In this paper, the author focuses specifically on how the current crisis regarding teacher layoffs in the United States is being analyzed and addressed through weak reformist discourses and how the hidden order of these discourses is revealed through current policies being implemented to reform existing programs and colleges of education charged…

In this article, the author presents his reflection about the song "Don't Cha" by the Pussy Cat Dolls (2006), which makes a strong statement in a postmodern way about women, and sometimes men, who see themselves in the world as central players in a dramatic narrative that highlights their own victimization as happy, powerful, and glorious. These…

In 2007, against a tragically ironic backdrop of National Poetry Month, April indeed was "the cruellest month" (Eliot 1922, I.1). The media spotlight during that time repositioned from Iraq and Afghanistan to Blacksburg, Virginia, where a stateside guerilla incursion at Virginia Tech would mark the single worst episode of school shooting violence…

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…

Cultural studies is positioned to address various dilemmas by asking, among other important and relevant questions: Who is responding to current urgent social issues, and how are these responders both regulated by and resisting the wider cultural forces within which they navigate? The purpose of this article is to offer some response to these…

This essay explores the cultural-pedagogical logic of what the author calls the perlocutionary effect of transcendence that the "discourse of the West" produces. This discourse provides a fortified interiority beyond history, but also a door through which racisms, imperialisms, and fascisms of the past can possibly return. The second part of this…

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,…

This article considers and assesses a youth exchange project between two community-based youth centers: The Purple Thistle Centre in East Vancouver, British Columbia, and the K'asho Got'ine Youth Centre in Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. Both centers serve primarily low-income youth, but after that the similarities are very few. The…

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…

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…

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…

More than 30 years since Hannah Arendt's death in 1975 at the age of 69, her novel theory of the public realm continues to attract attention and debate. In this article, the author contributes to this discussion by drawing on Arendt's theory of public life to investigate the space of youth media production in relation to questions of democratic…

The author of this article proposes a critical approach to sexuality as a pedagogical agenda. The author offers a brief appraisal of sexology as a developmental science, and of the academic notion of developing sex. First, the author locates sexuality education in terms of its conventional curricular organization, arguing that that sex…

This article explores how a curriculum of film becomes organized by the teacher's worries about what film may open up in class. The author focuses on her own worries about showing Gus Van Sant's (2003) film, "Elephant," an elliptical and dreamlike study of the murders in 1999 of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, to a class of…

This article examines visual culture created by secondary students as part of a larger research study that investigates how youth understand and mediate body knowledge. During a six-month period students created a number of visual artworks, using a diversity of material explorations as a means to think through the body as a process of exchange and…