2023 VATE State Conference

'coming to voice'

2023 VATE State Conference

The title of VATE’s 2023 State Conference looks back to 2022 when we asserted, ‘It’s our time’ but also, Janus-like, takes us in a sweeping forward movement through to 2023 and beyond. 2022 keynote speaker, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, looked into the future as he provided us with our 2023 title, ‘coming to voice’. Building on the familiarity of a ‘voice to parliament’ Ahmad rejected the notion of a single, racially defined voice, as he referred to bell hooks’ claim that ‘we cannot begin to talk about freedom and justice in any culture unless we are talking about mass-based literacy movements – because degrees of literacy determine how we see what we see’.

In Teaching to Transgress, published in 1994, hooks described her pedagogical practices as emerging ‘from the mutually illuminating interplay of anti-colonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies’ (p.10). The participle ‘coming’ enacts this movement, which reflects the active, fluid, and open-ended quality of the drive to the state of ‘voice’.
Read full conference abstract here.

The conference will be delivered in-person over two days – Thursday 23 November and Friday 24 November 2023 - at Deakin University's Burwood campus. For those who are unable to attend the conference in person, our program will also include a live-streamed component that you can access from your device, no matter where you are.