424: Innovating the Future (of Management Teaching): Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Anxiety and Defense (CANCELLED) (21083)

This interactive workshop, which is based upon a very successful and well-attended PDW in 2022, uses psychoanalysis to disrupt the assumptions embedded in contemporary modes of teaching and learning. We will explore the potential of psychoanalysis to further our understanding of the realities of education, both now and in the future. Insights from psychoanalysis include the importance of paying attention to unconscious anxieties, fantasies, and psychological defenses. Applying these insights to learning spaces, and their concomitant stresses and anxieties, provides critical scholars and educators with concepts useful for understanding the psychosocial (collective) defenses that arise in response to anxiety-inducing social, cultural, and institutional pressures. The unconscious permeates a range of phenomena across educational systems: individual (student, teacher), interpersonal (teaching dyad), group (classroom), organization (institutional), and social (discourses of pedagogy, politics). Psychosocial defenses often serve to create undiscussable and collusive resistance to the work of learning, essentially erecting a form of willful ignorance to avoid the anxieties of not knowing. We contend that psychoanalytic thinking can make such dynamics knowable and discussable. Further, that psychoanalytic thinking provides both teachers and students with useful strategies for managing the anxieties associated with (un)learning what we think we know about providing, or obtaining, management education. This PDW may benefit researchers and scholars who, regardless of career stage, wish to explore and engage with the potential of psychoanalytic thinking for deepening their understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning, and in doing so deepen their potential to innovate for the future.