In the second-wave women's movement in Canada (1965-1985), the rhetoric of ''freedom'' and ''choice'' occupied a prominent position in public discourses. Waged as rallying points to resist entrenched forms of gender inequality in all areas of social, economic, and political culture, this language…

In the United States, corporate school reform or neoliberal educational restructuring has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum, and nearly all aspects of educational reform. Although this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced now…

Technology plays a leading role in how media is imagined, and so how one feels about, understands, and participates in contemporary culture. At the same time, technology is key to the local and global imaginaries of the university. The role of technology in the university is now profound, and indeed has gained in complexity and ambiguity with…

This article foregrounds the salience of "lived experience" in the mediation of unlearning racialized habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and in learning and relearning the "truth about reality," or the truth about others. This article emphasizes the value of positive "lived experience" for anti-racist and reconciliation pedagogies, in addition…

This article examines the relations between two contrasting education phenomena that occur generally and that have come to light in the geographic location where the author teaches and works. This first phenomenon is the proliferation of interest in issues of diversity and equity through education policies, theories, practices, and initiatives.…

Critical pedagogy believes education to be a form of cultural politics that is fundamental to social transformation aiming to cultivate human agency and transformative activity. The explosion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has provided ordinary people with unprecedented opportunities to take on the ruling educational power…

This article presents an interview with Gary Olson on the changing contexts of the humanities in this modern world. He emphasizes that the humanities are absolutely essential when it comes to the very real-world problems. He explains that what he is saying not just applies to terrorism and economic crisis; the humanities equip everyone to deal…

This article presents the author's response to Henry Giroux's "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex." Henry Giroux has written a provocative assessment of the contemporary challenges facing the United States as a society, which over the course of the 20th century had assumed the role of leader and exemplar…

In her well known keynote address at the Responsibilities for Literacies Conference, Mary Louise Pratt defined "contact zones" as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power." Pratt's view of a contact zone hints at the fact, but does not make explicit, that…

This article is an intervention into and examination of hypermodern forms of militarization or what the author calls "hypermodern militarized knowledge factories," exemplified here by the increasingly militarized universities of North America. He specifies the important arguments of his intervention into the hypermodern militarization of higher…

This essay offers a schematic reflection on the institutional formation and political location of Asian-American Studies in relation to the rise of the United Sates prison industrial complex over the last three decades. The author is generally concerned with the peculiar location of "Asian-Americans" as fabricated cultural figures within a U.S.…

This article is a commencement speech delivered by the author on May 26 at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. In his speech, the author focused on affirming public discourse, civic morality, and what it might mean to conduct your lives as engaged citizens attentive to the suffering of others and the fragility of democracy itself. He said…

Reading youth writing is an avenue for the youth where they can express their opinions and ideas. In this article, the author questions whether practitioners in the field of cultural studies are actually engaged in this particular dialogue. The author has examined several articles written by young people from "Toronto Star." He realized that while…

In this article, the author focuses on how cultural studies has been translated into the Turkish context in terms of modernization, and how the process of remaking it has raised some interesting questions about interdisciplinarity. Should it exist or should it be rejected on the grounds that it seeks to abandon established disciplinary models (and…

When composition instructors discuss teaching diversity, the concept of tolerance often takes over the conversation. Tolerance constructs an ideal "comfort zone" where every student's voice can be heard and respected. While tolerance is perceived as an admirable goal, Marinara has concluded that the ideal of the comfortable classroom space from…