Conference themes

Main theme: Provocations and possibilities

We are particularly keen to shine a light on the unspoken, unseen, unasked and intangible during this conference. We invite you to uncover and examine these from multiple perspectives and to contemplate future directions, opportunities and potential. We welcome the creative, emerging and the unexpected; both in terms of what you are researching and how you are approaching and undertaking research. 

The sub-themes are intended to offer a broad and open means for locating your provocations and/or possibilities and connecting your conversations to an international community of researchers with common interests. 

Sub themes

Sites of professional work

What sites of professional practice, learning and education have we been overlooking? What does analysis of particular sites provoke us into thinking? What possibilities emerge from virtual, contingent, fluid, optional, dispersed, ephemeral, precarious sites of work and learning?

Digital disruptions, learning and technologies 

How are technologies changing professional and learning practice, professions and education and how are these technologies supporting professionals to maintain important features in a turbulent world? What technological possibilities are emerging, and what do such disruptions provoke?

Ethics and responsibilities (re)imagined 

What ethical considerations or responsibilities need greater attention, or are being reviewed, restructured, or re-invented? And what are the implications, provocations and possibilities that flow from these for practice and professional education?

Space | Time | Materiality

Exploring aspects of practices; are there specific dimensions of practice you’ve been investigating? What provocations and possibilities do spatial, temporal or material analyses of practice, learning and education open up?

Knowledge and ignorance

Knowledge, knowing and the unknown: what we think we know, how we know, what we don’t know and what we’re not talking about. Provoke us into thinking in new ways about knowledge and ignorance in professional practice, learning and education! Show us the possibilities that are emerging!

Questioning professions and professionals

Wither professions, professionals, and even professionalism? What are the signs of decay, disruption, erosion, entrenchment, endurance, reformation and rejuvenation in the professions? What is maintaining boundaries between them, what is re-drawing these boundaries, or transgressing them? What provocations must we confront as a community framed around the idea of ‘professional’? What possibilities are we overlooking?

Methodologies and methods

We use a range of theoretical and methodological resources in researching professional practice, knowledge, education and learning. Practice-based or ‘socio-material’ approaches are increasingly prominent in this space but not exclusively. We invite contributions that explore and critique methodologies and methods relevant to this area of inquiry. What do particular approaches make possible that others don’t? What provocations can they surface that refresh and invigorate our research?

Professional education

What is professional education in higher education, professional bodies and workplaces if professions are contested, disrupted, eroded, transformed? How can we provoke new questions about professional education? What are the possibilities for professional education? 

Learning in practice

Have we lost a focus on “learning’ in our work on problematising practice? What new questions can we provoke about learning in practice? What are the possibilities for understanding learning in practice differently?  

What is becoming or what questions aren't we asking?

This sub-theme is for presentations that address directly what is coming or becoming or questions we are missing? As a scholarly field, are we there yet? What have we not yet got a handle on? What is not yet a feature of professional practice, education and learning, but needs addressing now? What are the not-yet professions? What about the idea of the not-yet professional? How can we work with not-yet data? 

And what questions are we missing? What provocations and possibilities are overlooked? What keeps you up at night in relation to professional knowledges and practice, education or learning? What questions are emerging in your area of practice? If it doesn’t fit in any of the categories above, and you think we need to be talking about it please raise it! We don’t know what we don’t know ….