- About
- Conveners
- Programme 2015-16
About
‘We are only free when we are connected to others’ (Hannah Arendt)
What is not to like about a taco van, bought by wealthy parishioners, parked on a church lawn, staffed by undocumented immigrants, serving food to street dwellers – unless of course you work for immigration and have no jurisdiction to exercise your power on that property. This is the subversive good.
In this interdisciplinary seminar series we theoretically, aesthetically, methodologically and practically explore what happens when we forge spaces of encounter. We take as a starting point Kearney and Taylor’s 'sacrificial stranger' – persons or groups that are deemed to threaten social order, represent spectacles of unacceptability and so are forced to exist outside of legitimate citizenship. In juxtaposition to such understandings of ‘otherness’ we explore the ‘everyday ethics’ (Banner) of prioritizing connectedness within broader questions about borders, security, belonging, faith, personhood, education and justice.
We engage with these themes by considering institutional and disciplinary assumptions, motivations, enablers and constraints upon the capacity of ‘encounter’ to shift or alter understandings of selfhood, belonging, and what it means to an active member of the public sphere.
Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Conveners
Conveners
Dr Ruth Armstrong (Institute of Criminology)
Dr Jo-Anne Dillabough (Faculty of Education)
Dr Michelle Ellefson (Faculty of Education)
Dr Amy Ludlow (Faculty of Law)
Ruth Armstrong is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Criminology and a College Research Associate at St John’s College. Together with Amy Ludlow she is co-founder and convenor of ‘Learning Together’, an innovative educational partnership between the University of Cambridge, Institute of Criminology and Her Majesty’s Prisons. Her research interests include how people rebuild their lives after being convicted of a criminal offence, the role of mentors and faith communities in this process and the nature and experience of trust in prison and post-release.
Jo-Anne Dillabough is Reader in the Sociology of Youth and Global Cultures (Education), University of Cambridge, and Chair and Convener of Education, Equality and Development. Her interest in this CRASSH project stems from recent research she has conducted on links between youth, surveillance and securitization pertaining to disadvantaged youth who are targeted by police or security officials in impoverished urban communities in South Africa and the UK. This work suggests that the heightened surveillance of young people often undermines their successful engagement with education and places constraints on the development of fundamental capabilities for living a ‘crime’ free existence. Drawing primarily on the work of Hannah Arendt, she is therefore interested in understanding how policing practices and surveillance undermine young people’s potential for positive collective unity with others and their access to fundamental human rights.
Michelle Ellefson is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology & Education and a Bye-Fellow at Gonville & Caius College. Her research interests are in cognition, neuroscience, child development, and education, integrating them into a multi-disciplinary research programme aimed at improving math and science education. Her current research projects focus on the role of higher order cognitive skills in school learning. These skills seem important beyond just school learning – but also childhood behaviour and risk for juvenile or adult incarceration. From the perspective of this project, she’s interested in how supporting the development of these skills in childhood could prevent imprisonment as well as considering ways that providing opportunities to improve these skills in the prison population might improve later outcomes and reduce recidivism.
Amy Ludlow is a College Teaching Officer and Fellow in Law at Gonville and Caius and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Law. Together with Ruth Armstrong she is co-founder and convenor of ‘Learning Together’, an innovative educational partnership between the University of Cambridge, Institute of Criminology and Her Majesty’s Prisons. Her research interests include the procurement and privatisation of public services, the enforcement of labour rights by migrant workers and experiences and impacts of prison environments on staff and prisoners.
Faculty Advisors
Dr Caroline Lanskey (Affiliated Lecturer, Institute of Criminology)
Professor Alison Liebling (Institute of Criminology)
Nicola Padfield (Faculty of Law)
Dr Tatiana Thieme (Department of Geography)
Programme 2015-16
| The Subversive Good |
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Curating Kinship: Forging Spaces of Learning and Encounter 13 Oct 2015 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Rowan Williams (Divinity), Tom Hawker (Criminology), Jasmine Bourne (Music), Matthew Russell (Project CURATE) – The Subversive Good |
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Learning Together: Education that is … 27 Oct 2015 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Jacob Dunne (Nottingham Trent), Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow (Cambridge)- The Subversive Good |
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Free me: Education as the Practice of Freedom 10 Nov 2015 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Baz Dreisinger (CUNY), Karen Graham (Educational Sociology), Ingrid Obsuth (Criminology)-The Subversive Good |
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Not Shut Up: Creating Relational Spaces for Dialogue and … 24 Nov 2015 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building David Newman (Political Geography), Patrick McKearney (Anthropology/Divinity), Marek Kazmierski (Not Shut Up)-The Subversive Good |
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Person-Centred Social Science – Who is the Last Poet Standing? 19 Jan 2016 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Alison Liebling and Judith Gardom (Cambridge) – The Subversive Good |
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Violence, Surveillance and Policing 2 Feb 2016 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Elena Van Der Spuy and Julie Berg (South Africa), Jo Anne Dillabough (Education)-The Subversive Good |
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Legal Harms and the New Politics of Resistance 16 Feb 2016 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Eva Nanopoulos, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Amy Nivette, Ryan Williams (Cambridge)-The Subversive Good |
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Head Space, Physical Place and Social Transformation. 1 Mar 2016 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Michelle Ellefson, Tatiana Thieme, Ben Crewe (Cambridge)-The Subversive Good |
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Humanising and Democratising Social Spaces and Institutions. 26 Apr 2016 12:30pm - 2:00pm, Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building Caroline Lanskey and Bethany Schmidt (Cambridge), Rev Paul Tyler (Chaplain of HMP Frankland)-The Subversive Good |
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Learning Together: Prison and University Partnership 12 May 2016 - 13 May 2016 All day, Day 1: HMP Grendon and Day 2: Old Divinity School, St John’s College, Cambridge Conference- The Suvbersive Good |
