The retreat of state funding at public institutions paired with the growing concerns surrounding vulture capitalism that has weaponized philanthropic gift-giving (i.e., distinguished chairs, scholarships and fellowships, academic research centers, faculty lines, campus maintenance) means educators must find ways to teach students about the…

It is challenging to define who Michel Foucault was, whether he was a theorist, a philosopher, a historian, or a critic. In many of his books, and essays, Foucault denied being a philosopher or a theorist, nor did he want to be called a writer or a prophet. He described himself as an experimenter by saying that his work simply consists of…

Farzana Shain reviews two books: (1) Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang and George Lipsitz, 2019; and Education and Race: From Empire to Brexit, by Sally Tomlinson, 2019, Bristol, Policy. Shain begins this review by saying that we…

In this discussion with literacies researcher Allan Luke, the New London Group Member reflects on the role of multiliteracies in shaping literacies research and the continuing changes to technology, capitalism, and learning. Focused on looking toward future advances in literacies research, Luke reflects on the role of multiliteracies in…

This response considers the strengths of Carr and Thesee's 2017 paper in "Democracy & Education" and explores further areas of research related to education for democracy or citizenship education. [For "Seeking Democracy Inside and Outside of Education," see EJ1162605.]

In this response to "The Political Nuances of Narratives and an Urban Educator's Response," the authors applaud Pearman's critical approach to deconstructing and challenging narratives of heroic figures who single-handedly change the world and agree with him that these narratives restrict the sense of agency that may propel citizens to…

In the shadow of triumphalist and hubristic capitalism, many adherents to critical pedagogy promote "democracy" as a kind of anti-capitalist challenge to inequality, oppression and exploitation. However, American culture has gone global, immersing the world in the received wisdom of a variety of liberalisms or in the reaction formations of…

This article reflects on Henry Giroux's work as a critical public intellectual and the important role his work plays in fostering educated hope and insurgent possibilities during our present times of daily and longer term catastrophes. In addition to attempting to capture the experience of what it means and how it feels to read Giroux along with…

While whiteness studies at most institutions aims to expose the persistence of white supremacy to a disbelieving audience, whiteness studies within the College of Ethnic Studies (COES) at San Francisco State University (SFSU) begins with the assumption that racism still exists. The course then traces how whiteness is constructed and fortified to…

Badiou's philosophy of the "event" has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou…

Normative thinking around democracy often emphasizes the supremacy of electoral politics, underplaying the salience of education as a defining feature to produce a more meaningful, engaged, inclusive form of democracy. Critical pedagogy can be an extremely useful, illuminating and transformative means and process of deconstructing how democracy is…

This article argues that under neoliberal casino capitalism there has been a wholesale attack not only on the social state but also on those public spheres that enable the formative cultures necessary to produce critical agents, engaged subjects, and the literacies necessary to make power and authority accountable. In this instance, the struggle…

Henry A. Giroux is recognized as one of the fifty most significant thinkers on education in the 20th century. He is also considered a scholar of immense influence in a number of fields internationally, hardly an inconsequential accolade in a century noted for a glut of educational and social thinkers. Yet, its wide-ranging and ever-expanding…

This article examines the ways in which the complex and at times contradictory project of "conservative modernization" has altered the terrain of education. It extends the arguments I make in "Educating the "Right" Way" (2006) about understanding the "right", about the possibilities of interrupting the right in education, and about our roles in…

As both Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire would remind that obstacles must be named before being transcended, the author writes then with the intention of naming, and he names with the hope of transcending. For the purposes of this paper, transcendence means the replacement of a homogenizing public school system--one that indoctrinates children…