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1968: A GLOBAL YEAR OF STUDENT DRIVEN CHANGE
November 20-22, 2008
Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Marking the 40th anniversary of the Black Student takeover of a computer building on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, a conference, 1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change, will take place at UCSB from November 20-22, of 2008.
The Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara organizes this conference to place such Black student agency, which led to the founding of the Department and the Center for Black Studies Research at UCSB, in a global context, one that includes such other student driven awakenings as the Paris uprising in May of 1968, the university student protests in Mexico City on the eve of the Olympics, the launching of the Asian American Studies movement, and the codification of the Chicana/o Studies movement in El Plan de Santa Barbara in 1969.
But this conference resists the temptation to celebrate 1968 as merely an object of memory. Students in 1968 aimed at nothing less than the democratic demand that they be allowed to shape their educations and the quality of everyday life in the societies into which they were being initiated. That democratic idealism remains alive today in pedagogical strategies in the arts, music, and academia. This conference wishes to map the “new education” of the future and the New Black Studies by looking back to look forward, by recovering what is useful and dispensing with what is not, and by fashioning a new pedagogy out of the innovative ways of thinking, doing, and creating culture students advanced on three continents in 1968.
Who Can Attend the Conference?
All are welcome! There is no need to register, and no fee to attend.
We especially welcome students, academics, artists, and people who are interested in how education changed in the 1960s, especially in 1968, when an upsurge occurred in the willingness of students around the globe to take the nature of their education into their own hands. We invite people to engage in a broad range of issues related to the transformation of education at this time by placing black student activism in a comparative and transnational context. |
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