Speakers
We are excited to announce the Keynote and Radford Lectures for the AARE 2023 Conference.
Four highly esteemed researchers will address the conference theme, ‘Voice, Truth, Place: Critical junctures for educational research’, from the perspective of their specialised areas of research, which range across Indigenous studies, anthropology, sexuality and gender, early childhood, and digital education.
Their thought-provoking lectures will open-up new questions and challenges for educational research today. Please check the website regularly for updates on lecture details.
Held at the University of Melbourne, November 26-30, we invite you all to join us at the 2023 AARE conference.
Register now to secure Early Bird rates to the conference.
2023 Radford Lecture
Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen | Australian National University
Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen has undertaken research in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Her research focuses on building transdisciplinary understanding of sexuality and gender across diverse lifeworlds, taking account of issues related to sexual citizenship, cultural and religious difference and technologies of sexuality, education and health. She is co-editor, with Louisa Allen, of the Handbook of Sexuality Education (Palgrave).
Title: Queer Public Pedagogies: Educating the Nation about Gender, Sex and Sexualities
Abstract: 2023 has seen coverage of many events and issues related to gender, sex and sexualities in the Australian media and online. From World Pride and Georgie Buchanan’s fabulously silly Progress Shark mounted outside the Australian museum in Sydney, through protests related to drag queens reading to children in public libraries. From the queer utopia that was the FIFA World Cup coverage through the Australian Bureau of Statistics mea culpa on the way in which they count LGBTIQ+ people in the Australian Census. At the same time, in several Australian states, we continue to publicly fund a private education system that legally discriminates on the basis of gender, sex and sexuality. A pattern of discrimination and exclusion related to gender and sexuality that is gaining momentum globally. What are the implications of these conflicting public pedagogies for educating the nation about gender, sex, and sexualities? What lessons might Australia take away from these conflicting pedagogies? How might these be shaped by researchers and activists in education?
2022 Radford Lecture
Distinguished Professor Susan Danby | Queensland University of Technology
Susan Danby is a Distinguished Professor within the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Susan’s experiences as early years educator and teacher in Australia and the USA in government and social service agencies provided strong foundations for understanding and working with families, early childhood services and partners. Susan leads a collective of national researchers from 6 Australian universities and partners across government, industry and community to enable the Centre’s vision –young children are healthy, connected and educated in a rapidly changing digital age. Her cross-disciplinary research explores children’s everyday social and interactional practices with peers, teachers, family, helpline counsellors and medical clinicians.
Susan is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (2021), and was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship (2012-2017), and has been chief investigator of 6 ARC Discovery Projects. She was a member of the ARC College of Experts (2016-2017) and of the ARC Engagement Impact Panel (2018). In 2019, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Uppsala University (Sweden) for her international contribution to child studies, and studies of children and digital technologies.
Title: Why that now? The ‘everyday’ for children being seen and heard in a digital world.
Abstract: I grew up in a time when children were seen and not heard. As a novice researcher I started investigating how children use language to organise their everyday activities and each other as they navigated their social worlds with peers and adults. Shifting paradigms across research and human rights made possible new ways to see children as agentic members of society. More recently we are witnessing children’s lives being profoundly changed with the ubiquitous experiences of interacting with new digital worlds unknown by previous generations. I draw on a collection of my research to examine how children attend to their agency as language users across social, educational, and digital contexts. Focusing on critical junctures of disciplinary paradigms and changing childhood contexts makes possible new research encounters within disciplinary areas and understandings of the complexity of children’s everyday lives.
2023 Keynotes
Professor Neil Selwyn | Monash University
Neil Selwyn has been researching and writing about digital education since the mid-1990s. He is currently a professor at Monash University, having previously worked at the UCL Institute of Education and Cardiff University. Recent books include: ‘Should Robots Replace Teachers? AI and the future of education‘ (Polity 2019), ‘Critical Data Literacies’ (MIT Press 2023, w/ Luci Pangrazio), and the third edition of ‘Education and Technology: key issues & debates’ (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Title: Resetting our research agendas
Abstract: This conference challenges Australian education researchers to make genuine connections with contemporary concerns, controversies and change – from climate collapse to the rise of AI; decolonisation to pandemic recovery. These are, however, ambitions that are far easier to acknowledge than to address meaningfully. In this talk, Neil Selwyn considers how his own research area of digital education has been confronted by many of these critical junctures. This prompts him to reflect on the challenges facing all education researchers looking to connect with broader societal, political and environmental change. These include embracing the vulnerabilities of ‘not knowing’, consciously moving beyond our disciplinary comfort-zones, and perhaps even reassessing some long-held beliefs around the intrinsic good of education.
Professor Dr Marcia Langton | University of Melbourne
Professor Dr Marcia Langton AO, BA (Hons), ANU, PhD Macq. U, D. Litt. ANU, FASSA
Associate Provost | Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor | Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies
Professor Langton, a proud descendent of the Yiman people of Queensland is an anthropologist, geographer and award-winning author, with a doctorate from Macquarie University and a number of honorary doctorates. She is the Director of the Indigenous Studies Unit in the Onemda Centre in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. She established the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Curricula Project and expanded the project in 2020 in partnership with the Melbourne Graduate School of Education where it is now based with a new title - Ngarrnga. The Indigenous Knowledge Institute which she assisted in founding is also a partner. Her current research concerns alcohol management and domestic and family violence in Aboriginal settings, and Indigenous data governance and community data projects. She co-chaired the Voice Codesign Senior Advisory Group with Prof Tom Calma AO. In addition to her many academic publications, she is an award-winning author; her most popular book is Welcome to Country. A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia (Hardie Grant 2018, 2021) and more recently Law. The Way of the Ancestors with Prof Aaron Corn (Thames & Hudson 2023.
Title: The Ngarrngga Project: Indigenous peoples, knowledge and ontologies in the Australian curriculum
