Resistance, Disobedience and Transformation: Exploring Possibilities for Learning In Conflict

Violent conflicts create radical and traumatic upheaval that radiates across social experiences and institutions. Education is often targeted, including through restrictive policy enactment, the exercise of state control and surveillance, or through direct assaults, precisely because of the societal significance educational institutions hold for the construction of national identity, notions of belonging and ideological formation.

Yet learning is not confined to formal education settings. In this session we aim to explore the diverse forms that learning may take and the varied roles those within it may play in potentially challenging authoritarian control, contesting violent hierarchies and/or working towards peace. Recognising conflict as contextual, multi-dimensional and differently experienced, we apply a broad understanding of conflict that takes in armed conflict, militarisation, political authoritarianism and state violence. Learning is similarly conceived of broadly, recognising the contributions of social movements, unions, students and teachers across formal and non-formal settings.

We welcome contributions from diverse settings which engage with the social context and transformative potential of learning in conflict. Attention might be given (but is not limited) to:

• varied forms of knowledge and learning, including elements of formal, non-formal or informal education, and engagement with diverse forms of knowledge-sharing;
• resistance to authoritarian policies and state capture of education, including higher education institutions and student movements, protests and solidarities;
• educative work that aims to support peace building, addressing legacies of conflict and/or bridging divides;
• the mobilisation of education as a form of civil disobedience or activism;
• theoretical engagement with sociologies of education, conflict and peace.