This essay begins with the story of Vincent Lloyd who recounts a disturbing experience he had while teaching a course to a group of students of color. What does pedagogical uptake under conditions of systemic oppression require of educators? In the first section, I explore philosopher Nancy Potter's (Nancy Potter. "Giving Uptake".…

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…

This article presents an attempt to examine my own service-learning practices through the use of the conceptual tools of Michel Foucault, in particular his notions of governmentality and power. The article views the development of service-learning in South Africa and our current practices as operating within a regime of truth, and it considers…

This study looks at a student writing culture in a fifth grade English language arts classroom through the lens of Foucauldian power dynamics to examine the power relationships in the classroom and curriculum. The research questions were: (1) What is the nature of a writing culture in a fifth-grade writing classroom?; (2) What are students'…

We examine the emergence of the 'postfeminist' sensibility from feminist theory and praxis, and its relation and relevance to education. Analytical frameworks such as postfeminism and intersectionality have given equal weight to recognition-based struggles, such as those based on sexual, racial, class-based, gender-related identities. We follow…

It is challenging to define who Michel Foucault was, whether he was a theorist, a philosopher, a historian, or a critic. In many of his books, and essays, Foucault denied being a philosopher or a theorist, nor did he want to be called a writer or a prophet. He described himself as an experimenter by saying that his work simply consists of…

There is no standard definition of empathy, but the concept is assumed to be innately pro-social and teachable regardless of factors such as power dynamics or other manifestations of social injustice within a society. Such assumptions in discursive practices, whether academic, popular, or pedagogical, obscure the emergence of two important…

International Baccalaureate (IB) Directors of international schools command a paradoxical space of progressive futures, cloaking injustice and whiteness. This is enacted daily through policy, recruitment, teaching and remuneration which privileges the empowered, exploits the marginalised and thereby delivers a critical education of questionable…

In this paper we problematise the notion of authority as it appears in discourse relating to school discipline. The account of authority that dominates is narrow and restricted, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for control. This prohibits full consideration of the range of relationships in which authority manifests itself. We draw on…

Badiou's philosophy of the "event" has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou…

Perhaps more extensively and provocatively than any other contemporary theorist, Henry Giroux has theorized the relationship between youth and democratic public life. Beginning arguably with his first book, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Temple University Press, 1981), and continuing across a number of critically acclaimed works…

Contemporary efforts to rethink the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy are part of the ongoing project to make the field relevant to current struggles against oppression. Inherent to this project is an invitation to account for the plurality of ways and spaces in which privilege is performed in North American society and the troubling…

In the first decade of the 21st century, efforts to create alternatives to neoliberalism emerged in many parts of Latin America. Social movements across the region took to the streets, occupied abandoned factories, and started to create new democratic spaces, solidarity networks, and social economy initiatives. In one country after another,…

The use of hybridity today suggests a less coherent, unified and directed process than that found in the Enlightenment science's cultural imperialism, but regardless of this neither concept exists outside power and inequality. Hence, hybridity raises the question of the terms of the mixture and the conditions of mixing. Cultural hybridity produced…

A collection of chapters examines the applicability of postmodern/poststructural theory to educational leadership and school restructuring in the United States today. Based on the assertion that educational administration research and publications have been traditional, conservative, and naive, this book presents a review of Weberian positivism,…