SPPA warmly invites you to our two conference events this year
IN-PERSON CONFERENCE - 22nd August 2023, UCL Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, London,
ONLINE CONFERENCE - 17th November 2023, Zoom
The topic for the in-person conference this year is Social Pedagogy as a Catalyst for Change: Transgressing the status quo in different national contexts
Inspired by reading bell hooks’ ‘Teaching to Transgress’ (1998), the SPPREAD (Social Pedagogy Practice, Research, Education and Development) network will be presenting research, reflections and ideas from soon to be published works at the in-person SPPA conference on 22nd August 2023, at 106 UCL Gordon House (29 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PP)
Established in 2018 as a space for dialogue between academics and practitioners from Brazil, Denmark and the UK, the SPPREAD network (which includes SPPA members & trustees) explores how social pedagogy operates in these diverse contexts, what similarities and differences we have, with the broad aim of learning from and with each other and growing understandings.
For our London event, we will continue exploring how bell hooks’ writings on education relates to social pedagogy, particularly around her thinking on transgression. We are concerned with how recent global and local events indicate rising inequality and polarisation, so questioning and transgressing the status quo seems more and more necessary. bell hooks provides a welcome, nuanced, feminist, anti-racist approach that both chimed with and inspired us in diverse ways. The presenters at our conference represent some of the contributing papers to a Special Issue of the International Journal of Social Pedagogy that will be published at the end of 2023.
Get your tickets for the SPPA in-person conference here:

SPPA will follow this theme of social pedagogy and transgression into the online conference on 17th November where we would like to aim for a more practice-based exploration of the same theme.
Speakers
Sebastian Monteux is a registered mental health nurse and lecturer in mental health nursing at Abertay University, Dundee. He has previously worked in Scotland and the Netherlands in the NHS, in the fields of local authority residential childcare, adult social care and learning disability. Most recently, prior to lecturing, he was based in the North of Scotland Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) regional inpatient unit, Dundee. His current research interests are around child and adolescent mental health, trauma, everyday care practice, and Social Pedagogy.
https://www.abertay.ac.uk/staff-search/mr-sebastian-monteux/
Marianne is a social pedagogue (1996). Her area of work is sexualities, psychiatry, and science studies (forms of knowledge). She held a master’s in pedagogical philosophy (2013). Her current employment is at VIA University College, where she is a trained lecturer. Also, she is a PhD researcher at Roskilde University. Her research question is: To what extent can analysing with anecdotal theory give welfare workers an opportunity to realise if we exercise contributory injustice and when we do not understand our fellow citizens

Cecile is a social pedagogue working with young people in care, and as such she is always interested in the interaction between learning processes and social change. She expands on this in a blog:
https://www.mypedagogicalblog.com/
Cecile has experimented with forms of communal living -a very personal form of social pedagogy- and she is currently living in a housing co-operative in London. By living there, she is trying to create a different sense of community, to experience and work with the importance of group processes and to move away from individualistic thinking. Cecile carries some of those themes forward in her PhD, where she explores the attitudes and beliefs professionals working in children’s homes have of the young people they work with.
Cecile is also a SPPA trustee, she joined the Board in July 2021 and has since then been actively engaged in all SPPA matters, showing her passion for social pedagogy at all times.

Charlotte has worked extensively with young people/adults in vulnerable/exposed positions. Listening to people who do not normally speak and supporting their opportunities to be heard and at the same time taking a critical look at the structures and institutional understandings that dominate the social field runs like a common thread through her social work, teacher and research practices. She is particularly strong in researching and working with citizen perspectives and innovative and experimental methods in both, social work and research contexts. She embraces complexity and chaos and has a good eye for both, individual and organizational challenges.
SPEAKERS AND WORKSHOPS

Lotte works as an assistant professor in continuing education and research, with a specific focus on social pedagogy at VIA University College in Aarhus. Lotte has a long relationship with the UK & Ireland having practiced and taught here periodically over a number of years. She focuses her research and lecturing on different aspects of social pedagogy and social work, including how the children, young people and adults that social pedagogy and social work is supposed to help, encounter and perceive that help. In that sense, and in a perspective inspired by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, she explores help and the borders of help.
Dr. Maria Helena Zamora is currently a professor at PUC-Rio’s Psychology Department, having joined in 2000, as well as being a member of the Postgraduate Psychology Program since 2012. Invited professor at National/Global Advisory Board for Faith and Justice in Community and Society, Indiana, USA, between 2011 and 2015. Started a partnership with the Cognitive and Social Psychology and Vocational Development Institute, in Coimbra, in 2012. Member of the Sergio Vieira de Melo Chair at UNHCR / UN (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR), based at PUC-Rio, in 2017. Invited Researcher at the research network SPPREAD International (Social Pedagogy, Practice Research and Development International) about socio-education, with members from the United Kingdom, Denmark and Brazil, since 01/2018.
Dr. Zamora has been a member of some Centers for the defense of human rights, NGOs and social movements. She is an associated researcher at the Interdisciplinary Core of Afro-Brazilian Reflection and Memory (NIREMA) at PUC-Rio, since 2015. Member of the Youth Homicide Prevention Committee at UNICEF in 2019-2021.
Event Details
Date
22/08/2023
Time
09:30 - 16:30
Location
29 GORDON SQUARE, LONDON, WC1H 0PP
106 Gordon House
Pricing
From £25 to £70
Ticket sale now on!