Sociologists are engaging in a long-overdue reckoning about the place of the traditional canon in social theory courses and pedagogy. Instructors are revising their syllabi to include a more diverse set of authors while "provincializing" classics that have long been taught as universal. We confront the question of how to teach contested…

The 100 Families Alliance in Sebastian County, Arkansas experienced a phenomenon that centered around multiple power shifts that helped men and women move from crisis to career. The current study uses a critical social theory lens and a qualitative research design that combines transformative worldview, an embedded single-case study, and critical…

Despite proliferating attention within the social sciences toward the sources and consequences of climate change and environmental crises, educational sociologists have been slow to confront ecological questions. This omission may seem surprising given the prominence of global perspectives within the field. However, we argue, such a focus is…

For several decades, Western universities have been subject to wide-ranging structural, financial and ideological changes. These changes have problematised afresh the meaning of academic identity as evidenced by the emergence of a substantial, international, anglophone research literature. This article examines how the idea of academic identity…

The historical process of consolidation of a Latin American and Caribbean critical social theory is framed, to a great extent, in interpreting our socio-historical formation, identifying the axes that structure the great regional and national problems, with the intention of constructing analytical categories destined to contribute to social…

The critical race theory concept of 'White supremacy' continues to be a major locus of disagreement between Critical Race Theorists and Marxists regarding both how it operates as a general descriptor of racial power dynamics in the Western world and for its explanatory power in accounting for the multiple forms in which racism manifests.…

As the COVID-19 pandemic invaded our lives in March of 2020, schools were forced to close their doors and urgently transition to remote learning. This action research study is about pre-service elementary teachers (PSTs) in a social justice-focused social studies methods course who used this unprecedented time as valid curricular material. While…

This essay offers a new interpretation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's landmark work of critical social theory "Empire." It develops an account of the politics of exile by situating this political strategy in terms of Hardt and Negri's claim that it is no longer feasible to confront capitalist power head-on. It attends closely to…

In this exchange between an EdD professor and one of their practitioner-scholars, the two recount their respective and overlapping journeys in Critical Social Theories for Just Schools and Communities. While the professor was trained as a philosopher and has embraced the theoretical throughout her career, the practitioner-scholar enrolled in the…

The "language pyramid" in the post-colonial territories as propounded by Melchers and Shaw in 2003 aptly reflects on the status of different languages in Pakistan. At the top is English, with its heritage as a colonial language. Then is the "national" language Urdu which has nationalist value and is spoken by the majority as a…

In this article, the authors explored the narrative of a single participant from a larger critical narrative study on identity-based activism, reconstructed as a letter addressed to campus administrators. Using critical race theory and intersectionality as theoretical frameworks, we analyzed Pete's conceptions of activism and offer implications…

This study assesses the extent to which public high schools become more or less socially mixed after families are allowed to choose schools outside their designated catchment areas in a mid-sized Canadian city. We draw on settler-colonial theory, critical human geography, and critical social theory while applying a critical mapping of school…

This paper traces the evolution of discourses around the role of critical social theory in the field of lifelong education that have played out in the pages of the "International Journal of Lifelong Education" and elsewhere in the field, beginning with early critical theoretical discourses, a consideration of the impact of some key…

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon's work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and…

The Core Practices Movement (CPM) and Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE) represent two communities of practice within which novices develop as professional educators. However, there is little dialogue about how they might collaborate to develop novice social justice educators, and the critiques and recommendations that do cross movements…