School of Public Pedagogies — Contexts, Collectives and Action
Wednesdays, 10.00am-12.00pm (AEST)
October 14 – November 18, 2026
The Public Pedagogies Institute is inviting submissions to present at our 2026 online seminar series: Contexts, Collectives and Action.
The theme for the series is Collectives, both in practice and through representation. What do collective formations offer the public as a way of organising? What are the elements that make up a collective? What are the challenges in actualising collectives and what are the hopes generated through imaginings?
If you are interested in hosting a session as a part of the School of Public Pedagogies, the seminars will take place online once per week on Wednesdays – beginning Wednesday, October 14 through to Wednesday, November 18. Each session will be two hours with two people taking carriage of an hour each. The time is 10.00am-12.00pm (AEST).
Contributors will also be invited to submit an abstract for a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Public Pedagogies.
Please send your proposals to Karen.Charman@vu.edu.au by Monday August 24.
Notes on Collectives
We recently invited members of the Public Pedagogies Institute to submit some notes on collectives to stimulate ideas for the upcoming seminar series, which we have provided below.
The term ‘collective’ as an organising principle has a long history. Associated with political groups and informed by ideas of egalitarianism, collectives offer another way of undertaking ‘work’ that is informed by egalitarian principles and enacted in ways that are non-hierarchical. By their nature to be egalitarian and non-hierarchical they must interrogate their own composition to address power dynamics and to establish the terms through which they will work. Democratic imperatives in education (Freire 1971, Dewey 1990) are closely aligned with collectivist modes in that there is an aim on behalf of the educator to bring students together to be active participants in both the school and ultimately in the broader society. They also provide fertile ground for questioning, advocacy and reassessing shared values in perpetuity.
Collective plurality is also a condition for political and philosophical realisations (Arendt 1952). Feminist collectives have formed at different times in history in an ongoing challenge or dismantling of patriarchy to address the needs of women. Worker’s collectives have initiated structures whereby profits are shared that challenge the quintessential concept of self-interest in capitalism. Collectives constitute ways of imagining that move us beyond what we now term as neo-liberalism. Larger ways of organising societies have been illustrated through configurations of collectives whether this be in practice or through representation in film, fiction or theatre such as French film makers of the 1930’s, Socialist Realist writers of the same era alongside the ‘New Theatre’ in Australia. More contemporary iterations are collective arts groups who work to realise projects in public settings as well as collectives that meet together to generate social change.
Some community and participant-led research also values the collective over either the individual or hierarchical structure, bringing the questioning of the political act of the distribution of power into the creative and empowering process. This is often done with the realisation that empowerment is not a gift that can be given by others but is act against oppression and is best facilitated by fostering and seeking out collectives, with shared values and experiences.
The idea of collective, collective action, and collectivity when looked from the perspective of a rebellion against the dominant hegemonic system very often tend to overlook the idea of the hegemonic as also the collectives of the individuals (who represent the same idea). The status quo or the shared, consensus values that inform our everyday lives are themselves governed by a kind of silent collective, There is a need for exploration of the meanings of what the term collective may entail. The idea of the collective and the ones which are rebelled against are not fragmented and are a result and part of the process of the same system. Each individual in a group/collective is a representative of complexities of ideas and a result of the processes exposed to different ideas and situations.
The idea of the circles is the representation of different groups of people working on different ideas as collectives they are also the representations of the different populations having different interests. As a result, each group is a set of different ideas and individuals with different interests and intentions. Hence a collective as not a homogenous group rather a mix of complexities of ideas, interests, connections, situations, geographies, demography, ideologies, and temporality.
Therefore, there is a need to explore the idea of collective from different perspective of being;
1) Positive vs negative: how one defines positive and negative is also as situated in the positionality of the individual, the temporal situation and the larger idea of society in relation of what is excepted, not excepted, ideas of equality, justice, equity and access);
2) Existence of hierarchies: the collective actions as lead by people, individuals, or groups. The constitution of groups as also hegemonic powers and people, and may have hierarchies within a group;
3) Intentional and organic: how different groups are formed: just as a result of being situated in a space or as a result of intentionally working for a cause and taking actions (irrespective of whether people like or dislike, agree with each other on some idea and situation), the idea of people working together as a result of the intentionality of the state or institutions;
4) Ephemeral: the groups may come together and dissolve over time with different reasons;
5) Process (constant change, evolution and connected progression, and circling back to the same idea and not necessarily always in a linear form at times in an entangled and nonlinear form): the ideas of the different groups may evolve, dissolve, and change with time and as result the formation of collectives also lead to further bifurcations, change in groups, and formation of different groups.
There is also the shadow side of “collectivity”. We should bear in mind that as other concepts/terms in social organisation have been abused (such as republic), Collective has an unhappy history; it was hi-jacked during the Russian communist revolution. Collectives were ” state-controlled agricultural enterprises created by forcing peasants to pool their private land, livestock, and equipment.” This was partly to wipe out rich enterprising farmers, the kulaks. This shadow side of collectives occurs in more contemporary times in community development where social movements can just as easily be seen to be on the evil side of the equation. Terrorist or Fascist groups use similar techniques of community organising as does community development but in the case of terrorist or fascist groups can’t be called community development because they are lacking the Human Rights foundations. So, values are fundamental to understanding collectivity and collective work in community development. The work cannot be separated from the values. That’s why process is important and why reflection is important. The phenomenon of group think, group bullying, group shaming, group scapegoating are interesting experiences of the dark side of collectivity. The common environmentalist cliche evokes collectives “Think globally, act locally” signals the importance of collective action at local levels. So, there is the possibility of the relevance of collectives to social and other circumstances on the ground.
Lastly collective memory—instances of history that have been memorialised or in more recent times contested. The dismantling of monuments; social history museums and the work Monument Lab https://monumentlab.comall attest to a reconsideration of collective memorialisation. The most recent special issue of the Journal of Public Pedagogies (no 8 2026) is focussed on the public pedagogical formations of history. One of the prompts for this issue was what pedagogical responsibilities do we as communities have to bring a public into a relationship with the past and what might the public contours of this relationship look like?
