The Professional Association’s Annual Conference 2022

The Association will gather for its 2022 Annual Residential Conference at Glasgow University. This city centre campus, steeped in history, as a centre for community education will provide a fitting location for us to explore the conference theme of ‘Pracademia: Creativity, Community and Collaboration’.

The conference provides an open space to present, discuss and debate the changes, opportunities, and learning from engagement in youth and community work education, professional practice, and policy impact from across the sector and across the four UK nations.

Pracademia:
Creativity, Community and Collaboration

The pandemic and multiple lockdowns mean youth and community work, in both its practice and the teaching of it, have probably changed forever. Concurrently we operate in a climate where the future of higher education, and the intersection between practice, communities, and the academy, are contested and under scrutiny. Perhaps more than ever before youth and community work courses are having to carefully situate themselves within a volatile practice and higher education context. We are also operating in a landscape that increasingly emphasises conformity, competition, and consumerism.

The conference seeks to offer an alternative narrative of creativity, community and collaboration. In order to navigate these terrains, we often need to be pracademics, a (re)imagined professional identity that comprises a coherent, albeit hybridized, unity - that of a practitioner as well as an academic (Jain, 2013). It aims to articulate pracademia as an enhancing synthesised praxis of practice and academia, rather than an apologetic dilution of both. The conference also aims to foreground the traditions of community development, community education, and community work in recognition of the Scottish emphasis on these practices (See CLD Standards Council).

The conference will explore these questions through seminar presentations, research dissemination, group discussions, and any other format you wish to create, that share emerging practice, debate emerging realities, and plan for future collaboration in addressing these changes. Our emphasis - as with all annual conferences - will be on dialogue, discussion, and debate as we reconvene to refresh our commitment to youth and community work education as we emerge in this new reality.  As last year, there is an intent to develop a publication from conference contributions (TBD).

seminars will address:

We invited contributions that embraced a breadth of learning, practice and research activity related to three continuing contemporary themes:

1. Creativity: Contributors will present on how they have been creative in navigating the policy and practice of teaching youth and community work and undertaking research: its challenges, opportunities and future possibilities.

2. Community: Contributors will present on how people have built and re-articulated community, either through community education and development, or through other aspects of a community of practice, including academia.

3. Collaboration: Contributors will explore the collaborations they have developed in teaching, research and other activities that have enhanced their work

Following an open call for papers and workshops on themes that address theory, research and practice we welcome four Keynote addresses, fourteen seminar presentations/ papers and eight optional sessions - you can view the list of presenters and abstracts via the button above.

what to expect from the programme

The conference programme will commence with lunch on Wednesday 29th June at 12pm and close with lunch on Friday 1st July.

The conference programme is centred around four aspects:

Sector news and updates: with invited guest speakers and presentations from member activity across the sector.

Keynotes, seminars and optional workshops: presentations and discussions led by members based on their research and professional practice.

Networking and collaboration: space to connect with members through social time, workshops, excursions and a celebration of peoples publications this year.

Association business: conference includes a short AGM including a report of activities for 2021-2022 and election of Directors and Strategic Development Committee members for 2022-2023.