This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young's article "Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach", supports his contention that curriculum theory has lost sight of its object--"what is taught and learned in schools", and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for…

Education under neoliberal reform has been targeted as an indispensable source of profit. Market-based reforms have commodified education and are transforming public school into a corporatized industry concerned not with democracy but with the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy. Targeting public schooling as a site in which to accumulate…

This article argues that Education Studies needs to develop its existing interdisciplinarity understanding of structures and agencies by giving greater attention to the modern process theories of self-organisation in the physical, biological, psychological and social sciences, sometimes given the umbrella term "complexity theory". The…

This response recasts the issues highlighted by Longhofer and Floersch in terms of the continuing dynamics of the neoliberal knowledge economy, how this impacts on what is researched by the social work academy, how it is researched, and what type of research is recognized. While Longhofer and Floersch's turn to critical realism is welcomed, this…

This paper explores promiscuous black feminism by juxtaposing black feminism, Foucualt's poststructuralism, and my grandmother. The tensions created by these juxtapositions illuminate the ways black feminism and poststructuralism are resources and challenges to each other, and how both offer understandings of the relations at play that shape…

This commentary explains and expands upon Wenger's concept of communities of practice. Knowledge construction to improve common practice within a community committed to learning is critical. Vertical and horizontal communication, interactions within and between boundaries of organizations are necessary for creating learning organizations. One…

Defending emotions is neither banal nor senselessness. It is not falling into sentimentality (Camps, 2011, p. 33) would say. Emotions take shape within human actions and imply leadership, not just in a purely mechanistic sense, but in the sense set out by Sartre (1973), dealing with the way the individual understands emotions and the role they…

For over 50 years, developmental psychologists have conducted research around the world to understand the relation between culture and cognition. In fact, psychologists have been interested in this topic for over a century. In the late 1800s, Wundt introduced "Elements of Folk Psychology," the study of how culture becomes part of higher…

The term Critical Social Theory is employed in this article following the tradition of the Frankfurt School, and particularly the work of Herbert Marcuse and his interpretation of the political and social philosophy of Hegel and Marx. Discussing the contribution of G.W.F. Hegel to social theory Marcuse argued that: "Hegel's system brings to a…

In this article, the author will focus on Seymour's article titled, "And What is the Public Interest?" (Sarason, 1986). To the author, the core of the article is as follows: "And what is the public interest? At its phenomenological root it is a picture of a triad: the individual, the society, and the bases on which they give meaning to each other.…

In a time of rapid and unprecedented social change, the concepts we use to make sense of the ways in which young people understand and interact with the world are very much under the microscope. Some researchers argue that we need to reinvigorate our conceptual repertoire, while others argue that our theoretical tool box still has the capacity to…

Business students typically do not read James Madison's "Federalist #10", a seminal work in political theory on the causes of and remedies for factions. I make the case that they should and offer suggestions for teaching and assessment. Factions are a subset of stakeholders that have interests "adverse" to the…

In an earlier article, the author argued that there had been a devaluation of inner subjective experiences by the counseling profession over the last several decades (J. T. Hansen, 2005). In their reply to this article, J. Rudes and J. T. Guterman (2007) advocated for a social constructionist position for the counseling profession. In the current…

Despite the efforts made by the media literacy movement in the U.S. to institute media education as a means of addressing social issues, there still exists the potential for a more politically empowering media literacy education. While media literacy scholars and practitioners' avoidance of adopting particular political or social agendas is…

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…