Dr. Peter Taubman, Professor, Brooklyn College, USA
Friday, March 23, 2018 | 12:30 – 2:00 pm | Scarfe 310
View the Seminar Poster
Abstract
Professor Taubman will focus his remarks on the decades-long education reform movement in the U.S. and its tumultuous culmination in the Trump administration’s education policies. Located in the “no-man’s-land” between the psychic and the social, and the individual and the collective, his talk offers a particular reading of neoliberalism and Freud’s concept of the death drive. Professor Taubman relies on these to explore how the Utopian desire called public education has, in the United States, with its history and current forms of racism, capitalism, and scientism, turned to ashes. Out of those ashes, what visions may rise? This talk offers some possible answers to that question.
Short Bio
Peter Maas Taubman is Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at Brooklyn College, where he teaches graduate courses in education and English. He is also a co-founder of the Bushwick School for Social Justice, in Brooklyn, New York. He has written extensively on teacher identity, classroom teaching, psychoanalysis, and the problems with audit culture. His book, Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education, published by Routledge Press, received the 2010 Outstanding Book Award from AERA’s Division B, the 2010 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association, and the OL Davis, Jr Outstanding Book Award from AATC. In 2010 Disavowed Knowledge: Psychoanalysis, Teaching and Education was published by Routledge Press. In addition to numerous articles critical of neoliberal education reforms in the U.S., Professor Taubman is a founder of reClaiming the Conversation on Education and author of A Manifesto for A Revolution in Public Education. His most recent work has focused on the death drive in U.S. education and culture.