Roundtable Critical pedagogy in contemporary planning and design education

In recent years, planning and design education has become increasingly politicized. Critical pedagogies have emerged seeking to educate (self)critical beings, who can capture the relationalities, inequalities and oppressions embedded in places to claim progressive transformation for more egalitarian futures. Education is thus considered a political practice to imagine a different world outside hegemonic laws of value, a space where hierarchies of oppression (both human and nonhuman) can be ended (McLaren 2006, post-humanist focus by us). Many critical pedagogy practices in planning and design studios reach back to the seminal work of Paolo Freire, while new practices have been developed in different contexts to unravel new paradoxes, challenges and questions. In this roundtable, nine educators who engage with di!erent socio-spatial contexts (from informal settlements in Brazil to lands of militarism and neoliberal laissez-faire in Cyprus), will come together and discuss epistemological, methodological, social, political and emotional challenges and opportunities that critical pedagogy brings to planning and design education. Each educator will shortly present her critical pedagogy practice and formulate three questions that she considers vital for developing critical pedagogy in planning and design education. To instigate a productive discussion across the di!erent perspectives the roundtable will have the format of a discussion carrousel shifting between presentations and discussions among the participants and the audience. Examples of questions/issues that we will address are: - Subjectivities of educators as bridges between places and students in engagement with inequalities; - how intersectional or other approaches can inform di!erent forms of self-criticality and ethics in engagement with emotional and a!ective geographies; -how to include discussions on value systems constructed by actual politics, while far-right rises; - how to instigate students to challenge current forms of technocratic planning and to use theories of communicative rationality; - how to include more than human perspectives; - methods for multi-sensory exploration, transect walks.