The educational historian Brian Simon is well known for his portrayal of the social and political conflicts surrounding adult working-class education in 19th and early 20th-century England. However, the third and fourth volumes of his classic history of education in Britain, covering the period from 1920 to 1940 and 1940 to 1990 respectively,…

Since the death of cultural critic Mark Fisher and the posthumous release of his final lectures Postcapitalist Desire, conversation surrounding his teaching and pedagogy has started to arise. This article thus seeks to (partly) formalise Fisher's pedagogy into concepts that might contribute to broader pedagogical discourse. Building on and…

In this article, I discuss how the principle of exemplarity developed in the 1970s by the Marxist educators and theorists Oskar Negt and Knud Illeris can be a model for a deliberative curriculum. Today's crisis-ridden discourses of 'taking back', 'reclaiming', etc., the practices and purposes of the university are evidence of a widespread…

The antagonism between "class" and "race" have plagued educational theory for decades. As a communist organizer seeking to move Marxist educational theory out of the stagnant waters of theoretical debates, I turn to recent CRT scholarship, which I find much more in line with the communist project. Yet, this literature omits…

This essay analyzes Derrida's questioning of the relationship between "Theory and Practice" in his recently published seminar of 1976-1977 of this same title. It traces Derrida's reading of this relationship in Marx and Marxism, beginning with various interpretations (such as Althusser's) of the famous line from Marx's "Theses on…

The tone of this article is biographical and theoretical. Biographical, insofar as it concerns the author and his circumstances while also serving as a testimonial, probably partial and idiosyncratic, of the successes experienced by an entire generation of Argentineans in Diaspora. Although biographical, this is also a theoretical text that…

This essay places Paulo Freire in dialogue with a Black Radical Tradition (BRT) in three distinct yet interrelated ways. First, the paper situates the significance of Cedric's Robinson's articulation of a BRT while exploring how contemporary scholars are troubling his disputatious relationship with Marxist social thought. Second, the paper…

This article sheds new light on Karl Marx's theoretical legacy to promote educational philosophy and theory in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education. Accordingly, this article selects Marxian thought as an exemplar case to elaborate critical pedagogy and aesthetics and culminate with an overview of the Marxian…

In this paper, Matthew Cowley advances a theoretical approach toward higher education drawn from critical race theory (CRT) and Black Marxism. After an overview of CRT and Black Marxism, Cowley builds a working understanding of two recent (re)conceptualizations of race and class analysis that draw from both: (1) "economies of racism" and…

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of "active learning," leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which…

If the dawn of the Anthropocene heralds the collapse of the natural and social sciences into a single geostory, then why not also a radical synthesis of the anthropocentrism of Marxist theorising with the biocentrism of Deep Ecology? This article proposes just such a unifcation for theorising education. First, those on the educational left who…

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in "education" emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction "feminism" developed out of feminist…

Presenting the current mode of production as a triumvirate of capital, learning, and debt, I argue that a certain education and rhythm reinforce exploitation and domination. I propose queer communist study to break out of this regime. I first turn to Lee Edelman's polemic against reproductive futurism, which commits us to the logic of identity,…

Using the 'medical' framework (symptoms, diagnosis and prescription) in Schwab's the Practical 1 article, I analyze the current state of contemporary curriculum theorizing as a result of the reconceptualist movement. I argue that curriculum theorizing is in serious crisis due to the loss of the original subject of curriculum studies--practice and…

This piece critically follows David Bakhurst's 2009 article "Reflections on Activity Theory" in light of recent developments in the field. It sketches three directions for further research. First, it examines his identification of "two strands" of activity theory (AT)--the philosophical, which he associates with E.V. Ilyenkov…