radical pedagogy: toward a minor education exam reading list

Area 1: Articulating Critical Pedagogy

Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).

———, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Voice and Political Empowerment,” Educational Theory 38(1), 1988: 61-75.

———, “Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature 9(1), 2003: 91-105.

———, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1), 2004: 59-97.

Henry Giroux and Susan Searles Giroux, “Challenging Neo-liberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 6(1), 2006: 21-32.

Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio, Critical Pedagogy in the 21^st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

Peter McLaren, “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 432-462.

———, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 289-314.

———, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Boston: Pearson, 2007).

———, “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 6(2), 2010: 1-11.

Peter McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?,” Educational Researcher 29(3), 2000: 25-33.

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(3), 2010: 251-262.

Peter McLaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching In and Against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teacher Education Quarterly (Winter 2004): 131-153.

Matthew Smith, Jean Ryoo, and Peter McLaren, “A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Education and Society 27(3), 2009: 59-76.

 

Area 2: Critiquing Critical Pedagogy

Anne C. Bell and Constance L. Russell, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,” Canadian Journal of Education 25(3), 2000: 188-203.

Gert J.J. Biesta, “Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education,” Interchange 29(1), 1998: 1-16.

James Campbell, “Education and its Discontents: The Pedagogy of Henry A. Giroux,” Critical Studies in Education 33(1), 1992: 96-109.

Jane Durie, “Emancipatory Education and Classroom Practice: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Perspective,” Studies in Continuing Education 18(2), 1996: 135-146.

C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 47(3), 1997: 359-375.

Scott Ellison, “On the Poverty of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy’,” Educational Theory 59(3), 2009: 327-351.

• [Peter McLaren responds: “Afterwords,” Educational Theory 60(3), 2010: 391-393.]

Nirmala Erevelles, “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability Studies, and the Politics of Schooling,” Educational Theory 50(1), 2000: 25-47.

Sandy Grande, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53(3), 2003: 329-346.

———, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy, Decolonization, and the Critical Project,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 315-336.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 463-487.

Wendi Kohli, “Critical Education and Embodied Subjects: Making the Poststructural Turn,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 511-520.

Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 487-498.

Zeus Leonardo, “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 1 (March 2002): 29-50.

Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

• [Includes: Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 297-325.]

Jan Masschelein, “How to Imagine Something Exterior to the System: Critical Education as Problematization,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 521-530.

Gregory Martin, “The Poverty of Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Politics of Engagement,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 337-353.

William F. Pinar, “The Unaddressed ‘I’ of Ideology Critique,” Power and Education 1(2), 2009: 189-200.

William F. Pinar and C.A. Bowers, “Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 163-190.

Willem L. Wardekker and S. Miedema, “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a Direction for Reformulation,” Curriculum Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-61.

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

 

Area 3: Articulating a Radical Pedagogy

Pole 1: Ranciere and Anarchic Pedagogy

Gert Biesta, “Say You Want a Revolution…Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 499-510.

Gert Biesta and Charles Bingham with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Abraham P. DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (November 2006). [http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=67]

———, “Oh No, Not the ‘A’ Word! Proposing an Anarchism for Education,” Educational Studies 44, no. 2 (September 2008), 122-141.

Issue 42(5-6) Educational Philosophy and Theory – special issue on Rancière

Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Democratic Education: An (Im)possibility that yet Remains to Come,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5/6), 2010: 571-587.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Richard Kahn, “Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 2009: 37-49.

Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo, “Imagining the Future: What Anarchism Brings to Education” [review of Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective], Journal of Philosophy of Education 43, no. 1 (2009), 159-165.

Todd May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Nina Power, “Axiomatic Equality: Ranciere and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Eurozine, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html [accessed July 6, 2010].

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (eds.), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006).

———, “Anarchy in the Classroom,” The New Humanist 120(5), September/October 2005. [www.newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom]

———, “Anarchism, Utopias and Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35(4), 2001: 627-646.

 

Pole 2: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and the Strategy of Refusal

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

“The State and the Bosses Only Understand One Language: Strike, Blockade, Sabotage,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-state-and-the-bosses-only-understand-one-language/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

“Infinite Strike,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/infinite-strike/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

Pole 3: Towards a Minor Education

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

reading notes on critical pedagogy – weiner, crisis of imagination

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

Summary

Weiner’s basic premise is that even though critical pedagogy has become far more complex than its original critical theory roots would allow – by taking on more complex notions of race and gender, sexuality and ability – it suffers from an “imaginative inertia” (58). This imaginative inertia manifests itself in a number of ways, one of the most poignant would be the attempt by numerous critical pedagogy scholars to retrench the discourse in a firmly Marxist stance (see McLaren and Jaramillo, 2010).

Weiner assumes a number of things in his critique that are problematic:

1) “that people need to learn new languages before they can be expected to understand them.” (60)

[This is actually directly opposed to Ranciére’s view of learning the mother tongue. More importantly, this critique assumes a linear process rather than a coeval one. One learns a new language while seeking to understand it, and one understands it only by learning it.]

2) a notion of progress that can be measured by a) its formal inclusion in the curriculum, b) a numerical aggregate of “how many sites have ‘we’ infiltrated?”, and c) a progressive evolution of the theory from least complex to most complex.

3) that higher education remains a site of positive privilege that some people can access and others can’t (61)

[This is problematic first, because the number of Americans accessing some form of higher education is now a majority, and second, a higher education degree or less is no longer a guarantee of a) a higher standard of living or b) greater access to traditional power structures and institutions. In fact, higher education is quickly becoming, if it hasn’t already, the new site for the reproduction of the proletariat in the form of the cognitariat.]

Weiner historicizes critical pedagogy by referencing Giroux at two points in his career.

1) “The first definition could be said to come out of the earlier days of the discourse’s theoretical development: critical pedagogy is a way of seeing, analyzing, and intervening into operations of power within various sites of learning, but most specifically schools; it is a critical theory of education born out of the need to better understand how domination, wrapped in educational policy, pedagogy, curriculum development, and assessment oppresses, marginalizes, and/or silences students, especially those from working-class backgrounds.” (62) This tradition is exemplified in Henry Giroux’s 1983 book, Theory and Resistance in Education (New York: Routledge).

2) A convergence between cultural studies and critical pedagogy [see Giroux, Border Crossings (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992)]. This view of critical pedagogy decenters the school as the primary site of the reproduction of exploitative and oppressive social conditions.

He goes on to trouble both definitions:

1) “The first suffers from the problem of totality. It attempts to be a radical grand theory, providing answers, in the last instance, to questions of oppression and schooling… This position struggles under the weight of ideology itself, for even if it is true that everyday life is shaped by ideologies, it is less clear that solutions to troubles caused by ideology will be discovered in ideology.” (63)

2) “The second suffers, in my estimation, from a different problem: it also claims to know where it stands and what it stands for, yet the theoretical ground upon which it rests and the future it envisions, is, itself (by design), unstable.” (63) In other words, critical pedagogy has no imagination.

An important distinction Weiner makes is between critical teaching and critical pedagogy.

• Critical teaching – “a way of framing one’s pedagogy as it takes form in the context of schools and other sites of ‘formal’ learning’” (66)
• Critical pedagogy – “an epistemological paradigm that frames pedagogical projects, educational critique, and social/political/cultural critique more generally.” (66)

Weiner closes with four considerations for critical pedagogy:

1) “it must reassert itself as a paradigm for liberation of oppressed people throughout the world.” (75)

a) “Theoretically, critical pedagogy should operate not only as a synthesizer of developed or developing theories, but should place most of its intellectual resources into developing new ways of thinking and seeing, new ways of imagining what is possible.”

b) “Beyond the modern and postmodern and outside the feminist and post-structural, critical pedagogy’s new role, as I see it, should be artistic, inventive, speculative; it should embrace the abstract and lead the way in rewriting categories of the real.”

2) “the pedagogical dimension of this epistemological paradigm ideally needs to be geared to those that it hopes to help.”

3) “intellectual pursuits with affective goals and affective pursuits with intellectual goals should overwhelm ideological pursuits, particularly in the classroom.” (76)

4) “critical pedagogy should be as concerned with developing complex theoretical research as much as developing vehicles by which to disseminate the research to audiences that would benefit from it the most.”

a) critical pedagogy should be driven by public intellectuals

Useful Quotes

“If critical pedagogy has become a ghettoized paradigm of liberation and freedom, then it can no longer be considered a paradigm of liberation and freedom, only its opposite.” (60)

“Too directed toward political freedom, even when it is considering culture, critical pedagogy risks a kind of vocationalization of  imagination; that is, it can slip into an ascetic understanding of the potential of culture to stir the passions of imagination in terms that might be outside of a narrow conception of freedom.” (74)

 

a plea for understanding whiteness

Don’t let the talk of this title fool you: “White History Month,” a talk given at Wabash College by my close friend and colleague, Sam Rocha, is no celebration of white supremacy (a la Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin). Instead, it is a passionate plea for a better understanding of the construction of the white race as a social phenomenon, organized around the typical cultural norm of the power and privilege of putting whiteness under erasure.

GESO emerging trends in higher education panel remarks

This past Monday, February 21, I sat on a panel for a discussion entitled “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.” Below are my remarks.

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First, I’d like to thank Franco, Valerie, Maria, and Chris for helping us contextualize the GESO struggle. It is imperative that we link what goes on at Ohio State with what is occurring internationally and with the trends and patterns nationally. Ignoring our links to Tunisia or Wisconsin, Italy or California opens up a space to further sediment our exploitation.

I use this word, exploitation, consciously and hopefully it is unsettling. As the other panelists have shown us, the translation of graduate employee positions to secure, tenured positions with the academic freedom, flexible schedule, and intellectual fulfillment that the vast majority of us want is not happening. What these panelists have helped us realize, I hope, is that without action on our part, here, now, then our positions as graduate employees is doomed to a permanence that shifts our experiences from the realm of a willingly experienced apprenticeship to the first stage of an exploitative relationship that will continue for our entire careers.

But we have a unique opportunity to change this outlook. The emergence of international and national struggles against the global regime of an educational paradigm driven by debt, decreasing opportunities to translate the new discourse of instrumental degrees into employment, and the elimination of rights for public workers (including graduate employees) is serendipitous, for us, as it allows us to connect our struggle to a concrete movement. It is becoming abundantly clear that the changes GESO has been promoting for about a decade now are not unreasonable.

What is it that GESO has been working to correct? Here are a few examples:

- OSU currently has no legally binding contract that guarantees that when an offer of employment is made to a graduate student to teach that the wages and benefits that go with that appointment must be honored. It is a common experience for graduate students at this university to be extended an offer of employment only to have it rescinded. Students who have chosen OSU for its academic programs, stellar faculty, and campus resources frequently find themselves regretting their decision to attend, given that they turned down offers from other universities that would have been more stable.

- OSU currently sets its minimum stipend level at $1000 per month. A non-profit organization in Columbus estimates that the required minimum monthly salary in order to avoid any form of public assistance is $1400, and this is likely to rise. Unionized campuses often have a minimum stipend that reflects the cost of living in the area in which the university is situated, and bargain for raises indexed to cost of living increases. For example, the University of Michigan’s minimum stipend is over $2000 per month. OSU’s minimum stipend level depresses wages and leads to countless sacrifices made by graduate employees every day. Even worse, Ohio State’s minimum stipend level seems to assume a number of stereotypes about graduate students: that they are single, wealthy, come to grad school with no previous debt, and are willing and able to go into debt to close the gap between stipend and living expenses.

- Departments are increasingly asking graduate employees to shoulder more and more of the financial burden in order to teach. The Music department has, in the past and perhaps currently, asked its graduate employees to pay for all photocopies related to teaching. Other departments will not purchase dry erase markers or chalk. The most alarming trend, however, is how many departments are now asking graduate students to teach multiple courses as a rule, rather than the exception, without adequate compensation. Philosophy and Political Science are two departments where students are increasingly asked to take on teaching two sections of a single course, or two different courses entirely, and paid at the 75% appointment level because the university prohibits 100% appointments. 50% plus 50% does not equal 75%; yet in many departments this seems to be rapidly becoming the norm. Gone unchallenged, this will soon become the expectation all around campus. The sad thing is, graduate students are so often desperate for the money and accept this arrangement without question; or when they are presented with the option, it is framed as a “learning opportunity” that will give them “an advantage on the academic market.”

- OSU has no independently mediated grievance procedure, leading to regular abuses of graduate employees and a culture of fear which prevents speaking up.

- Health care costs are unreasonable, especially for those on regular, expensive medications or those with spouses, partners, and/or dependents.

- and the list could go on.

We must be careful, though, and not focus too heavily on the wages and benefits issues. In fact, OSU has already used a common union busting tactic against GESO just when it seemed that we were gaining the momentum that would lead to unionization. In 2005, OSU caved on the health care subsidy and, in effect, gutted the momentum GESO had built. By focusing on the single issue of health care benefits, the university effectively stopped GESO in its tracks by giving a little, a 75% subsidy at the time; with our momentum killed, GESO has been struggling since then to continue to organize. This is hard to understand, though, given what we know about our working conditions, which are not good. We must find a way to fight back against the rhetoric of gratitude and sacrifice that is so normal: it is frighteningly common to hear “I’m just so grateful to have a position at all; I really need the teaching experience to be competitive on the job market, so I’ll make sacrifices now in order to make my entry into full-time, tenured employment easier.” But again, we know this is no longer the case.

The conditions at OSU are ripe for a collective response. And the GESO members think that response can be in the form of a union. However, with John Kasich in office, emboldened by like-minded governors in New Jersey – Chris Christie – and Wisconsin – Scott Walker, union rights to collective bargaining are under attack. But if we change the way we think about unionization from the mere economism of wages and benefits toward reimagining the collective politics of the precariat – students, flexible workers, academics, and others, then we have the opportunity to shift the balance of power.

Any unionization effort must also focus on the possibility for unionization to intervene in the governance processes at the university in a democratic way. I don’t mean, however, shared governance. Of course we should be involved in decision making processes – and I would especially like to see this happen through direct democracy rather than representation. What I mean, instead, is the possibility of an campus or academic union that takes the university as a site around which we build a ‘world’ or a form of life – in this sense, a union is actually what helps produce a particular sensibility at Ohio State.

This world of which I speak is one in which it is normal to expect agitation around wages and benefits issues, the university’s role in community development, and the way major donations are spent. It is a form of life that naturalizes a solidarity across employment category: janitor, Sodexo worker, graduate employee, and undergraduate work studies would just be the beginning.

This conversation is intended, as Amy noted in her introductory remarks, to begin to conceptualize, yet again, what unionization would mean for the university. What GESO has worked for, historically, has been a union for graduate employees. Over the past year and half to two years, though, we have been making connections to broader movements in Columbus – such as the Jobs With Justice effort to pressure OSU to sign a community benefits agreement that would include local hiring provisions and agreements to use union labor in new building projects. Recognizing that we must work not just in cooperation but in absolute synchronization with the efforts of USAS, SEIU, and Sodexo workers to unionize, with janitors, adjunct and full-time faculty, trade unions, and community organizations. What we have come to recognize is that the struggle of graduate employees is actually a small component integral to the role of a new paradigm of flexible, precarious, immaterial laborers.

 

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics: toward an immaterial unionism – outline

A while back I posted a first rough draft of an essay I’m working on called “Academic Labor and the New Paradigm of Class Politics.” I’ve now expanded the title to include the subtitle “Toward an Immaterial Unionism,” and I’ve revised it to follow an Introduction – Theses – Proposal format a bit more conducive to the zine/polemic sensibility that I’m going for. I’m hoping to have a draft sufficiently completed to distribute on Monday, February 21, 2011 at the GESO panel discussion, “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.”

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Introduction

A Brief History and Rationale for Unions

Thesis 1: The crisis of the university is experienced momentarily, but is in fact the condition of the university’s historical existence.

Thesis 2: The university functions in the economy today as the factory yesterday.

Thesis 3: Given the function of the edu-factory in siting and (re)producing immateriality, unions as a response to academic working conditions are insufficient.

Thesis 4: An academic union, as a manifestation of the common university, is a decisive intervention in the edu-factory.

Thesis 5: The university cannot be saved; it must be reconstituted.

Proposals

on ignorant schoolmasters

Jacques Ranciere, “On Ignorant Schoolmasters,” in Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

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What is an ignorant schoolmaster?

“At the most immediate level, an ignorant schoolmaster is a teacher who teaches that which is unknown to him or her.” (1)

“An ignorant schoolmaster is not an ignorant person who is thrilled by playing teacher. It is a teacher who teaches – that is to say who is for another a means of knowledge – without transmitting any knowledge. It is thus a teacher who enacts a dissociation between the mastery of the schoolmaster and his or her knowledge, who shows us that the so-called ‘transmission of knowledge’ consists in fact of two intertwined relations that are important to dissociate: a relation of will to will and a relation of intelligence to intelligence.” (2)

“The ignorant schoolmaster exercises no relation of intelligence to intelligence. He or she is only an authority, only a will that sets the ignorant person down a path, that is to say to instigate a capacity already possessed, a capacity that every person has demonstrated by succeeding, without a teacher, at the most difficult of apprenticeships: The apprenticeship of that foreign language that is, for every child arriving in the world, called his or her mother tongue.” (2)

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics

Feedback please! I’m working on this for 1) the GESO website and 2) for some circulation in discussions on academic labor.

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Why would graduate students need a union? is one of the most common questions GESO activists come across while organizing the campus. Answering this question, GESO activists usually focus on our ongoing struggle for transactional benefits such as an increased minimum stipend, better health benefits for students and their families, a formal grievance procedure, and other issues. Rarely, though, do we get an opportunity to discuss larger themes and trends in higher education and political economy. In an effort to make the GESO website as useful as possible, we’d like to take the opportunity to address one of the primary reasons that a graduate employee union (and unions for adjunct and full-time faculty as well) is absolutely necessary: the paradigmatic shift in the United States from an economy of material production to one of immaterial production.

Stated simply, unionism is no longer confined to the realm of the trades (carpenters, electricians, pipe-fitters, etc.) or manual labor (longshoremen, migrant farmworkers, etc.).

The early days of unionism saw the creation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO, the IWW; later, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) were formed to bring unions to new areas of the labor force. Even teachers were unionized in many places by the early 1900s (National Education Association, 1918; American Federation of Teachers, ). The growth of unions in the 20th Century  can be largely attributed to the maturation of a capitalism based on the mass production of material goods. This form of mass production brought with it a rash of problems the likes of which had never really been seen before: children missing limbs from industrial loom accidents, the black lung deaths of coal miners in Appalachia, and so on. Recognizing that government intervention was unlikely, and unable to combat the supposedly free labor contract on an individual basis, workers in the early 20th Century banded together to demand rights including fair wages, retirement benefits, injury and accident compensation, child labor prohibitions, and many other things we take for granted today in any workplace. Individually, a worker could not demand sick leave from the employer who literally exercised a power over the worker that dictated whether he could eat that night, let alone feed a family. Collectively, though, thousands of workers could force an employer to meet these basic demands. The peak of the material labor pact came in the wake of the New Deal and World War II and lasted until about the 1970s.

Decades of reasonable profits and a stable middle class weren’t enough, though, and with the OPEC oil crisis, capital began to push back. Beginning in Chile in the 1970s, then in Britain and the U.S. in the 1980s, neoliberal capital began to take root: outsource material production to countries where labor was not demanding a living wage, insource the production of new knowledge and innovation that would drive an economy without labor (a capitalist’s wet dream!). While we cannot know if we are at the pinnacle of this wave of capitalism, we can certainly say that the U.S. national economy is largely destroyed in favor of a global economy, the regional iteration of which is focused on producing knowledge, affects, and financial instruments – essentially, our economy has shifted to producing immaterial goods.

The university is one of the primary engines in the new economy, and graduate students are essential to the functioning of the university. Graduate students (and other contingent academic labor) have replaced material laborers in function, if not necessarily in experience. [It would certainly be ridiculous to claim that the experience of a graduate student in the humanities is equivalent to the dangerous life of a coal miner in 1920 West Virginia.] What is clear is that the labor required to drive the new economy is not coming from the factories, it is coming from universities.

Most of you are probably thinking at this point, ok, but still, why do we need a union, grad school is only a few years long and then I’ll go on and be a professor (or perhaps for those of you in engineering or some such department, a job in the private sector). If this were 1975, we would say, no problem, tough it out. However, the academic landscape has shifted dramatically: in 1975 the ration of tenured to non-tenured faculty on campus was 75::25; today it is directly reversed, part-time and contingent faculty now make up 75% of the academic workforce, with tenured positions rapidly falling below 25%. The sad reality is, most of us will leave OSU with an advanced degree and then go on to a pastiche of part-time academic jobs with little security, no academic freedom, few benefits, and wages so low that we’ll look forward to a lifetime of debt repayments. A graduate employee union certainly does not guarantee a fix to all of these problems, but it forms a particularly important foundation for a new class politics that can help 1) to alleviate the financial burden on grad students to hopefully reduce debt loads and increase the array of post-graduation opportunities and 2) to build a university-wide coalition of labor activists to not only protect wages and benefits, but also to create a democratic workplace.

 

an education of pure means, or towards a minor education

So, these thoughts are anything but complete or fully fleshed out. But I had to get them onto “paper” before they morphed into something else entirely. I just spent two hours discussing Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,” and I’ve been reading a bit for my candidacy exam question on education/radical pedagogy, and this is basically the thought that popped into my head. Comments are most welcome, since I don’t know yet where this is going.

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Critical Pedagogy reinscribes a violence no different than the State and its schooling apparatus. Critical Pedagogy does not seek to supplant the legal order and reconstitute it anew; instead, it seeks to renegotiate the division (partage) of the current order.

A radical pedagogy (a minor education) must, then, resemble Benjamin’s discussion of the nonviolent proletarian strike, or what Claire Fontaine referred to as “human strike.” In this case, an education of pure means is an education of pure potentiality, for withholding from an Education and refusing the demand (for more or better or more democratic education) is to place oneself in the position of breaking the link between education and violence. The constitutive violence of compulsory education, as an apparatus of the State, only reinscribes itself in any new Education – even an education that is ‘liberatory’ – that purports to be more democratic, revolutionary, or whatever. A minor education, or an education of pure means, is like the human strike in that it is a refusal absent a demand, and in that very moment the ends are the means, severing the internal link to the violence that compels social organization.

In this way, an education of pure means is a divine education, or an education that breaks with the order of fate, where the law which constitutes Education is always already linked to a particular end. A minor education, basically, is an education that does not replicate itself for its own ends.

Crazy Life

Life has been pretty crazy the past few weeks. I’ve presented 3 papers at two conferences and I’ve been managing to keep up with my school work pretty well too. Hence, no posts for a while…

I’m going to eventually get some of my 3 papers up on here, but for now, just some good news. A few weeks ago I was invited to give a paper as part of a panel at the 2010 AERA Annual Conference in Denver, CO. I had to submit an abstract and then the panel had to be approved by the big-wigs at AERA. I found out today that it was accepted, so I’ll be giving my first invited paper in late April or early May as part of a panel called, “Unusual Spaces: Exploring unconventional sites for the study of teaching and learning.”

AERA changed its process for reviewing and accepting proposals this year – I’m also serving as Co-chair and Co-program Chair for the Foucault and Education Special Interest Group, so I’m familiar with the updated process – and it was much harder to get accepted than in the past. Last year (2009) there were about 1400 paper sessions; this year (2010) there will only be about 1000, a really big cut. AERA is trying to improve the “quality” of the presentations, which is all part of their effort to become more narrowly scientific, which is all due to pressure from government and policy makers and uninformed members of the public to be of more use to setting “good policy.” Clearly I don’t like this development. So, it’s nice to get accepted, do some radical work, scare some people (no joke, I was told I was scary at the most recent conference I went to), and subvert the agenda a bit.

Here’s the abstract for the paper I’ll be giving:

The Pedagogies of Markets: Rethinking the Educational Role of Capital

Under the contemporary conditions of capitalism, education is a key component that articulates with other forces to create specific conditions for life to exist, particularly as productive life. The thought that man’s purpose may be to not work is perhaps unthinkable in the context of cell phones, laptop computers, wireless internet, and 24-hour connectivity to work.

Following Judith Butler, I will explore the epistemological and ontological questions of “framing” markets. As she notes, “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) are politically saturated” (2009, 1). However, Butler is quick to remind us that this epistemological question is deeply entwined with an ontological one because we have to accompany the question what do we know with what is it that we know?

At issue is the way markets operate in (at least) a triple-layered fashion. At a local farmer’s market, people encounter the physicality of the market itself. Walking through the stalls and talking with vendors, they then encounter a market based on meeting human needs organized largely around use-value exchange. But they also encounter a market that is global, exploitative of labor-power, highly volatile, and normalized through the exchange of money for goods, the sale of non-local products, and the presence of security guarantors such as the police. The experience of the layered market is not an abnormal one in American lives, and must surely have educative impact.

But such an analysis has largely been done before, by Giroux, McLaren, Apple, and others. However, these thinkers tend to homogenize capitalism as something to be resisted, which is, to me, an uncontroversial impulse. Where they tend to fall short, though, is that “the market” is often perceived to be the site of injustice instead of a site that can be re-appropriated as anti-capitalist. Using the works of Hardt and Negri (2001; 2005; 2009), DeLanda (1997; 2006), and Marx (1990), I will discuss the educative epistemological and ontological frames of markets and provide the beginnings of a way to think markets otherwise and perhaps give rise to new educational possibilities.

Works Cited:

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?. New York: Verso, 2009.

DeLanda, M. (1999). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital, Volume I. New York: Penguin, 1990.

YouTube Video Essay – Cross Listed on EPL306 Course Blog

The Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) has a pretty cool project called the Bureau for Open Culture which is hosting Red76, an Oregon-based collective, as part of its Descent to Revolution programming for their fall 2009 semester. Red76 is doing a number of things worth checking out, but an especially interesting project is called the YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP). Basically, they’re encouraging people to mine the depths of Youtube to find different videos on similar topics to create video essays. It’s a pretty cool idea rooted in the notion that we live in a society with so much excess stuff, including knowledge and opinion, that you can make pretty creative statements using a bricolage of pre-existing video and other multimedia sources.

I have a deep aversion to putting myself in front of the camera, so this essay will mix some text with video, but is inspired by the YTSSP.

Students in higher education:

Students in K-12:

One entry point into the study of education is to think about students: who are they? where do they come from? when do they come from? in what social/cultural/economic contexts do they exist?

But how do we understand students, and therefore the best ways to teach them, without knowing something else? What is that something else?

Article

The easy answer is… technology.

But discussions of technology often implicit notions of 1) the inherent democracy of technology, 2) that technology is a new thing, and/or 3) digital technologies, in particular, are somehow always already revolutionary.

Students may indeed read fewer books in their lifetimes than they do facebook pages, but is this a good thing? What do we mean by good? What is it that reading a book might help us do that reading Twitter headlines from Iran can’t do? What does reading an actual, physical newspaper do that reading what Cass Sunstein called “The Daily Me” can’t do? Should education as a field engage these debates? Or should educators simply identify changes in society and match their pedagogy to match what society needs? (And what is “society” anyway? And who decides what “it” needs?)

So, we have a digital divide. Basic questions remain unanswered. Why a digital classroom anyway? Can we look deeper and find out why there’s a push to on-line learning? When we no longer meet face-to-face to learn, what are we losing? Is it worth the costs?

What if the reason we’re moving to on-line education in the United States wasn’t about the democratization of education, but is instead a way to further place the financial burden of education on students rather than on the state? If universities don’t have to build buildings or have faculty serve on committees or put on arts programs, and can instead ask the student to pay for their own classroom (a computer), they can become more profitable. But should education be profitable anyway?

EduPunk: