Pedagogy of the anxious: rethinking critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal autonomy and responsibilization

Critical pedagogy, and the work of Paulo Freire in particular, understands the struggle for emancipation as involving the emergence, as historical subjects, of those who have been marginalized. In this regard, this tradition could be said to foreground a politics of the subject as central to its philosophy. However, scholars of critical pedagogy have not adequately attended to the reorganization of subjectivity that neoliberalism itself proposes. In the context of a pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation, neoliberalism asks us to understand ourselves on the basis of principles of individual responsibility, autonomy, and competition. Starting from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and the Lacanian notions of drive and desire, I describe how this neoliberal recomposition of the subject poses a challenge to key principles in critical pedagogy. Thus, Freire’s account of the paralysis that characterizes the oppressed stands in contrast to the particular autonomy and hypermobility that neoliberalism demands. Likewise, the privileging of the sphere of consciousness in Freire overlooks the structure of libidinal investments within neoliberal circuits of consumption and communication. This interrogation has implications for critical education in the present, which I argue should invite students to betray the compulsions of their anxious autonomy in favor of a collective commitment and enlivened agency.     

Longitudinal Links Between Fathers’ and Mothers’ Harsh Verbal Discipline and Adolescents’ Conduct Problems and Depressive Symptoms

This study used cross‐lagged modeling to examine reciprocal relations between maternal and paternal harsh verbal discipline and adolescents’ conduct problems and depressive symptoms. Data were from a sample of 976 two‐parent families and their children (51% males; 54% European American, 40% African American). Mothers’ and fathers’ harsh verbal discipline at age 13 predicted an increase in adolescent conduct problems and depressive symptoms between ages 13 and 14. A child effect was also present, with adolescent misconduct at age 13 predicting increases in mothers’ and fathers’ harsh verbal discipline between ages 13 and 14. Furthermore, maternal and paternal warmth did not moderate the longitudinal associations between mothers’ and fathers’ use of harsh verbal discipline and adolescent conduct problems and depressive symptoms.     

Engaging the Campus Community Through New Roles and New Relationships: The McMaster University Library Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Recent reports identify a problem concerning university libraries—that of trending toward the disintermediation from the research process. Many experts have called for libraries to begin leading scholarship and to keep themselves relevant to faculty and students in light of recent work illustrating that within the hierarchy of answering questions regarding information evaluation and searching, librarians fall below Internet search engines, instructors, and even friends. In order to be successful and stay relevant, libraries must be reestablished as leaders within the university community. McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada has taken the approach of “library as lab” by matching the needs of the library with the interests of an emerging scholar. This has led to the creation of three library-funded postdoctoral fellowships in a program sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources. The new positions have been successful in facilitating a greater number of university partnerships in both teaching and research through such initiatives as the creation of the Virtual Museum of the Holocaust and the Resistance and the opening of the Lyons New Media Center. The ongoing success of the postdoctoral initiative is insured with the creation of the McMaster Centre for Digital Scholarship.     

A Sales Floor in the Sky: Philadelphia Department Stores and the Radio Boom of the 1920s

Between 1920 and 1922, the number of radio stations in the United States mushroomed from a handful to almost 600. Department stores operated 30 of these stations, using the airwaves to stimulate the sale of receivers, to advertise the store, and to promote merchandise. This research analyzes the phenomenon of department store radio stations, with a particular focus on Philadelphia. In contrast to historical accounts of radio that stress the dramatic commercialization of the industry in the late 20s, this research argues that advertising has always been a defining element of the American approach to broadcasting.     

Antiracist Solidarity in Critical Education: Contemporary Problems and Possibilities

This paper argues that antiracist solidarity in education remains urgent, but that in framing solidarity projects critical educators have not been sufficiently attentive to the shape and extent of racism as a global ordering of social life. We describe the paternalism that has determined historical efforts at solidarity between African Americans and Whites and then extend our analysis of whiteness to the contemporary context, outlining its expressions in schooling and the challenges they pose for solidarity projects. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies and philosophy, we describe whiteness as a basic ordering of human being as well as a system of material and cultural oppression, and suggest that antiracist solidarity has to involve a reorganization of ways of being and knowing as well as a vision of global coexistence that respects epistemological difference and autonomy. On this basis we identify several key principles that should guide projects of antiracist solidarity in the present. The paper describes the most important implications of these principles for teaching, focusing in particular on the differing costs to teachers of color and White teachers of participation in antiracist activism, and outlining a form of solidarity without guarantees that can orient critical work in schools.     

Context,Content and Social Responsibility in Professional Education

The paper describes a curriculum experiment designed to provide a “liberal” complement to the vocational core of an undergraduate programme. After tracing the genesis of the new “context” curriculum its rationale is set out in terms of three key educational assumptions. From these flow implications for both the content of what is to be taught and the ways in which teaching and learning should be conducted.