New Disciplinary Perspectives on Education

«In a world where environmental challenges, education and activism converge, this is an important addition to the field of art and early childhood education. It identifies a post qualitative research approach and provides an ethical alternative to the difficult and urgent challenges facing future artist educators and researchers in Ireland today.»
(Dr Dervil Jordan, Emeritus Professor of Education, NCAD)
«This thought-provoking book is an essential read. Lucy’s aesthetic lens offers a fresh perspective for early years professionals’ as it reveals the infinite richness of children’s learning with materials. It is full of AHA moments on the artfulness of everyday moments, you will think differently about the material world.»
(Mary Skillington, Lecturer, Atlantic Technical University, Ireland)
This work suggests that art has more to offer education than diverting activities grounded by ideas of human exceptionalism. Posthuman perspectives of everyday playful activity in Early Childhood Education and Care, can offer alternative ways of seeing and understanding nature/culture entanglements. Tuning in to young children’s play with materials through a posthuman theoretical lens, can orientate adults’ attention toward the innate artfulness of young children’s everyday moments of learning and growth. This perspective reveals how such moments of intensity and learning always occur in complex relation with diverse others, human and non-human, natural and technological, living and non-living. This emphasises the undeniably rich, yet easily overlooked, relationship with the material and social complexities of the world, upon which all human learning and growth relies.

An extraordinary tribute to the visions of Joyce Canaan, a vibrant academic activist who touched so many with her intellect, her acuity, her humanity and her love. Anyone interested in critical pedagogy has to read this inspiring book that takes so many slices on what the university has become and what it still might be.
(Professor Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley)
This Festschrift is a beautiful tribute to Joyce Canaan, a woman whose revolutionary intellect and commitment should be treasured and studied, not only remembered. Each contribution illuminates her voice and expands on her spirit. The result is a volume that traces how we learn in the pursuit for justice, through building and sharing knowledge within a community of struggle. This is an important volume for any student of revolutionary and feminist education.
(Sara Carpenter, Department of Educational Studies, University of Alberta)
After the great global «pause», this volume presents an exciting look forward through the memory of boundary crosser, Joyce Canaan, whose life’s work scrutinized the impact of neoliberal regimes of accountability and the academy’s compliance with these processes. Collectively, the contributors warn of cultural myopia: that cultural near-sightedness that stands in the way of critical engagement with exclusionary mechanisms at both the pedagogic and economic levels.
(Sheila Landers Macrine, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)
Joyce Canaan’s life illustrates what it means to be angry at social injustice and to challenge it through theory and practice, spirit and emotion, intellectual rigour, love and humour. This collection movingly and rigorously celebrates her personal contribution through engaging with contemporary issues for critical pedagogy today.
(Jim Crowther, Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh)
Critical Pedagogy and Emancipation: A Festschrift in Memory of Joyce Canaan offers its readers a powerful vision of how radical educational praxis based on genuine dialogue and solidarity can «humanise» both learners’ and teachers’ experience of education and invigorate revolutionary and socialist democratic politics of the Left. The book is written as a celebration of the legacy of Professor Joyce Canaan (1950–2018), a radical intellectual and feminist. The contributors take her project of critical pedagogical scholar-activism as their common point of departure, developing themes – drawing in particular on public sociology, social movement and popular education, as well as critical pedagogy – around critiques of the neoliberal university, popular and working-class educational movements, feminism, anti-racism, climate justice, critical theory and politically engaged teaching, learning and research.