Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 2003"

Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a critical theory of educational struggle

Abstract: (2003). Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a critical theory of educational struggle. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 5-16.

Toward a Critical Theory of Education

Abstract: I propose developing a critical theory of education for the new millennium articulating a metatheory for the philosophy of education and key themes of a democratic reconstruction of education. These include developing new literacies as a response to new technologies, a new critical pedagogy to meet the challenges of globalization and multiculturalism, and radical democratization to counter the trend toward the imposition of a neo-liberal business model on education. I argue that democratic reconstruction of education needs to build on and synthesize perspectives of classical philosophy of education, Deweyean radical pragmatism, Freirean critical pedagogy, poststructuralism, and various critical theories of gender, race, class and society.

The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America

Abstract: The Truth of Ecology is a wide-ranging, polemical appraisal of contemporary environmental thought Focusing on the new field of ecocriticism from a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective, this book explores topics as diverse as the history of ecology in the United States; the distortions of popular environmental thought; the influence of Critical Theory on radical science studies and radical ecology; the need for greater theoretical sophistication in ecocriticism; the contradictions of contemporary American nature writing; and the possibilities for a less devotional, "wilder" approach to ecocritical and environmental thinking Taking his cues from Thoreau, Stevens, and Ammons, from Wittgenstein, Barthes and Eco, from Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, from the philosophers Rorty, Hacking, and Dennett, and from the biologists Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould, author Dana Phillips emphasizes an eclectic but pragmatic approach to a variety of topics His subject matter includes the doctrine of social construction; the question of what it means to be interdisciplinary; the disparity between scientific and literary versions of realism; the difficulty of resolving the tension between facts and values, or more broadly, between nature and culture; the American obsession with personal experience; and the intellectual challenges posed by natural history Those challenges range from the near-impossibility of defining ecological concepts with precision to the complications that arise when a birder tries to identify chickadees in poor light on a winter's afternoon in the Poconos

Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent

Abstract: In this article I want to outline an argument for a New Critical Theory with a cosmopolitan intent. Its main purpose is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning society and politics. This belief is the notion that “modern society” and “modern politics” are to be understood as society and politics organized around the nation-state, equating society with the national imagination of society. There are two aspects to this body of beliefs: what I call the “national perspective” (or “national gaze”) of social actors, and the “methodological nationalism” of scientific observers. The distinction between these two perspectives is important because there is no logical co-implication between them, only an interconnected genesis and history.

Democracy, Power, and Legitimacy: The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas

Abstract: Over his long and fruitful scholarly life, Jurgen Habermas has patiently laboured to diagnose the limitations and free the potential of the project of modernity - the pursuit of the ideal of free society by rational subjects. Omid A. Payrow Shabani here analyses the development of Habermas's critical philosophy in its pursuit of a theory of justice that can address the ethico-political concerns of our diverse, pluralist, and fragmented society. He contends that Habermas's more recent work represents a position that is inadequately critical of the existing political order in liberal democracies. Payrow Shabani situates Habermas's current philosophical orientation by laying out its historical background and theoretical sources in the work of Kant and Hegel, and charting its movement towards an account of communicative rationality. Habermas's discourse ethics in turn translates his theory of communication into a sociological critique of democracy in advanced capitalism. Yet, Payrow Shabani argues, in his impressive effort to theorize deliberative democracy, and the role of law and power therein, Habermas concedes too much to 'real-existing' capitalism, and thus legitimizes political power as currently exercised in Western democracies. The deficiencies of Habermas's theory can be overcome, Payrow Shabani proposes, by appropriating Foucault's analysis of power as a contestational network of relations flowing in all directions. Similarly, he argues, incorporating Derrida's deconstructive strategy allows for a distinction between the presence of law and the attainment of justice, which is always to come, a-venir. In this view, contestation and dissent are seen as critical democratic values. For Payrow Shabani, such a refurbished critical theory recognizes the diversity of public deliberation in modern democracies, where the pursuit of the ideal of justice is an enduring negotiation that is never completed.

Globalisation, the state and class struggle : a 'critical economy' engagement with open Marxism.

Abstract: This article explores common commitments between competing historical materialist perspectives within International Political Economy (IPE). It does so by engaging with the approach of Open Marxism that has emerged as the basis of a radical rethinking of theories of the state, the dialectic of subject-object and theory-practice, as well as commitments to emancipating the social world. Despite these contributions, though, there has been a sonorous silence within debates in critical International Relations (IR) theory in relation to the arguments of Open Marxism. In contrast, we engage with and develop an immanent critique of Open Marxism through a ‘Critical Economy’ conception of the state proffered by Antonio Gramsci. Previously overlooked, this alternative approach not only promotes an understanding of the state as a social relation of production but also affords insight into a broader range of class-relevant social forces linked to contemporary processes of capitalist development. A key priority is thus granted to theorising the capitalist state, as well as issues of resistance and collective agency, that surpasses the somewhat ‘theological’ vision of state-capital-labour evident in Open Marxism. Moreover, it is argued in conclusion that the approach we outline provides an avenue to critique additional competing ‘critical’ approaches in IR/IPE, thereby raising new questions about the potential of critical theory within international studies.

Pragmatic Sociology as Cultural Sociology: Beyond Repertoire Theory?

Abstract: Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through its more recent turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory–thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory.

From Habermas's communicative theory to practice on the internet

Abstract: Communication plays a crucial role in influencing our social life. How- ever, communication has often been distorted by unequal opportunities to initiate and participate in it. Such conditions have been criticized by Habermas who argues for an ideal speech situation, i.e. a situation of democratic communication with equal opportunities for social actors to communicate in an undistorted man- ner. This ideal situation is partially being realized by the advent of the internet. The paper describes how an internet-based tool for collaborative authoring was con- ceptualized, developed and then deployed with Habermas's Critical Social Theory as a guiding principle. The internet-based electronic forum, known by its acronym GRASS (Group Report Authoring Support System), is a web tool supporting the production of concise group reports that give their readers an up-to-date and credible overview of the positions of various stakeholders on a particular issue. Together with people and procedures, it is a comprehensive socio-technical infor- mation system that can play a role in resolving societal conflicts. A prototype of GRASS has been used by an environmental group as a new way in which to create a more equal exchange and comparison of ideas among various stakeholders in the debate on genetically modified food. With the widespread use of the internet, such a forum has the potential to become an emergent form of communication for widely dispersed social actors to conduct constructive debate and discussion. The barriers to such a mode of communication still remain - in the form of entrenched power structures, and limitations to human rationality and responsibility. However, we believe that the support provided by the comprehensive system of technolog- ical functionality as well as procedural checks and balances provided by GRASS may considerably reduce the impact of these obstacles. In this way, the ideal speech situation may be approximated more closely in reality.

Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace

Abstract: In the spirit of Jurgen Habermas's project of linking sociological observation with legal philosophy, this Article analyses the Internet standards processes - complex nongovernmental international rulemaking discourses. It suggests that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards discourse - a small, slightly formalized, set of cooperative procedures that make the other Internet discourses possible - is a concrete example of a rulemaking process that meets Habermas's notoriously demanding procedural conditions for a discourse capable of legitimating its outcomes. As evidence, the Article offers a social and institutional history of the IETF's Internet Standards process; and argues that participants in the IETF are engaged in a very high level of discourse, and are self-consciously documenting it. Identifying a practical discourse that meets Habermas's conditions removes the potentially crushing empirical objection that Habermas's theory of justice is too demanding for real-life application, although it does not prove its truth. Habermas's work provides a standpoint from which social institutions can be critiqued in the hopes of making them more legitimate and more just. Armed with evidence that Habermasian discourse is achievable, the Article surveys other Internet-based developments that may approach his ideal or, as in the case of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that already claim a special form of legitimacy. This Article finds most of these other procedures wanting and argues that the existence of even one example of a functioning Habermasian discourse should inspire attempts to make other decisions in as legitimate and participatory a manner as possible. Habermas seeks not only to define when a rulemaking system can claim legitimacy for its outputs, but also to describe tendencies that affect a modern society's ability to realize his theory. Speaking more as a sociologist than a philosopher, Habermas has also suggested that the forces needed to push public decisionmaking in the directions advocated by his philosophy are likely to come from a re-energized, activist, engaged citizenry working together to create new small-scale communicative institutions that over time either merge into larger ones or at least join forces. Like Habermas's idea of a practical discourse, this may sound fine in theory but is difficult to put into practice. New technology may, however, increase the likelihood of achieving the Habermasian scenario of diverse citizens' groups engaging in practical discourses of their own. Technology may not compel outcomes, but it certainly can make difficult things easier. A number of new tools such as slash servers, blogs, wiki webs, community filtering tools and e-government initiatives show a potential for enabling not just discourse, but good discourse. While it is far too soon to claim that the widespread diffusion and use of these tools, or their successors, might actualize the best practical discourse in an ever-wider section of society, it is not too soon to hope - and perhaps to install some software.

Key Ideas in Sociology

Abstract: The classical - the founding fathers and their contemporaries: alienation, Karl Marx Anomie, Emile Durkheim bureaucracy, Max Weber formal sociology, George Simmel Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, Ferdinand Tonnies historical materialism, Karl Marx the iron law of oligarchy, Robert Michels positivism, Auguste Comte the Protestant ethic, Max Weber social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer social solidarity, Emile Burkheim. Modern: conflict theory, Ralf Dahrendorf critical theory, Frankfurt school dependency theory, Andre Gunder Frank, deskilling, Harry Braverman ethnomethodology, Harry Garfinkel falsification and conjecture, Karl Popper gender, feminism hegemony, Antonio Gamsci human relations theory, Karl Mannheim labelling theory, Howard Becker linguistic codes, Basil Bernstein modernization theroy, W.W. Rostwow paradigma, Thomas Kuhn petriarcht, feminism phenomology, Husserl and Schutz, power elite, C.W. Mills scientific management, F.W. Taylor secularisation, Bryan Wilson stigma, Erving Goffman structural functionalism, Talcott Parsons symbolic interactionalsim, G.H. Mead urbanism, Louis Wirth. Post-modern/late modern: cultural studies, Stuart Hall discourse, Michael Foucault globalization, Anthony Giddens information(al) society, Manuel Castells Legitimation Crisis, Jurgen Habermas post-Fordism, Michael Piore post-industrial society, Daniel Bell post-modernism/post-modernity, Jean-Francois Lyotard relative autonomy, Nicos Poulantzas risk society, Ulrich Beck simulations, Jean Baudrillard structural Marxism, Louis Althusser structuration.

Culture and Democracy: Media, Space and Representation

Abstract: This book is about democracy and communication. The media and popular culture are often identified as bearing primary responsibility for the decline of active citizenship and the decay of democratic institutions. Media culture is charged with eroding the capacity of citizens to trust in public institutions and with encouraging widespread civic disengagement. In Culture and Democracy, Clive Barnett critically evaluates the conceptual underpinnings of such widespread judgements. In doing so he provides an innovative and theoretically informed exploration of the interface between culture, political economy, and public life. Through a triangulation of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas, he argues that deconstruction, poststructuralism, and critical theory converge around shared concerns for the possibilities of democratic public life in a globalising age. Drawing on cultural and media studies, human geography, political philosophy and social theory, and research on media policy and politics in the United States, Europe and South Africa, he demonstrates the indispensability of concepts of the public sphere, representation, and spatiality to the analysis of the politics of cultural democratisation. This book combines critical conceptualisation with policy analysis, and connects cultural studies to normative political theory. Clive Barnett demonstrates the importance of developing theoretical arguments in connection with case studies for understanding the contemporary interactions between media, culture and democracy.

Fuzzy Concepts and Sloppy Thinking: Reflections on Recent Developments in Critical Regional Studies

Abstract: H UDSON R. (2003) Fuzzy concepts and sloppy thinking: reflections on recent developments in critical regional studies, Reg. Studies 37 , 741-746. There have been considerable changes in approaches to the study of regions and regional uneven development in recent years. Much of this has been associated with cultural and institutional "turns' in the social sciences, involving a greater reliance upon case studies, qualitative forms of evidence and analysis, and different concepts of theory. For Ann Markusen these developments are problematic, both in themselves and in their resultant increasing detachment from public policy. I have some sympathy with her critique but in some respects see it as misconceived. Not least this is because of its conflation of quantitative methods with a traditional conception of theory that sits oddly with her call for greater policy and political involvement. Such concerns are better served by the theoretical traditions and practices of critical theory and political economy. H UD...

Critical Social Theory: Culture, Society and Critique

Abstract: Criticism by Theory Culture as Myth Work and Non-Work The Critique of Everyday Life Sex and Sexuality Art and Entertainment Knowledge, Action and Politics The Idea of a Critical Theory

Crossroads and Blind Alleys: A Critical Examination of Recent Writing About Race

Abstract: In recent years, idealist approaches and discourse analysis have moved to the fore Perhaps inspired by Continental philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and by trends in literary criticism and theory, many contemporary critical race theorists work almost entirely in the realm of discourse Although the occasional realist work does make an appearance, Critical Race Theory today is almost entirely dominated by the analysis of text, discourse, and mindset The study of "race" has supplanted the study of race A new collection illustrates this shift Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, edited by three members of the new generation of critical theorists, brings the ascension of discourse analysis into bold relief With essays on narrative, voice, the heroic, essentialism, anti-essentialism, and the black/white binary paradigm of race, Crossroads, which grew out of a recent Critical Race Theory conference at Yale Law School, constitutes a major, implicit statement in favor of discourse analysis and against the materialist/realist approaches of the movement's founding figures This Essay begins in Part II by outlining the history of Critical Race Theory and showing how a little recognized split between the two types of theories developed Part III summarizes Crossroads and shows how it falls almost entirely on the side of discourse analysis Part IV explains the limits of this approach and how it fails to even explain changes in the very racial consciousness it seeks to understand Part V offers a materialist explanation for the recent turn Part VI describes a radically different book written recently by Derrick Bell, one of the movement's founding figures; and Part VII concludes by sketching some issues that the next major volume of critical race writing should address

Transformational Education and Critical Music Pedagogy: examining the link between culture and learning

Abstract: This essay seeks to uncover liberatory practice in an epistomological appraisal of culture, foregrounding two very different views of its role in education. A traditional view of aesthetics, as promulgated by Mathew Arnold, will emphasise the power of culture or the arts to transform or uplift. Examples from the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx will argue that culture's primary function is not artistic production or aesthetic satisfaction, but rather education—or indoctrination. Viewed from opposing angles, both writers saw culture as teacher and subject. The results of their thinking gave birth to 20th-century critical theory. The author asserts that a critical review of the meaning of culture, particularly the relationship between education—formal or otherwise—and our society's dominant culture must lead to action. Teaching examples will illustrate a sense of possibility, of transformation, attempting to reconnect music education with real life. Ambiguities, however, surround such attempts. By way of...

The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics

Abstract: As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno - each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.

Interpretation and the Problem of Domination: Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics.

Abstract: Hermeneutics, or the science of interpretation,is well accepted in the humanities. In thefield of education, hermeneutics has played arelatively marginal role in research. It isthe task of this essay to introduce thegeneral methods and findings of Paul Ricoeur'shermeneutics. Specifically, the essayinterprets the usefulness of Ricoeur'sphilosophy in the study of domination. Theproblem of domination has been a target ofanalysis for critical pedagogy since itsinception. However, the role of interpretationas a constitutive part of ideology critique isrelatively understudied and it is here thatRicoeur's ideas are instructive. Last, theessay radicalizes Ricoeur's insights in orderto realize their potential to disruptasymmetrical relations of power in education. To this extent, the author contributes to thebuilding of a critical brand of hermeneutics,or the interpretation of domination.

A critical theory perspective on accelerated learning

Abstract: This chapter situates accelerated learning programs, and in particular cohort-based programs, within a critical analysis using concepts from Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm.

Art as a Form of Knowledge: The Implications for Critical Management

Abstract: Theodor Adorno (1970/1997) declared that art was a form of knowledge. In a somewhat related vein, his critical theorist colleague Herbert Marcuse (1956/1998) characterized art as a mode of cognition that is an alternative to positivism. The work of these two scholars is linked with the school of thought called ‘The Frankfurt School’. Famous for its notion and development of ‘critical theory’, the Frankfurt School’s work was carried out initially at the Institut fur Sozialforschung (the Institute for Social Research). This Institute was established in, but financially independent of, Frankfurt University. Founded in February 1923, a number of the scholars associated with the Institute found themselves drawn to art and the aesthetics as arenas in which alternative ways of thinking and ‘seeing’ were possible. For this group of scholars, in many ways, authentic art represented a ‘Great Refusal’ (Marcuse, 1956/1998, p. 149) against totalizing forms of logic.

Introduction to German philosophy : from Kant to Habermas

Abstract: Preface. Introduction. 1. The Kantian Revolution. 2. The Discovery of Language: Hamann to Herder. 3. German Idealism: From Fichte to early Schelling. 4. German Idealism: Hegel. 5. Critiques of Idealism I: the early Romantics to Feuerbach. 6. Critiques of Idealism II: Marx. 7. Critiques of Iddealism III: Nietzsche. 8. The "Linguistic Turn". 9. Phenomenology. 10. Heidegger: Being and Hermeneutics. 11. "Critical Theory". Conclusion. Glossary. References. Index

Political grounds for forgiveness

Abstract: This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyright version of an article published in Contemporary Political Theory 2(1) 2003: 77-87. The definitive version is available at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v2/n1/abs/9300071a.htm