Darren Webb, BA, MA, PhD

Senior Lecturer in Education

Course Director: BA Education, Culture and Childhood

Email: d.webb@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: 0114 2227084

Teaching

Darren is Director of the BA Education, Culture and Childhood. His teaching centres around the Sociology of Education and Education Policy, and he teaches modules in these areas on the BA and EdD.

Darren is a firm believer in the value of interdisciplinarity. Students on the BA Education, Culture and Childhood study sociology, psychology, history, philosophy and politics. Teaching on the programme seeks to integrate within modules concepts, methodologies and data drawn from across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences. Darren believes that interdisciplinary learning and teaching enables students to become more inventive and creative while also preparing them better to adjust to inevitable fluctuations in the job market.

Research

Darren’s current research focuses on education, hope, power, citizenship and utopia. As with his teaching, Darren adopts an interdisciplinary approach to his research, which draws on philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, theology and political science. He is keen to look at the construction of hope within educational settings as a means of exploring the role of education in, on the one hand, fostering critical inquiry and active citizenship and, on the other, constraining future possibilities and reproducing relations of power.

Recent publications include:

Webb, D. (2013) (forthcoming) Critical pedagogy, utopia and political (dis)engagement. Power and Education

Webb, D. (2013) Pedagogies of hope. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32, 397-414.

Webb, D. (2012) Process, orientation and system: the pedagogical operation of utopia in the work of Paulo Freire. Educational Theory, 62(5), 593-608.

Warren, S., Webb, D., Franklin, A. & Bowers-Brown, J. (2011) Trust schools and the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interest. Journal of Education Policy, 26(6), 839-853.

Webb, D. (2010) Paulo Freire and ‘the need for a kind of education in hope’. Cambridge Journal of Education, 40(4), 327-339

Webb, D. (2009) Where´s the Vision? The Concept of Utopia in Contemporary Educational Theory. Oxford Review of Education, 35(6), 743-760.

Webb, D. (2008) Exploring the Relationship Between Hope and Utopia: Towards a Conceptual Framework. Politics, 28(3), 205-14.

Webb, D. (2008) Christian Hope and the Politics of Utopia. Utopian Studies, 19(1), 113-144.

Webb, D. (2008) `Modes of Hoping and the Utopian Impulse´, in W. Bauman (ed), Hope: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp..25-38.

Webb, D. (2007) Modes of Hoping. History of the Human Sciences, 20(3), 65-83.

Webb, D. (2007) Utopia—Carnival/Modernity—Blackpool. Utopia and Utopianism, No.2, 163-177.

Webb, D. (2005) Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque. Theory, Culture and Society, 22(3), 121-138.