Considering globalization as part of a post-colonial conjuncture, the examination of the politics of decolonization is essential to understand key conflicts in global civil society. Recently, a global movement for the decolonization of higher education has played a key role in this context, with the #RhodesMustFall movement being particularly…

Due to the current COVID-19 reality and the protests supporting the #BlackLivesMatter Movement following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, seeking diversified and innovative educational solutions like ethnic studies (ES) and adapting to the everchanging needs of students by creating supportive healing spaces of…

Recent scholarship has focused on the vital role of social movement organizations as key pathways into activism. Yet attention to how learning unfolds within social movement organizations has not been adequately studied. Informed by critical learning sciences, we investigated Kokua Hawaii, a social movement organization that catalyzed a near half…

The present study details the theoretical and pedagogical development of an experimental cultural studies in education seminar. Specifically, we explore the societal ends of education, and the means they prefigure, through a meditation on the catastrophe of the present. This will involve theorizing this historical moment, thinking through the…

There is much in Freire's educational philosophy that can be helpful in the reading of a fictional work; similarly, in engaging fiction, the understanding of key Freirean principles can be deepened. These dual possibilities become evident in reflecting on his countryman Lima Barreto's novel, "The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma" (Barreto,…

The United States is at a turning point in its history. Insurrection has become a dominant motif describing a country torn between the promises and ideals of democracy and an emergent authoritarianism that trades in lies, lawlessness, and a rebranded fascist politics. In this article, I analyze the contrasting visions, politics, and role of…

The early twentieth century was a unique period of time in China's contemporary history. It has been marked as the beginning of China's modernization and liberalization. The circumstances and the long-term impacts of this political reform were certainly disputed. China's schooling materials mostly only indicate the bright side of the social…

Within the growing body of literature focused on the cultural space surrounding punk music, an increasing number of scholars have examined do-it-yourself (DIY) music cultures through the lens of curriculum theory and education research more broadly. Extant research into punk pedagogy has largely failed to investigate one particular cornerstone of…

Within the broad Freirean paradigm that dominates critical pedagogy, there is a tendency to assume that affects such as love, hope, and empathy as well as revolutionary agency are naturally occurring in all human beings and that conscientization will eventually lead to empowerment for change (Amsler 2011). However, it is not clear how the workings…

In this article the author aims to broaden the conception of critical pedagogy, while maintaining its defining features, which make it an educational practice distinct from traditional approaches. The author illustrates how critical pedagogy might be made a more broadly embraced practice by teachers and advance its affects on individuals, schools,…

Author Jane Anna Gordon begins this commentary by saying that early in her academic career she was struck by the dual character of schools as places that can damage and waste the human potential of some on one hand, and that can and should be put in the service of liberation on the other. She writes that this point was driven home to her through…

We live in the era of the corporate-imperial university. The notion of "the corporate university" points to the academy as a marketized sphere in which the costs of education are shifted from the state onto students. A key element of the critiques of both the corporate and the imperial university is the erosion of academic freedom and…

In this article, Mark Featherstone proposes to explore Bernard Stiegler's work through the lens of the politics of education and in particular the idea of the university, which becomes a pharmacological space of, on the one hand, utopian possibility, and, on the other hand, dystopian limitation, destruction, and death in his recent "States of…

Given its propensity to foster social awareness, literature can function as a tool for developing critical citizenship, particularly in schools. This article critically analyzes John Kani's "Nothing but the Truth", a text prescribed in South African high schools, in terms of whether it presents any issues that could be drawn upon to…

In this article, the author examines how a pedagogical and creative practice in one school for lowest-caste girls in Lucknow, India, is harnessing the imaginative affordances of theater--in particular, its ensemble-building and its capacity to hold the present open for investigation--to leverage these practices for understanding the political…