Contemporáneas and the Escuela de Humanidades at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has published widely and in various fields, including in philosophy of education, curriculum theorizing, political theory, social-legal studies, memory studies, and cultural practices and the arts. In addition to his recently published book Education and Democracy at the End: The Crises of Sense (Springer, 2024), his recent articles appear in such journals as Social & Legal Studies, Praxis Educativa, The Journal of Philosophy of Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and The Philosophy of Education Yearbook. Dr. Di Paolantonio is current President of the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society (CPES).
Baldwin in the Archives | YorkU Libraries
Jennifer Grant is an archivist at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, part of York University Libraries. In this role, Grant works collaboratively in a small team to manage the university’s private and institutional archival records, both digital and analog. Grant previously worked as an assistant archivist in the Corporate Records and Archives department of the Law Society of Ontario and is also an alumna of York’s Graduate Program in English. Jennifer’s current research is focused on labour issues in academic archives.
Panel #2 – James Baldwin: On Representation and Cultural Practice
Dr. Pablo Idahosa is a Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at York University. He is an internationally recognized specialist in African Studies. Dr. Idahosa’s publications, include The Populist Dimension of African Political Thought: Essays in Reconstruction and Retrieval (Africa World Press, 2004); and Development’s Displacements: Ecologies, Economies and Cultures at Risk (UBC Press, 2006). Dr. Idahosa’s research interests include, but are not limited to, the relationship between development and modernity in Africa, the relationship between development and cultural production in Africa, ethnicity and displacement in the Niger Delta, and the politics of ethnicity, globalization and development. He has previously served as the Coordinator of the African Studies Program at York University and is currently the Head of Founder’s College.
Dr. Daniel Yon is Associate Professor (Emeritus) at York University. He is jointly appointed to both the Faculty of Education and the Department of Anthropology and is a former Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology. He is also an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town. Dr. Yon was born on the Island of St Helena where, after studying in the UK, he taught history and was a founding member of the island’s Heritage Society. Dr. Yon worked in post-independent Zimbabwe, first as Head of History in a high school in the sprawling suburb of Chitungwiza (Harare), and then as lecturer and writer for the Curriculum Development Unit. His research and teaching interests include school ethnography, anthropology of race and racism, diasporas and cosmopolitism’s, anthropology and film. He is the author of Elusive Culture (SUNY 2000), an ethnography of youth, schooling and identity in ‘global’ times. His two films, One Hundred Men and Sathima’s Windsong come out of larger on-going project on the making of the South Atlantic World. Dr. Yon’s most recent work focuses on aesthetics and the apartheid archives.
Felicia Mings is a curator at The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of York University (TGG). Mings focuses on interpreting and presenting modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on art from Africa, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. Mings’ recent curatorial projects include Dele Adeyemo’s digital art commission, From Longhouse to Highrise: The Course of Empire (2023), and the exhibitions: Meleko Mokgosi: Imaging Imaginations (2023)—short-listed for the Galleries of Ontario GOG Award; Malangatana: Mozambique Modern (2020); and The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019), including co-editorship of the exhibition catalogue (The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press, 2020). Mings holds a Master of Arts in visual and critical studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts from University of Toronto and Sheridan College.
Dr. Paul Lawrie is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at York University. He is a historian of Afro-America whose research examines the intersections of race, labor, disability, urbanism, and time in modern America. He is the author of Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (NYU Press, 2016), which details how evolutionary science and industrial management crafted taxonomies of racial labor fitness in early 20th century America. His article, “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction,” won the 2014 Ernest Redekop prize for Best Article in the Canadian Review of American Studies. Dr. Lawrie was also a contributor (“Race, Work and Disability in Progressive Era America”) to the Oxford Disability Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2018), winner of the 2021 George Rosen Book prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine. His current SSHRC funded project, The Color of Hours: Race, Time and the Making of Urban America traces how time – as both lived experience and a category of analysis- mediated racial difference and identity in the American city from the factory floor to local watchmaking industries to the city streets.
Dr. Jumoke Verissimo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr Verissimo is a Nigerian writer and the author of two poetry collections and the critically acclaimed novel, A Small Silence (Cassava Republic), which was nominated for the Ondaatje Prize and won the Aidoo-Synder Book Prize in 2020. Dr. Verissimo has also published a children’s book (Aduke and the Moon’s Hidden Secret—also translated into Yoruba), and poems that are widely anthologized in several languages. Dr. Verissimo’s creative writing has received honours from the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award (shortlist), RSL Ondaatje Prize (shortlist), and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize (winner) among several others. Dr. Verissimo’s scholarship extends to African literary criticism and literature, memory studies, traumatic affect and research creation. She teaches and researches in the areas of creative writing (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction).
Opening and Closing Remarks
Dr. Warren Crichlow is an Associate Professor (Emeritus) at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is most recently a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020), and Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W. G. Sebald: Unsettling Complacency, Reconfiguring Subjectivity (Routledge, 2022). His Prodigious Presence: After the Door of No Return appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies: Special Issue on Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return at 20. His writing on film and moving-image installation includes Baldwin’s Rendezvous with the Twenty-first Century: I am Not Your Negro in Film Quarterly (2017) and (with Kass Banning) A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass, and Lessons of the Hour in Film Quarterly (2020). He is a Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
This event is co-sponsored by the Office of the Associate Dean in the Faculty of Education, Graduate Program in Education: Language, Culture and Teaching, Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University.
Part of the Pondering Pedagogy Series, organized by the Office of the Associate Dean, Academic Programs, in the Faculty of Education.