International Event – A Scholarly Debate

Student as Producer is to present at an event during the International Society for Studies into Teaching and Learning’s Conference in Liverpool on October 19th. The title of the event is ‘International Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Enquiry: A Scholarly Discussion’.

The event will be attended by other universities from around the world who are promoting connections between academic research and the undergraduate curriculum.

Each university will be presenting a poster on their work (see the poster from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) below: click on image to enlarge).

For a view of all of the posters, and for further information on the conference – see http://www.cur.org/pre-ISSOTL.html

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1940).

Student as Producer is based on a number of intellectual projects, including critical social theory. Walter Benjamin (1892 -1940) was a central figure among a group of critical social theorists writing in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. His article, Author as Producer (1934), is a key text for the development of Student as Producer

Author: Mike Neary