In the last thirty years there has been a broad shift in ideas and practices concerning the individual's responsibility to pursue healthiness (in particular ways, with particular idealized outcomes). This is a result of the ''unwinding'' (Packer 2013) of the social welfare contract between governments and its citizens, and…

When entering the permanent exhibit titled "Living in America" in the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan, visitors are greeted with a sign that reads "Ahlan wa Sahlan." It is a greeting that translates in English to: "Your path is easier now that you are with us." The visitor, "you,"…

This article is organized as follows. First, the author introduces a few ways to consider and define spoken word in its current cultural and historical form. She then discusses spoken word literacy by bringing in the voices of youth spoken word artists to address further the question of relevance. In doing so, Ruth Kin connects how spoken word…

As a field of study, kinesiology is realized in different places and locations as a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and, very rarely, transdisciplinary project. In the words of the American Kinesiology Association, it is an academic discipline that involves the study of physical activity and its impact on health, society, and quality of…

Paulo Freire's notion that education is politics is well known to readers involved in areas of critical education, and thus a detailed rehearsal of the burgeoning literature illustrating and elaborating on this view is not necessary. After all, this view has a very long, albeit repressed, history, which anticipates Freire and those who took up the…

A book, article, or theory might be judged not only by the insightfulness of the claims it makes, but also by the connections, possibilities, and politics that it fosters. By these criteria, Robert McRuer's publications, of which the most widely known is "Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability" (2006), are crucial. He weaves…

"Elitism" is frequently invoked among the pantheon of "isms" actively to be disavowed. Indeed the charge of elitism often takes the form of reiteration, of identifying yet another manifestation of adherence to traditional standards steeped in discrimination by sex, race, and class, this time in their institutional guises in the merit credited to…

In this article, the author reads the Fulford debate as an index to the current focus in cultural studies on hegemony and the cultural politics of difference, which the author argues connects to Imre Szeman's (2006) negative assessment of disentangling cultural studies from biopolitical ends. Rather than stay within the terms of the debate,…

The field of youth studies appears to have increasingly taken on a self-consciously "international" orientation, characterized by grappling with how to represent local youth identities and social practices within international, transnational, or global contexts. This challenge is repeated across many different types of study and worked through in…

The author cites the popular distinction between "traveler" and "tourist", noting that the latter has come to signify someone less enlightened, less conscientious and less distinguished than the former. Discussing critical pedagogy in terms of this paradox, she draws upon her experience in designing and teaching an interdisciplinary undergraduate…

September 11, 2001 generated diverse responses from around the world, but for many subjects located in "the West," an enduring perception surfaced in the aftermath of the attacks: that 9/11 revealed the fragility of the "Western Self" as a secure identity. In a move towards self-scrutiny post 9/11, it is not only the presence of the Other that has…

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and amid sweeping patriotic declarations that the suicide hijackers had waged a war on America as well as democracy, the energetic response by public intellectuals, academics, philosophers, and theorists has been to ask, what "America," what "democracy," what…

The politics of body size has been the topic of intriguing feminist work. Although in the author's view this issue is still undertheorized, the author has long sought for a way to bring what "does" exist in the literature into her academic activities. The opportunity arose when, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 2001, she…

Describing what cultural studies or what pedagogy is all about is very complex, because there are many contradictory perspectives and paradigms in both disciplines. There is no single object of study, no unified body of theory, no one-and-only methodology that defines cultural studies or pedagogy completely. In this article, the authors focus on…

This paper examines issues of social difference and justice in a university international student center through a "cultural studies as praxis" model, which had been developed in the field of cultural studies and/in education by Handel Wright at the University of Tennessee (Wright 2001, 2001/2002). The model blends and hybridizes three distinct…