Psychosocial Transformations: The School, The Clinic, and The Archive

Conference Program

Dates: Thursday November 7^th – Friday November 8^th 2024
Venue: Private Dining Room, Executive Learning Centre (ground level), Schulich School of Business. 56 Fine Arts Road, York University

Schedule-at-a-glance:

Day One: Thursday, November 7

10:00-11:30am: Opening Panel: Provocations in Psychosocial Studies

“The call and response of our relation”: Childhood, Sonic Empires, Queer Resonance

Hannah Dyer and Casey Mecija

In offering a queer and psychoanalytically inflected engagement with the centrifugal dynamics of development, we consider childhood not necessarily as a becoming but as an elsewhere that can be felt in sound’s sensorial modes and vibrations. In doing so, we aim to activate a theoretical framework for sensing childhood’s resonances, even after the project of ‘growing up’ is deemed complete. Because sound can hold disavowed feelings, we highlight the non-indexicality of sonicity and position it as the elaboration of racial formations that are not inconsequential to the child’s ego formation. We consider some of the quiet sounds and minor sensations of childhood that defy racist diagnoses which seek to ruin the full potential of a child’s future. At times, this means we approach sounds as containers for what has been lost but not dissuaded by its lack of welcome. Our analysis is grounded in the work of artist Tarik Kiswanson, who helps us consider the endurance of childhood. 

Inconsolable Wounds: An Aesthetic-Educational Response to the ‘Cruel Obstacles’ of Environmental Breakdown

Sharon Todd

There is a necessary imperative in this time of mass extinctions, climate emergencies, and biodiversity loss for education to find a way to respond; but how does it find its way without either falling into utter despair or holding on to an impossible sense of hope? Confronting what Britzman refers to as ‘cruel obstacles’ that have become too much to bear – and bear witness to – requires a movement of thought and affect that breaks away from either a (re)turn to certitudes or a (re)animation of utopic visions as acts of consolation. Following Britzman, it is instead the space of inconsolability that can generate possibilities for something else to happen. It is a space where we touch and are touched by the world in ways that allow for the experiencing of the wounds of living while also co-creating new beginnings and healings. Both art and education move in this Britzmanian space, seeking not to offer definitive answers but forms of inquiry, compassion and interconnection that point to the psychosocial and environmental bonds through which we are entangled with human and more than human others. This presentation seeks to engage the audience in this space of inconsolability through an encounter that focuses both on word and image, juxtaposing artwork that is a response to our current environmental wounds alongside my own spoken prose.

The Psychic Terrain of Political Expression on University Campuses 

Eve Haque

Questions of free expression and academic freedom have always been a fraught site of contestation on university campuses. Although these questions have become more high stakes and publicly visible in the past year, they have always been at the heart of the core knowledge building and exchange function of universities. In recent years, the increasing profile of politically charged speech in and of the university has given rise to myriad forms of institutional codes of conduct, policies and guidelines and even state legislations as a mechanism to manage and control various forms of speech and expressive activity on campuses. In this paper, I want to explore the psychic terrain of these processes; specifically, what is at stake in the desire both for and against certain forms of expression particularly on the university campus site and beyond by various university actors, such as students, faculty, staff and administrators. These escalating concerns and controls around free speech and academic freedom on our university campuses erase what Jill Gentile (2024) identifies as the void of the “signifying gap” thereby threatening academic freedom and giving rise to the polarization and chilling of speech in the academy and beyond (np). Thus, these contestations are marked by contradictory desires and anxieties and their significance is claimed by the harms that they purport to name and contain. Ultimately, this past year has indicated that struggles around speech, academic freedom and other forms of expression on university campuses are not going away anytime soon and therefore require our attention.  

1:00-2:45: Lightning Presentations

“I do not know how to teach” 

David L. Clark 

I do not know how to teach. Part of teaching, the most important part, beyond all the talk of gaining competences and perfecting practices, is, I argue, not knowing how to teach. And it is important to shelter a place for that experience of not-knowing how to teach or even knowing what teaching is in every classroom in which I discover myself. Each educational relation calls for a radical openness to the insurgency of not knowing how to teach. My brief paper is inspired by Briztman: “What is left to think is the impossibility of our work, not so much from the place of its failure or the adequacy of technique but rather from within the areas of conflict, where our work is most incomplete, and where we are surprised by what we do not really know.” 

Public Memory of the Air India Bombings, Difficult Knowledge, and Mourning Play 

Angela Failler

An Angus Reid poll released in June 2023 suggests that most Canadians know very little or nothing about the 1985 Air India bombings, and that the event is fading from Canadians’ collective memory. My research relies on Britzman and Pitt’s concept of “difficult knowledge” to understand why the bombings have not been incorporated into the national imaginary despite being considered “Canada’s worst encounter with terrorism” by some public authorities. Through the lens of difficult knowledge, official gestures of commemoration can be seen as reaction-formations working to disassociate Canada from this and other state-implicated violences, contributing to public forgetting. I turn, then, to a creative counter-archive wherein artists – many of whom lost relatives in the bombings – use “mourning-play” (Bassin 1993) as a means of remembrance. Mourning play, I argue, both resists the foreclosures of official memory and opens alternate possibilities for connection and hope in the bombings’ ongoing wake. 

Difficult Knowledges of Contagious Diseases

Penelope Ironstone

Deborah Britzman’s work on “difficult knowledges” has been influential in thinking I have attempted to do alongside and as afterthought to and around a number of disease challenges since the 1990s. These have included HIV/AIDS, the subject of my dissertation, SARS 2003, H1N1 and H5N1 influenza, Ebola, and, more recently, COVID. In my work I have found myself returning to Britzman’s work in order to ask questions about the times, spaces, and subjectivities that are deployed in response to crisis, looking to what representational practices tell us about the “new editions of old conflicts” they act out and, at times, attempt to work through. I am particularly interested in resistances to the information of contagious disease. Resistances and refusals tell us a lot about the thoughts that thought cannot tolerate, as do constructions that aim to contain pandemic recognitions in a not me, not here, not now of disavowal.  

Reading the Relational in Education Governance

Lauren Jervis

The idea of an impossible profession affects us because it proposes a constitutive discontinuity, a lack the profession represses, negates, and projects into others. The impossible professions are a terrible remainder of what is most incomplete, arbitrary, and archaic in us and in the events of working with others. (Britzman, 2009, pp. 129-130)

Deborah Britzman’s reading of Sigmund Freud’s formulation of the impossible professions offers an unsettling frame through which to view the limitations and failures of three fields - education, governance, and medicine - that think very highly of themselves. In this presentation, I will offer a short meditation on the world of education governance that considers how the narcissism of policy-making that aims to fix problems in public education (and frequently fails to do so) is a symptom of the “constitutive discontinuity” to which Britzman refers in the quotation above. Focusing on the problem of authority within the professions of education and governance, I will suggest that relationality is both an ever-present threat to contemporary notions of professionalism that affect the world of education policy while also being the thing that makes the work of education, and its governance, meaningful. Reading the relational back into education governance means reading professionalism against itself, because “the impossible professions take pride in their altruism, or their neutrality, or their objectivity” (Britzman, 2009, p. 129). However, unearthing the humanity behind and within education policy provides an opportunity to imagine forms of governance that, through being more in touch with their conflicts and failures, are also more humane in their exercise of authority.

What Remains of a Song 

David Lewkowich

“To think about our theory of theory the best material is the most unbelievable” (Britzman, 2012, p. 44) 

“Anxiety anticipates that a great deal will be lost should something more be thought and brings, through phantasies of learning and teaching, the emotional logic of resistance to theory. This is our most incredible or unbelievable material” (Britzman, 2012, p. 44) 

Writing on the “the use of theory,” Britzman (2012) tours the facts and phantasies of learning as facts of life and “adventures with vulnerable meaning” (p. 49), requiring resistance and conflict to what we do not remember and cannot know. “To think about our theory of theory,” she notes, implying the values of indirection and the imaginative possibilities of literature, “the best material is the most unbelievable” (p. 44), and it is here that I will forge my false account of being affected by anxiety’s threat of thought. Following from literature's potential incredulity, I will reference Jean Genet’s (1988) dreamy account of experiencing the material world “decay” (p. 10) in an instant of uninvited social dissolve, to Ocean Vuong’s (2016) impossible entry into the mouth of a smoker, to my own experiences trembling along with vestiges of control in the classroom, which happens often, but never so strikingly as when I turn to my students and sing, with an unexpectedly unpretty voice. Thinking seriously about what is sweat as my classroom momentarily adopts the guise of “the steam room of affect” (Britzman, 2012, p. 50), I will leave on this terrible note of quivering song, emphasizing the courage and compassion I have often found in Britzman’s work.       

Returning to “Practice Makes Practice” 

Jun Lu

This presentation will revisit Professor Britzman’s initial publication, Practice Makes Practice (1991/2003), in order to examine the significance of the phrase “practice makes practice” within a clinical setting. As a trainee in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, I am exploring how to punctuate experience and make meaning from experience in two contexts: one involves working and talking with clients in the clinic room, while the other pertains to the whole process of learning how to be a therapist. Furthermore, I would like to examine the tension between knowing and not knowing in clinical work and explore its connection to the continuous process of “practice makes practice” rather than “practice makes perfect.” Given that the therapist cannot to know everything about the client and their journey in the therapy, the challenge lies in how to work on the in-betweenness of knowing/not knowing and sustain the vitality of the therapeutic relationship. 

The Laughing of the Britzman 

Susanne Luhmann 

I return to a memory of Professor Britzman laughing to herself while writing. Memory being an unreliable narrator, I cannot be certain whether this image results from a conversation I shared with Professor Britzman, an anecdote related to me by somebody else, or even is something I made up entirely. I consider what I call “the laughter of the Britzman” in relation to what she, in the 1996 article “On Becoming a ‘Little Sex Researcher,’” refers to as “pleasure without utility,” which is how she defines perversity (385). In the article, Britzman is concerned with the normalizing force of the three “impossible professions,” when she writes: 

“But in the insistence that pleasure be confined to utility, the work of the apparatuses of education, law, and medicine becomes preoccupied with normalizing sexuality … In normative developmental models of education, sex education becomes preoccupied with posing, as a problem, the specification of the proper object and with rewarding those subjects who desire the interdictions of morality and the state apparatus” (385). 

Britzman’s observations regarding the confinement of pleasure arguably issues an invitation to orient towards “pleasure without utility” and to ask what it might mean for progressive and feminist education. What might it mean, rather than defining proper objects and moral stances, to take pleasure in what is difficult, in that which makes us most vulnerable in our work, and to attach differently to and be interested in these difficulties? And maybe to laugh while thinking and writing? 

Notes from a Train Ride

Bianca Rus 

“Notes from a train ride” is a creative writing piece that presents some of Deborah Britzman's ideas as a journey through various "archaeological sites" of educational and psychoanalytic thought, emphasizing the transformative potential of engaging with otherness and uncertainty in education. It starts with a quick visit of the Acropolis, and goes on to excavate some of Freud’s archives on language and the unconscious, to meet Deborah’s high-school monsters. From there, the journey takes us swiftly to revisit some of Deborah’s reworking of Togashi’s, Caper’s, Derrida’s, and Arendt’s concepts, to arrive at our final destination, which promises a “warm pedagogy.” This imaginary itinerary hopes to highlight what is needed to take a second chance at education. 

Britzman The Sophist 

Carl Anders Säfström

“The difference between mere circumstances and lived experience is our capacity to bestow experience with meanings, be reflexive, and take action. Without awareness of the potential and given meanings and our own capacity to extend experience through interpretation and risk, without this active side, our capacity to participate in the shaping of experience is diminished” (p. 34) D. Britzman (1991). Practice Makes Practice. A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Suny Press. 

The quote is from the profoundly influential book Practice Makes Practice. While this book worked promptly and precisely and clarified what is at stake in teaching teachers, it also spoke directly to my theoretical interests. Still, I just realised, recently, how it also speaks fundamentally to a Sophist tradition of thought and, as such, touches upon a radically different educational practice than the Platonian-Aristotelian-Kantian orthodoxy dominating educational thought and practice today. What particularly signals this in the quote, and which extends beyond the ‘pragmatist’ stance, is the focus on meaning. For Gorgias and Lacan, all speech is meaningful in ‘lived experience’.  I will give a personal yet informed reading of Britzman, the Sophist. 

The Most Important Something: Unconscious Equations of Literacy 

Lorin Schwarz

“We write and read in order to surprise ourselves, and we think in order to love.” 

-Deborah Brizman 

(After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning, p. 147) 

There’s an interesting line in Adam Phillips’ introduction to The Penguin Freud Reader. Freud, Phillips insists, “makes us wonder what we may be doing when we are reading, what the desire to read is a desire for” (vii).  Like Freud at his best, and theory at its best, and reading itself (even when it’s not at its best), Phillips’ words haunt, cajole and tease; they pose an unanswerable question; they make us wonder about our many readings –and how, for those of us who consider our best work to be teaching that involves reading, we might best inspire and live with and bring to classroom and curriculum the enigmatic desire at the heart of our project. In my presentation, I will consider Britzman’s quotation as a response to Phillips’ statement. Like so much in her writing, this deceptively simply sentence raises questions about the very nature of affect, the definitions and margins of subjectivity, how language creates and sustains a self, and how we bring what is intensely private to very public educational spaces and somehow survive. What is the role of the unconscious in that survival? Can psychoanalytic thinking take its readers somewhere more sufficient than mere survival? 

Remembering and “Working Through” Monsters

Hannah Spector

This lightning presentation will reflect on memories from the first course I took as a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia in 2009. The course was called Freud and education and was taught by visiting professor Deborah Britzman. I will highlight some heartfelt, humorous moments I shared with Deborah at this time while drawing attention to her chapter on “Monsters in Literature” (Britzman, 2006) from A Novel Education. The overarching thematic of this presentation will address remembering and “working through” (Freud, 1914) monsters. It will reference personal communication with Deborah regarding my unfortunate interest in studying human monsters, which is being taken up today in research concerning the human-caused sixth mass extinction (Spector, 2023). Studying “scary creatures” (Britzman, 2006, p. 113) has also recently brought me back to – after a long hiatus away from – Freud, in general, and the death drive, in particular.

What’s a consultant to ‘do’? 

Barbara Williams

For the past several decades I have worked with and consulted to international social justice, feminist and climate justice organizations and networks from a psychoanalytic perspective.  I agree, as Britzman (2006) contends, that there is a “common objection to psychoanalytic views on understanding social destruction” - certainly in this sector: “compared to doing something” (bolded by me) about poverty, misogyny, climate degradation, and violence (to name a few), for many of those with whom I work there is an anxious disinclination toward thinking.  It is almost impossible for us “to think” that thinking is an important kind of doing, to reconsider the grounds of our thinking, nor to think within “the complex processes of psychical life to recognize its capacity for suffering and repair”.  Guided by an attention to unconscious processes, an analytic interest informed by feminism and social justice aspirations, and attentive to this tension, I ask, what’s a consultant to ‘do’?

3:00-4:15pm: Keynote: When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Education (Introduced by Jonathan Silin)

Deborah Britzman

Missing in discussions of education dedicated to agency, creativity, and transformation is a paradox of subject formation: One may know something of the past but be without care for the contingencies of vulnerability and dependency that tie current breakdowns of civic life to what has already happened and to what is happening in the transference. Missing is a theory of learning that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2011) described as "the middle ranges of agency" that emerge from scenes of tolerating frustration, depressive anxiety, and uncertainty. This paper explores questions that reside in the paradox of subject formation: What is it to write with an awareness of the histories of emotional life and transfer this interest into a study of history's return? And, What kind of attitudes are involved for a psychoanalytic pedagogy dedicated to humane learning?

Biography: Professor Britzman is a Distinguished Research Professor and a leading scholar in psychosocial studies. They are an internationally recognized scholar and the author of over 10 monographs that examine intersections between psychoanalysis, education, and history. With literally thousands of citations, Britzman's work is foundational to psychosocial studies in Canada and around the world. Their landmark conceptualizations - including difficult knowledge, queer pedagogy, and novel education - open new ways to think about challenges of teaching and learning, the ethics of intersubjective life, and social and political breakdown and repair.

Day Two: Friday November 8

10:00-11:30am: Panel 1: Psychosocial Studies in Education

Camp Britz

Janet L. Miller and Patti Lather 

This presentation combines the uses and perhaps abuses we have each made of Britzman's work in our work, Janet's in curriculum theory and Patti's in feminist methodology. Over something like thirty years, across various conferences and agendas, we have both situated our work not so much in psychoanalysis as in Britzmanology or what might be called "A Psychoanalysis We Can Bear to Learn From." Our methodology was to go over indices of where Britzman shows up in our work and then to have a wine dinner to organize ourselves. Our goal is to combine levity and serious acknowledgement of the weight of Deborah's work in ours, while telling some stories from a walk down memory lane.

The Digital Commonplace Book: Reframing Reading as a Practice of Implication 

Paola Bohórquez 

This presentation examines the affordances of the Commonplace Book as a pedagogical protocol in the third-year Digital Humanities seminar, Assembling Relations between Self and Text: The Digital Commonplace Book. Defined as an annotated and curated collection of quotations and passages transcribed from miscellaneous texts, the Commonplace Book is simultaneously a thinking space where readers select, copy, amalgamate, and annotate texts; a method of invention and discovery through finding and creating an interconnected web of knowledge and ideas; and a habit of active, deep, and close reading. I discuss the potential of an expanded understanding of citational practices as a paradoxical site of convergence of repetition –through copy and transcription—and invention –the assembling together of read materials in a new amalgamated form— to constitute an autopoietic practice. I conclude with a reflection on the centrality of repetition as inherently transformative in Commonplacing practices.

Learning from Loss: Pedagogies of Art, Creativity, and Transformation

Karyn Sandlos

In the Covid-19 pandemic context, a conversation about learning loss is concerned with how best to help students catch up on missed time in school. The pandemic has reinvigorated educational debates about the most efficient and engaging ways for teachers to teach what students need to learn. At the same time, educators are asked to be responsive to student anxiety, disconnection, and disengagement. This, too, is a loss, one that can’t be overcome by innovative ways of delivering curricular content. We are all learning how to re-engage with learning. 

The paper will explore what happens when artistic responses to loss are brought to thinking about classroom life. What would it mean to reconceptualize learning loss through creative practices? How do aesthetic forms create conditions for symbolization and mourning? Case studies in artistic creativity and learning inhibition will suggest ways to think about loss as a necessary condition of our interiority and capacity for transformation.           

12:30-2:00: Panel 2: Psychosocial Studies in the Clinic

The Practice of Psychiatry: Human Encounters in the Field of Vulnerability 

Sheila Harms 

This presentation asks, “What does an education in psychiatry do to a psychiatrist?” and reflects on crucial problems that materialized for me when the “know how” in the custodianship of care did not translate into into a much needed “show how.” This nidus of professional confusion creates the context for my inquiry into the complex dilemmas of medical education, and specifically as it pertains to my practice as a psychiatrist. In my discussion, affect is a constant theme that predictably acts to break open educational encounters with colleagues, patients, and those learning a profession of caring. I  lean heavily on psychoanalytic orientations to arrive at the fault lines of education where pretending becomes practice, difficult knowledge runs amuck, and the uncertainties, including the frailty of my own self as a resource for the mind, often constitute the very educational myths I need to tackle as obstacles to practice. 

Bon Travail: Gender and Madness at the Far End of the Developmental Arc 

Susan Searls Giroux

This paper explores what Deborah Britzman has termed “the gendered afterlife of our fact of dependency” in the context of some reflections on a number of self-identified female Clients who report anxiety in approaching the end of their working lives. Theories of development—like histories of development—track young women’s movement into adulthood. I will explore what Britzman has called “vulnerability to disquieting imagination” among women who navigate the very apex of their careers and the anticipated movement into retirement, into the prospects, indeed the dread, of having to live out the materiality of their dependencies. Is it useful to consider career aspiration and achievement as a form of “maiming” as Winnicott uses the term, a consequence of a certain ruthlessness? What I am calling “bon travail” is always in tension with the frustrations and fears of being a “bad breast.” How does one bare the loss of work? 

Gender in Deep Time

Oren Gozlan

In this paper, I want to move to an understanding of different situations of transitions that are grounded in gender but that suggest a wider world of experience with the claim that understanding the self is a complicated matter; and while this in itself is obvious to everyone, its complexity still comes as a surprise because of the unconscious.  I turn to three memoirs of transitioning that suggest a wider world of experience: physicality (age, illness), generation, sexuality and relationality. In unpacking each narrative as unique figurations of transitioning, I show how each gives us a foothold into a new way of imagining gender. I argue that by reading memoirs the analyst enters a world that is theirs and not theirs. It is a way into an imaginative realm that allows us entrance into conflicts, questions, and representations of being in the world.

2:15-3:45pm: Panel 3: Psychosocial Studies in the Archive

“After-Education” in Lonely Times of Species Loss 

Claudia Eppert

This presentation considers grammar, symptoms, and geographies of lonelinessin the context of inchoate and incomprehensible histories of species loss in Canada. It takes up Britzman’s (2003) discussion of the “loneliness of learning from absence and erasure” (p. 193) and her diphasic conceptualization of “after-education.” Whereas re-education (the mistranslation of Freud’s Nacherziehung) constitutes a confining indoctrination, unable to account for how we unconsciously deploy our pasts to engage histories yet-to-be, Britzman describes after education as generatively referring us back “to an original flaw made from education” and addressing us to alternate constructions, to the “work yet to be accomplished” (p. 4). Anchored by Britzman’s insights, I explore species loneliness, and introduce a “curriculum of extinction” (Eppert, 2024) that poses psychoanalytic questions of remembrance, literary engagement, self/other relations, time’s vicissitudes, and the ongoing, thoughtful labour “of having to make education from experiences never meant to be educative” (Britzman, 2003, p. 150).

“The things left behind”: Atomic Archives and Oppenheimer Affects  

Sara Matthews

Where is the atomic, now? And how can the archive orient us to its persistent trace? This paper considers the reception of atomic history as an “emotional situation” (Britzman 2024) made from a strange mixture of timelines of transference understandings. Between the fathers of atomic science and the daughters of uranium, the Doomsday Clock keeps time, tracing atomic threat as a psychic sedimentation of nation building in late modern warfare. But the atomic is sedimented elsewhere too – in particles of sand, in human and animal gene codes, on the wind and in the deep sea. Drawing on recent field work at White Sands Missile Range and Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, I discuss an interpretive method for apprehending “the things left behind” (Britzman 2024) from the site of the Trinity atomic bomb test and its discarded infrastructures.  

A Letter to Deborah  

Sharon Sliwinski 

Deborah! I’ve known you almost half my life. And now I am the age that you were when we met all those years ago. You often come out of a page I am reading. And sometimes out of a page I’m trying to write. I have been meaning to send you a letter, which is ridiculously late now. Truth be told, I have been trying to write to you for a long time, ever since you asked that provocative question all those years ago: “how does the dream-work become a paradigm for knowledge?” (Britzman 2003: 52). You must forgive my tardy reply. The question sent me on many detours—like all good questions do—but here, finally, is my reply, my attempt to answer how dreaming—and especially the dream’s work—can be understood as a crucial source of knowledge and a medium for generating new worlds and new ways of living.  

4:00-5:00pm: Between the Past and the Future of Psychosocial Studies: A Spotlight Café

A conversation with Angela Facundo, Dina Georgis, and Rinaldo Walcott, moderated by Sara Matthews

5:00-5:15pm: Closing remarks

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Biographies

Paola Bohórquez is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and Director of the Academic Writing Centre at Woodsworth College (University of Toronto). Her current pedagogical research centers reading as a technology of rhetorical invention and self-transformation. She is the co-editor, with Verónica Garibotto, of the collection Psychoanalysis as Social and Political Discourse in Latin America and the Caribbean (Routledge, 2022). 

David L. Clark is Professor in the Department of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where he is also Associate Member of the Department of Health, Aging and Society, and a member of the Council of Instructors of the Arts & Science Program. Recent publications include “Abolish the University” and “‘Can the University Stand for Peace?’”, both published in The New Centennial Review.

Hannah Dyer is an Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. She is a cultural theorist of childhood with concentration in art/aesthetics, critical theory, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalysis.  

Claudia Eppert is professor of Curriculum Studies and English Language Arts Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta. Her research focuses on complexities of historical, contemplative, and ecological witnessing through literature and the arts. For information on presentations and publications, see her University of Alberta page: https://apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/eppert

Angela Facundo is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Queen’s University and a registered psychotherapist in private practice in Toronto. Her book, Oscillations of Literary Theory: The Paranoid Imperative and Queer Reparative (2016), is part of the SUNY book series, Transforming Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Studies in Education. 

Angela Failler is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory at UWinnipeg where she directs the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies. She leads a long-term study on public memory of the 1985 Air India bombings and is a founding member of Thinking Through the Museum. 

Dina Georgis is an Associate Professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work is situated in the fields of postcolonial and sexuality studies and psychoanalysis. Her new book, provisionally titled, “Making Use of Objects: Play and Radical Witnessing of War” explores what it means to ethically witness others as engaged subjects composing themselves and their surrounding worlds in large and small acts of play. 

Susan Searls Giroux is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She is the author of several books including Sites of Race: Conversations with Susan Searls Giroux, coauthored with David Theo Goldberg (Polity, 2014) and Between Race and Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility, and the University to Come (Stanford University Press, 2010). Upon completing a decade of service in senior university administration, she became a licensed psychotherapist. These shifts in her own career have informed her recent explorations in gender, workplace cultures, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and emotion. 

Oren Gozlan is a psychoanalyst in Toronto. He is a member of the Committee for Gender and Sexuality of the IPA.  His book ‘Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning” won the American Academy & Board of Psychoanalysis annual book prize (2015). He is the winner of the Symonds Prize (2016). His edited collection titled: “Critical Debates in Transsexual Studies: In Transition” was a runner-up for the 2019 Gradiva Award. He also won the 2022 Ralph Roughton Award and the 2023 Miguel Prados Prize. 

Eve Haque is the York Research Chair in Linguistic Diversity and Community Vitality at York University (Canada). She is also co-editor for the TOPIA: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching interests include multiculturalism, white settler colonialism and language policy, with a focus on the regulation and representation of racialized im/migrants in white settler societies. Her current research project is centred on academic freedom, free expression and the harms of language. She has published widely on these topics and is also the author of Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada published with University of Toronto Press.

Sheila Harms is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in Education in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. Dr. Harms practices as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at McMaster Children's Hospital with a focus on general outpatient care. Their research focuses on the embodied qualities of therapeutic practice as experienced and understood by therapists working across a range of complex traumas. 

Penelope Ironstone is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Cultural Analysis & Social Theory at Laurier. Recent publications in the European Journal of Social Theory and Canadian Journal of Communication examine the emergence of the human microbiome in popular science discourse. She co-edited two special issues on COVID for Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. 

Lauren Jervis is an education researcher and public policy advisor. She earned her PhD in Education from York University. From 2021-2023, she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Western University’s Faculty of Education. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research focus on policy controversies and parent advocacy in Canadian education systems.

Patti Lather is Professor Emerita in Education at Ohio State University where she taught qualitative research and feminist methodology, 1988-2014. She is the author of five books, the most recent (Post)Critical Methodologies, 2017. She is a 2009 inductee of the AERA Fellows and a 2010 recipient of the AERA Division B Lifetime Achievement Award.  

David Lewkowich is an Associate Professor of literary education at the University of Alberta and author of The Figure of The Teacher in Comics: A Psychoanalytic Study of Immaterial and Fragmented Education (Palgrave, 2024).  

Jun Lu earned a Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought from York University and is currently undergoing training to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. 

Susanne Luhmann is Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She grapples with questions of complicity and implication in histories and structures of violence in areas including cultural memory; sexuality studies; intersectional gender studies and research; and feminist and queer pedagogies. Work in progress includes a monograph Domesticating the Nazi Past: Gender and Generation in Recent German Cultural Memory. 

Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor at York University in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. Her current research theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. 

Sara Matthews is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Situated in the field of critical security studies, her projects explore the relations between visual culture and martial politics as well as how communities craft creative modes of relationality and survival in response to practices of state securitization.

Janet L. Miller, Professor Emerita, Teachers College, Columbia University & Faculty-At-Large, Columbia University.  Founding Managing Editor, JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. AERA “Fellow”; The Curriculum & Pedagogy Project’s “Lifetime Impact Award,”; AERA Division B-Curriculum Studies “Lifetime Achievement Award”.  Former Vice-President, AERA Division B; and Former President, American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. 

Bianca Rus is an educator. She teaches French to elementary students and feminist theory to university students (at Wilfrid Laurier University). Her work focuses on Julia Kristeva’s novels and theories, notably on her concepts of singularity and human dignity. 

Carl Anders Säfström, Professor of Educational Research, Director Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy (CPEP), Maynooth University, Ireland. His two latest books are: Education for Everyday life. A Sophistical Practice of Teaching, Springer, 2023, and co-edited: The New Publicness of Education.  Democratic Possibilities after the Critique of Neo-liberalism, Routledge 2023.

Karyn Sandlos is Associate Professor of Art and founding head of the Art Education program at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research explores the role of interiority in educational and aesthetic experience and the pedagogical work of dream life. A recent graduate of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, Sandlos maintains a small clinical practice.  

Lorin Schwarz has been teaching for three decades (every grade except kindergarten!) and is an assistant professor at York University’s Faculty of Education. He is an affiliate member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society where he studied in the FPP and Advanced Training programs. Research interests include literature, poetry and psychoanalysis. 

Jonathan Silin is a Fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto. Formerly a member of the Bank Street College Graduate Faculty, he is the author/editor of 4 books including Early Childhood, Aging and the Life Cycle: Mapping Common Ground. His occasional essays have appeared in the NYTimes, Tablet and the Chronicle of Higher Education. More about Jonathan: www.JonathanSilin.com.

Sharon Sliwinski is Professor of Information & Media Studies at Western University and creator of The Museum of Dreams. She has written extensively on photography, human rights, and the social imaginary. Her latest book, An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed (MIT Press), will be published in 2025. 

Hannah Spector is Affiliate Scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She has held positions as Associate Professor at Penn State and Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. Recent publications include In Search of Responsibility as Education and Curriculum Studies in the Time of the Anthropocene. Spector is currently co-editing the multinational, multidisciplinary Elgar Companion to Hannah Arendt.

Sharon Todd is Professor of Education and member of the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland. She has published widely in the areas of embodiment, social justice and ethics in education and is currently engaged in making connections between the climate emergency, art practice, and political aesthetics in education. She is author of The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Senses (SUNY, 2023), Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism (Paradigm, 2009), and Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis and Ethical Possibilities in Education (SUNY, 2003).  

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Carl V. Granger Chair of Africana and American Studies in the Department of Africana and American Studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY. Rinaldo is the chair of department. 

Barbara Williams EdD, Director of Bureau Kensington, a psychoanalytically oriented organizational consulting practice; Guest, Toronto Psychoanalytic Society; Member, International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations & the Organization for Promoting Understanding of Organizations; Accredited Consultant, AK Rice Institute; Advisory Editor, Journal of Organizational & Social Dynamics; Guest Editor, Socioanalysis.

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