Anti-Racism, Feminism, and Critical Approaches to Education (Critical Studies in Education & Culture

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Referencing a range of cultural phenomena including cultures of discipline and surveillance, as embodied by institutions such as prisons and practices such as confessionals, Foucault figured power as circulating through everyday structures of regulation and relation.

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Foucault conceived of power as not only repressive but also productive and as central to the construction, or fashioning, of subjectivity. The study of discourses has typically involved a decentered and intertextual analysis of a variety of symbolic artifacts and practices. The emphasis on texts and textuality has generated a great deal of critique within the ongoing field of cultural studies, with many scholars arguing that cultural criticism should attend not just to texts themselves but also to their production within a particular political economy and their reception by audiences.

The former may involve attention to the institutional, industrial, and economic contexts in which texts are produced, while the latter may involve ethnographic methods, or participant observations of audience members engaged in reception practices. As such, cultural studies scholarship has addressed these three distinct but interrelated areas of analysis—texts, political economy, and audiences—in order to understand the complex process through which cultural artifacts are produced, disseminated, and consumed.

At the same time, however, scholars, such as Grossberg, have maintained that the field of cultural studies should be not simply interdisciplinary but anti-disciplinary, remaining open toward all methodological approaches to studying culture—including textual analysis, semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, ethnography, and more—and committed to the possibility of multi-method approaches, however challenging they may be Grossberg, Although the historical development of British cultural studies cannot be separated from the field s of critical theory, not all uses of the phrase cultural studies refer to critical scholarly practices.

Claire Sisco King

Some traditions of cultural studies, including ones that preceded and have followed the Birmingham School, study cultural practices and contexts without offering critique of them. Some scholars have suggested that the use of the term critical in conjunction with the phrase cultural studies is unnecessary given the critical aims of cultural studies in its inception with the Birmingham School Striphas, Both critical theory and cultural studies attend to the important role that mass culture and media play in shaping the beliefs and identities of their audiences.

While class-based domination was an initial focus of both the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, critical cultural studies has expanded to consider multiple aspects of identity including gender and sex, race, sexuality, colonialism, age, and ability. The theoretical dimensions of critical cultural approaches should be understood as part of a political project to counter oppression.

Most early British cultural studies did not foreground gender as a mode or object of analysis and did not directly address the gendered dimensions of power. In response, a number of feminist scholars associated with the CCCS, including Dorothy Hobson, Angela McRobbie, and Janice Winship, called attention to the ways that the Birmingham School marginalized femininity in its inaugural studies of culture, expanding cultural studies beyond its focus on class to include analysis of texts and reception practices directly tied to such issues as identity, the body, and sexuality University of Birmingham, As such, the emergence of feminist cultural studies began as both an extension and critique of British cultural studies.

Likewise, Winship examined the ideological significance of photographs of women in a popular British magazine, encouraging resistant readings of these images that could challenge the subordination of women. Critical cultural approaches to the study of gender and sex, which have developed from early examples of feminist cultural criticism, have a political charge to them, aiming not only to understand the categories of gender and sex but also to counter inequalities that structure them.

Although scholars like Hall and Grossberg have argued that attention to textuality alone is never sufficient, the analysis of representations of gender has maintained a privileged position within much critical cultural scholarship based on the understanding that symbolic practices impact, and are impacted by, the material dimensions of existence. For example, feminist cultural criticism has examined textual representations by women, textual representations of women, textual representations presumably for women, and the reception practices of women.

Feminist criticism of representations of women has typically addressed the prevalence of sexism and the domination of women in patriarchal, or male-dominated, society. This critical work has identified a number of salient themes within mediated representations of and public discourse about women, including the objectification of female bodies, the silencing of female voices, the association of women with the private sphere, the subordination of female bodies and subjectivities to male ones, and the devaluation of the category of femininity itself.

The critical emphasis on the objectification and concomitant sexualization of female bodies owes a great deal to a form of critical theory that developed alongside the work of the CCCS. The Screen tradition, which was associated with a British scholarly journal of the same name, developed as a theoretical framework for studying the cinema. As such, some cultural critics have interpreted the male gaze in Foucauldian terms as a disciplinary technology, or a form of power that aims at constituting and regulating the body.

While such work may emphasize the subjugation of women in culture, other critical and cultural work has focused more directly on the concept of audience agency , or the capacity of an individual to make choices and to think and act critically. This scholarship exemplifies a significant point of divergence from critical theory by focusing on the potential value that mass media texts may have for their active audiences.

Yet still, other critics, while acknowledging audience agency, have advised against overestimating the capacity of audiences to read against the grain of texts given the myriad political, economic, and cultural forces that induce them to read texts in line with hegemonic ideologies Condit, Critics have also warned against the assumption that oppositional readings, absent political action, are sufficient to bring about social change Cloud, Debates about the relationship between discourse, including representation and signification, and materiality have been common and long-standing in critical cultural studies.

While some scholars emphasize the role of discourse in the construction of reality, others emphasize the importance of material relations and forces in the constitution of human subjectivity. These debates have extended to discussions about gender and sex. Some feminist scholars have argued that gender is a social and cultural construct while sex is a material reality; other scholars have argued that both gender and sex should be understood as constituted by discourse. The latter perspective—which is influenced by postructuralism, generally, and postructuralist queer theories, more specifically—posits gender and sex not as biological givens but as discourses constituted by representations, practices, and institutions; these theories emphasize all identity formations as unstable and contingent, arguing against investment in both essentialist and normative understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality.

In addition to addressing the construction of gender and sex, cultural criticism influenced by poststructualist theory has also addressed the performative and regulatory dimensions of these categories of identification. The emphasis on the concept of performativity contends that people are interpellated into gender and sex categories that preexist them and that structure their subjectivity.

Over time, these choices come to feel natural and give the appearance of a stable, core identity. The framing of gender and sex as discursive categories has received criticism from some feminist cultural critics as lacking attention to materiality and the lived experiences of women. Those articulating this critique argue that cultural criticism should engage more directly with the politics of gender and embodiment, addressing the violence and exploitation that many women experience in their daily lives.

Many of these critiques, therefore, call for a return to theories that foreground the importance of economic and physical forces. Beyond the Marxist emphasis on the means of production, this perspective argues that a variety of material conditions—including ones that are political, bodily, and affective—shape the production and experience of gender. Despite their differences, both poststructural and materialist theories share a concern with the ways that gender and sex may be policed.

Hegemonic norms and expectations perform a regulatory function, delimiting what iterations of gender and sex might be considered culturally acceptable within particular contexts. Thus, much critical cultural scholarship has deployed Foucauldian theories to examine the disciplinary technologies affecting both normative and nonnormative bodies and subjectivities. For example, such technologies might include cultural expectations about diet, physical fitness, or attractiveness that circulate in popular magazines, idealizing certain bodies over others. The theoretical account of individuals as being constituted by and subjugated to cultural norms has raised questions about agency.

According to this latter position, the act of naming and defining an individual according to preexisting categories paradoxically gives that person the tools with which to challenge and possibly dismantle those classifications. As feminist cultural studies has drawn attention to the experiences of women, it has also enabled a more expansive analysis of gender and sex. As a result, representations of men and masculinity have become significant objects of critical cultural inquiry as well.

Critical analysis has revealed that masculinity is not monolithic and does not maintain hegemony simply by subordinating femininity. Rather, particular versions of masculinity may win hegemony over other, subordinate masculinities just as particular iterations of femininity may be privileged over others. For example, those iterations of masculinity identified as white, heterosexual, and middle class often maintain a position of privilege denied to both women and other versions of masculinity or maleness.

Critical cultural scholars have characterized hegemonic masculinity as related to both cultural expectations about male identity, including such characteristics as physical strength and aggressiveness, and a range of practices that operate at individual, cultural, and institutional levels and that privilege some while subordinating others.

Critical cultural scholarship of masculinity has examined representations of hegemonic masculinity in order to understand but also intervene against its privileged status; at the same time, other scholarship has analyzed potentially counter-hegemonic iterations of masculinity that may challenge normative gender expectations.


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Some scholars have argued, however, that even seemingly counter-hegemonic performances of masculinity may ultimately reinforce the hegemony of the masculine. For example, while mediated representations of gay masculinity might challenge the heteronormativity of hegemonic masculinity, these texts may do little to disturb the privilege that men experience over women. Some feminist scholars have expressed concern that a focus on gender, more generally, or masculinity, more specifically, risks displacing attention to the already marginalized histories and experiences of women.

These critiques have suggested that some versions of masculinity studies may perpetuate the logics of postfeminism, or the belief that feminism is no longer a necessary or relevant cultural project. Postfeminist rhetoric has claimed that gender or sexual difference no longer matters in contemporary culture and that women have achieved the equality for which feminism struggled.

As such, many cultural critics have argued that the study of masculinity should be grounded in feminist political frameworks, aiming to intervene against asymmetries in the ways that power is distributed between men and women Wiegman, The recognition of the existence of different versions of masculinity not unlike femininity has derived in large part from attention to intersectionality. This perspective insists that various categories of identity cannot be addressed in isolation or treated as singular but must be seen in relationship to other axes of identity.

The categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality not to mention age, ability, and nationality often overlap with and impinge on one another. Black feminist scholarship—like that of Hazel V. Carby—has argued, for example, that the experiences of women of color cannot be equated with those of women who benefit from the privileges associated with whiteness. Sexuality also impacts these kinds of differences such that the experiences of a queer woman of color cannot be equated to those of either a queer woman who is white or a woman of color who is heterosexual.

Given the centrality of language to the formation of subjectivity, Spivak has argued for a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of people who were marginalized or oppressed by imperializing forces that often compelled them to speak not their own language but that of their colonizers. Relatedly, emphasis on transnational feminism has called for cultural critics to attend to the ways that the politics of gender are shaped by not only local processes but global ones as well. Some scholars have attempted to move beyond the language of intersectionality to conceive of the complicated interrelationships between various categories of identity.

These categories do not merely intersect with one another; they may shape and be shaped by one another, one category helping to constitute another. For example, a number of feminist and queer scholars have argued that the hegemony of heterosexuality has impacted cultural ideas about gender and sex. The two-sex model, which assumes that there are two natural, biologically determined sexes male or female cannot be extricated from heteronormativity, or the presumption that heterosexuality is the norm.

Gender normativity may also contribute to what some scholars have called homonormativity, referencing the privilege afforded to cisgender not to mention white and middle class gay-identifying people. Both cisnormativity and transphobia have gained increased attention in recent scholarly work, and queer scholars have attempted to disrupt the presumed continuity between sex, gender, and desire, arguing that the relationship between these nodes of identification may be arbitrary and slippery.

Such scholarship has critiqued the two-sex model in favor of more fluid, unstable understandings of gender and sex and has proffered theoretical challenges to the naturalized links between maleness and masculinity, or femaleness and femininity. For example, scholars have argued for an understanding of such categories as female masculinity or male femininity, not as derivations of or deviations from normative gender and sex categories but as identifications in their own right.

This line of scholarship has also allowed for considerations of the experiences of those who identify as trans and for developing new perspectives for thinking about subjectivity and embodiment. Emerging in a complex relationship with both feminist and queer theories—as well as critical disability studies—the field of transgender studies has aimed to destabilize the presumed linkages between biology, subjectivity, and social roles and to challenge objective epistemological paradigms by emphasizing the importance of subjective, embodied, and experiential forms of knowing.


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New media and digital technology—including video games, smart phones, and such social media sites as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—have become a central focus of much critical cultural studies scholarship in the field of communication. The emphasis on technology has also guided much critical cultural scholarship that specifically addresses the study of gender and sex.

Such research has included analyses of representations of gender and sex on various digital and social media platforms. This scholarship has also given attention to the gender and sexual dynamics that affect the practices of people who engage with digital technologies and media at the levels of both production and reception. This work has considered not only the ways that gender and sex affect the identities of those people—not to mention industries and institutions—who make and use new technologies but also the very logics and designs of the technologies themselves.

This area of study has also been shaped by recent interest in the concept of convergence, which examines the ways that various forms of mediation have become interconnected through technological, economic, and social networks. Another recent focus within the field of critical cultural studies has been on conjunctural analysis.

Scholars, such as Hall and Grossberg, have used the term conjuncture to define social formations as structured by a variety of intersecting and conflicting forces that often produce states of crisis and uncertainty. The study of conjunctures calls attention to the complex, contingent, and often-contradictory ways that economic, political, and cultural forces intersect and interact. Grossberg has called for critical scholars of culture to attend more rigorously to these intersections and interactions.

This perspective refuses the disaggregation of the economic, political, and cultural, thereby challenging the hegemony of textual analysis within critical cultural studies. Grossberg has argued that the future of cultural studies lies with conjunctural analysis that addresses not only questions of representation and signification but also matters of production, distribution, and reception; he has encouraged critical cultural scholars to examine texts and artifacts as well as industries and institutions and to study interpretative work as well as labor practices.

Conjunctural analyses of gender and sex would, hence, consider how such categories of identity shape and are shaped by a variety of symbolic and material factors and would continue to probe the complex interrelationship of subjectivity, embodiment, and social roles as they align, conflict, and intersect with various registers of identification, including class, race, gender, sex, sexuality, and ability.

Text and Performance Quarterly , 23 , — Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 88 4 , — Ecstasy and possibilities for liveable life in the tragic case of Victoria Arellano. Critical Studies in Mass Communication , 13 , — Quarterly Journal of Speech , 90 3 , — Simpson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the re-centering of white patriarchy.

Ellen, television, and the politics of gay and lesbian visibility. Critical Studies in Media Communication , 18 , — Black masculinity and domestic violence in the news. Gender, race, and heredity after the human genome project. New York University Press. The post-nuclear family and the depoliticization of unplanned pregnancy in Knocked Up , Juno , and Waitress.

It cuts both ways: Fight Club , masculinity, and abject hegemony. Male sacrifice, trauma, and the cinema. Michelle Obama, post-racism, and the pre-class politics of domestic style.

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The erotic gaze in the NFL draft. The rhetoric of counterpublics and their cultural performances. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 89 4 , — Film and television in postfeminist culture. Transnational feminism and communication studies.


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The Communication Review , 9 , — The concept of critical pedagogy can be traced back to Paulo Freire 's best-known work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire, a professor of history and the philosophy of education at the University of Recife in Brazil, sought in this and other works to develop a philosophy of adult education that demonstrated a solidarity with the poor in their common struggle to survive by engaging them in a dialogue of greater awareness and analysis.

Although his family had suffered loss and hunger during the Great Depression , the poor viewed him and his formerly middle-class family "as people from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world". The influential works of Freire made him arguably the most celebrated critical educator. He seldom used the term "critical pedagogy" himself when describing this philosophy. His initial focus targeted adult literacy projects in Brazil and later was adapted to deal with a wide range of social and educational issues.

Anti-Racism, Feminism, and Critical Approaches to Education

Freire's pedagogy revolved around an anti-authoritarian and interactive approach aimed to examine issues of relational power for students and workers. Freire's praxis required implementation of a range of educational practices and processes with the goal of creating not only a better learning environment but also a better world.

Freire himself maintained that this was not merely an educational technique but a way of living in our educative practice. Freire endorses students' ability to think critically about their education situation; this way of thinking is thought by practitioners of critical pedagogy to allow them to "recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded".

Social transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor , who was mentored by and worked closely with Freire from until Freire's death in , [5] defines critical pedagogy as:. Empowering Education , Critical pedagogy explores the dialogic relationships between teaching and learning. Its proponents claim that it is a continuous process of what they call "unlearning", "learning", and "relearning", "reflection", "evaluation", and the effect that these actions have on the students, in particular students whom they believe have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by what they call "traditional schooling".

The educational philosophy has since been developed by Henry Giroux and others since the s as a praxis -oriented "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action".

Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. Another leading critical pedagogy theorist who Freire called his "intellectual cousin", [7] Peter McLaren , wrote the foreword. McLaren and Giroux co-edited one book on critical pedagogy and co-authored another in the s. Educationalists including Jonathan Kozol and Parker Palmer are sometimes included in this category. Critical pedagogy has several other strands and foundations. Radical Teacher is a magazine dedicated to critical pedagogy and issues of interest to critical educators.

Like critical theory itself, the field of critical pedagogy continues to evolve. Kincheloe and Shirley R. In this second phase, critical pedagogy seeks to become a worldwide, decolonizing movement dedicated to listening to and learning from diverse discourses of people from around the planet. Kincheloe and Steinberg also embrace Indigenous knowledges in education as a way to expand critical pedagogy and to question educational hegemony.

Kincheloe, in expanding on the Freire's notion that a pursuit of social change alone could promote anti-intellectualism, promotes a more balanced approach to education than postmodernists. We cannot simply attempt to cultivate the intellect without changing the unjust social context in which such minds operate. Critical educators cannot just work to change the social order without helping to educate a knowledgeable and skillful group of students.

Creating a just, progressive, creative, and democratic society demands both dimensions of this pedagogical progress. One of the major texts taking up the intersection between critical pedagogy and Indigenous knowledge s is Sandy Grande's, Red Pedagogy: In agreement with this perspective, Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, challenges the anthropocentrism of critical pedagogy and writes that to achieve its transformative goals there are other differences between Western and Indigenous worldview that must be considered.

Ira Shor , a professor at the City University of New York , provides for an example of how critical pedagogy is used in the classroom. He develops these themes in looking at the use of Freirean teaching methods in the context of the everyday life of classrooms, in particular, institutional settings. He suggests that the whole curriculum of the classroom must be re-examined and reconstructed. He favors a change of role of the student from object to active, critical subject.

In doing so, he suggests that students undergo a struggle for ownership of themselves. He states that students have previously been lulled into a sense of complacency by the circumstances of everyday life and that through the processes of the classroom, they can begin to envision and strive for something different for themselves. Of course, achieving such a goal is not automatic nor easy, as he suggests that the role of the teacher is critical to this process. Students need to be helped by teachers to separate themselves from unconditional acceptance of the conditions of their own existence.

Once this separation is achieved, then students may be prepared for critical re-entry into an examination of everyday life. In a classroom environment that achieves such liberating intent, one of the potential outcomes is that the students themselves assume more responsibility for the class.

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Power is thus distributed amongst the group and the role of the teacher becomes much more mobile, not to mention more challenging. This encourages the growth of each student's intellectual character rather than a mere "mimicry of the professorial style. Teachers, however, do not simply abdicate their authority in a student-centred classroom. In the later years of his life, Freire grew increasingly concerned with what he felt was a major misinterpretation of his work and insisted that teachers cannot deny their position of authority.

Critical teachers, therefore, must admit that they are in a position of authority and then demonstrate that authority in their actions in supports of students In relation to such teacher authority, students gain their freedom--they gain the ability to become self-directed human beings capable of producing their own knowledge. And due to the student-centeredness that critical pedagogy insists upon, there are inherent conflicts associated with the "large collections of top-down content standards in their disciplines".

To the critical pedagogue, the teaching act must incorporate social critique alongside the cultivation of intellect.