Conference "Teaching systems and the national categories of thinking"

« ESSE » Network - I - Nationalisms

Location : Château de Coppet et Genève [ March 10-12th, 2005 ]

Direction : F. Schultheis

Abstract : The first big colloquium bringing together the ESSE network will be consecrated to the following topic: “The teaching systems and the categories of national thinking: The academic unconscious”. Some 80 members of the network, accompanied by junior researchers, are to work in sessions in the plenum and in workshops around the general question of the academic production and reproduction of visions and divisions of the social world and, in particular, the social representations of the national and foreign. It will be matter of realizing a collective analysis and reflection around the national teaching systems as privileged places where categories of thinking and judging are installed. The goal is to update the academic unconscious. We will ask ourselves to what degree cognitive structures that are wrongly open like the opposition between explaining and understanding, individual and social or quantitative and qualitative are enrolled, at the same time, in the collective history of a teaching system and the individual history of the academic trajectory of members of a concrete society. According to the dominant traditions in each of the concerned nations such oppositions and dichotomies can assume inverse values and specific connotations, which makes transnational exchanges utterly difficult. As the linguistic tradition does not reveal semantic particularities, we ignore most of the time the reasons why we do not really understand.