2023 VATE State Conference - Hybrid

'coming to voice'

2023 VATE State Conference

The title of VATE’s 2023 State Conference looks back to 2022 when we asserted, ‘It’s our time’ but also, Janus-like, takes us in a sweeping forward movement through to 2023 and beyond. 2022 keynote speaker, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, looked into the future as he provided us with our 2023 title, ‘coming to voice’. Building on the familiarity of a ‘voice to parliament’ Ahmad rejected the notion of a single, racially defined voice, as he referred to bell hooks’ claim that ‘we cannot begin to talk about freedom and justice in any culture unless we are talking about mass-based literacy movements – because degrees of literacy determine how we see what we see’.

In Teaching to Transgress, published in 1994, hooks described her pedagogical practices as emerging ‘from the mutually illuminating interplay of anti-colonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies’ (p.10). The participle ‘coming’ enacts this movement, which reflects the active, fluid, and open-ended quality of the drive to the state of ‘voice’.
Read full conference abstract here.

The conference will be delivered in-person over two days – Thursday 23 November and Friday 24 November 2023 - at Deakin University's Burwood campus. For those who are unable to attend the conference in person, our program will also include a live-streamed component that you can access from your device, no matter where you are.

If financial barriers prevent you from attending the conference, please get in touch with Kate Gillespie. 

Please note: Interstate delegates can register for the conference here.

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations must be emailed to events@vate.org.au. Cancellations received by 12pm five working days prior to the event date will be charged a 15% cancellation fee. Cancellations received after this will receive NO REFUND. Registrations can, however, be transferred to another staff member. Please email events@vate.org.au the details. If you do not attend and have not notified VATE according to the above policy, you will receive no refund.  Please note: If this event is cancelled due to COVID government or venue restrictions, you will receive a full refund.