Lecture by honorary doctor Annalisa Sannino
Research
Education and learning
Welcome to a lecture by Professor Annalisa Sannino, this year’s honorary doctor at the Faculty of Education, University of Gothenburg.
Welcome to a lecture by Professor Annalisa Sannino, this year’s honorary doctor at the Faculty of Education, University of Gothenburg.
Annalisa Sannino is Professor at Tampere University in Finland. Her research focuses on learning, collective agency and processes of change, with particular emphasis on how learning can contribute to equality and sustainability.
Sannino has collaborated closely with researchers at the Faculty of Education for several years, contributing to research development, doctoral education, seminars and international networks.
The presentation focuses on current developments of the method of the Change Laboratory, their premises and prospects. Central to the argumentation is a dialogue with the construct of heterogeneous coalitions from the sociology of real utopias, and discussions on responsibility and optimism in the social sciences.
Coalitions of heterogeneous actors and organizations can act transformatively and learn expansively to respond to acute historical contradictions. The construct of heterogenous coalitions embraces hands-on collective and longitudinal undertakings toward equity and sustainability. The construct is illustrated with the help examples from recent Change Laboratories seen as part of 4th generation Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT).
The presentation highlights four pathways through which a perspective of responsibility of optimism can be pursued in educational research and in transdisciplinary endeavors in response to acute societal needs with the help of the Change Laboratory method. The responsibility of optimism can be nourished through work and education by 1. Thinking dialectically to grasp ecosystems and human activities as systems of relations in continuous flux; 2. Collectively overcoming paralyses of the will when sharing them and identifying their historical roots; 3. Delving in gray areas of possibilities, i.e., cracks that the contradictions of daily activities inevitably create, within which will for just transformations develops and thrives; 4. Cultivating unrecognized and suppressed forms of power that manifest in alternative modes of living, producing and organizing and persist against all odds.