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April 10, 2008

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Faculty of Education professor to visit Oxford
by Heidi Wicks

Dr. Ursula Kelly, Faculty of Education, often teaches her MUN classes about popular culture. However, this month she takes a break to discuss society and culture at Oxford University.

The Oxford Round Table brings scholars from around the globe to one of the world’s most prestigious universities to discuss issues of public policy in education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other selected countries. Scholars may attend by invitation-only, hence it is a great honour to sit at this momentous event.

This year, Dr. Ursula Kelly of Memorial’s Faculty of Education will attend, discussing her research on socio-cultural critique as the basis of a more fair notion of education, which is the emphasis of her three books – Marketing Place: Cultural Politics, Regionalism and Reading (’93), Schooling Desire: Literacy, Cultural Politics and Pedagogy (’97), and Cultural Loss, Place and Education, which is set to be published in fall 2008.

Dr. Kelly says she is thrilled to be able to represent Newfoundland and Labrador and Memorial on such a global platform.

“All of my work – teaching, research, writing – is enacted through my lens on this place, this province,” she said. “I have always felt a deep response to that from others. Every place is, in some sense, ‘a global place’, but each place feels the effects of that global interconnection with its own particularity. Those who attend the Round Table Sessions will, I hope, share their research with a similar sense of particularity and interconnection.”

“I will present alongside scholars from countries and contexts as diverse as Iran, India, Japan, South Africa, Singapore, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and of course, Canada,” she continued. “We are together for an intensive one week period of dialogue and networking around a variety of global issues.”

Past topics of discussion have included considerations of human rights, social welfare, economics, religion, ethics, morals, law, medicine and the liberal arts and sciences.

Cultural critique and social justice permeates all of Dr. Kelly’s research, writing and teaching, and is the basis of the paper – entitled Sensate Democracy and Cultural Critique – that she will present at Oxford. The paper will address those concepts in relation to education in a time of heightened global conflict and war.

The Oxford Round Table discussions take place March 17-21.

Philosopher in Paris Dr. Kelly is not the only faculty member invited to a prestigious academic facility. Dr. Arthur Sullivan, Philosophy, recently returned from Paris where he presented his work at the Institut Jean-Nicod, a research institute co-hosted by the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, two prestigious French institutions for research and higher education. The Institut Jean-Nicod is a prominent international centre for the study of cognitive science. Research carried by its members has a strongly interdisciplinary profile, at the interface between philosophy, cognitive science and the social sciences. Although most members of the group are philosophers, the issues addressed are not purely conceptual and have a strong empirical component. Dr. Sullivan, whose studies have been based primarily around logic, both pure and applied, delivered a presentation titled Multiple-Proposition Views in Recent Philosophy of Language. Dr. Sullivan’s works and research on applied logic has focused on children’s comparatively advanced acquisition of language in the early stages of their lives, as compared to other aspects of their life that do not progress as rapidly or at the same level of sophistication.

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