Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 2023"

Global Citizenship Education in the Global South

Abstract: This volume presents a critical discussion that brings contemporary academic debate about ‘southern theory’ to Global Citizenship Education (GCE). It situates the discussion around GCE in the Global South within a critical and post-colonial paradigm informed by the values and knowledge of critical pedagogy ingrained in social justice. Global Citizenship Education in the Global South invites the reader into chapters written by educators exploring, analysing, and celebrating ideas and concepts on GCE in the Global South. The book is presented as a pedagogical tool for discussion that invites educators to reflect critically on the possible origins and implications of GCE discourses they are exposed to. The book is designed with the intent to contribute towards the possibility of imagining a 'yet-to-come' critical-transformative and post-colonial and value-creating GCE curriculum beyond a westernised, market-oriented and apolitical practices towards a more sustainable paradigm based on principles of mutuality and reciprocity.

Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance and the “Critical Race Theory” Controversy

Abstract: In this article, Barbara Applebaum examines “the inability to disagree claim” as it arises in objections made by those who want to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools and universities. Employing insights from the recent scholarship around willful hermeneutical ignorance, she discerns the important role that marginalized conceptual resources play in conditions of just and constructive dialogue. When such resources are misinterpreted and denied uptake, the resulting harm impedes the epistemic agency of marginally situated knowers. Applebaum claims that many high-profile anti–“critical race theory” arguments put forth by politicians, scholars, and others are a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance, and she concludes by showing how more just communications, in which disagreement is distinguishable from dismissal, can be achieved.

“Life was brought back into my body”: a critical race feminista analysis of racial microaffirmations

Abstract: This qualitative study utilized a Critical Race Feminista approach to explore the experiences of graduate Students of Color with racial microaffirmations. Racial microaffirmations are the subtle verbal and nonverbal strategies People of Color engage that affirm each other’s dignity, integrity, and shared humanity. These moments of shared cultural intimacy allow People of Color to feel acknowledged, respected, and valued in a society that constantly and perpetually seeks to dehumanize them. A Critical Race Feminista approach is grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Chicana feminist theoretical foundations. These theories guide the overall research design, and specifically, the methodological process. Four group pláticas were conducted with 30 students who also participated in the co-construction of knowledge during data analysis. This analysis revealed how racial microaffirmations can be embodied experiences, as sensory forms of knowledge that connect us to shared cultural intimacies and can serve as strategies for healing from racial traumas.

Ecomodernism and the Libidinal Economy: Towards a Critical Conception of Technology in the Bio-Based Economy

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, we carry out a critical analysis of the concept of technology in the current design of the bio-based economy (BBE). Looking at the current status of the BBE, we observe a dominant focus on technological innovation as the principal solution to climatic instability. We take a critical stance towards this “ecomodernist” worldview, addressing its fundamental assumptions, and offer an underarticulated explanation as to why a successful transition toward a sustainable BBE—i.e. one that fully operates within the Earth’s carrying capacity—has not yet been reached. Bernard Stiegler has developed a philosophical perspective on the concept of economy, broadening it to include the human condition through the notion of desire. This theory can help to obtain a more profound understanding of why ecomodernist strategies are dominant today. Stiegler’s theory of the libidinal economy offers an analysis of controlled and exploited human desire as a primary driver behind modern techno-economic structures. Our hypothesis is that a critique of contemporary technofixism as a critique of libidinal economy is a necessary step to take in the discussion around the BBE as a concept, if the BBE is ever to bring about a system that can truly operate within the Earth’s carrying capacity.

Toward a critical social theory of AI: Knowledge, information, and intelligence in the later works of André Gorz

Abstract: In his last scholarly work, L’Immatériel, André Gorz grapples with the emergence of the new cognitive capitalism based on immaterial labor and capital and, crucially, he seeks to comprehend how advanced technologies—such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, ICTs, and specifically, AI—reshape the very nature of the human subject. Despite its vital contributions, his conventional form of humanism—one that draws clear lines between organic human culture and inorganic machinic systems—is questioned and challenged by the increasingly complex and pervasive interplay between the two domains. Focusing on his later writings, this essay critically examines Gorz’s social theory of cognitive capitalism with particular reference to knowledge, information and intelligence. In doing so, the essay draws out some theoretical implications of Gorz’s defense of the humanities against post-human civilization for the development of a critical social theory of AI.

Critical theory in prestigious academic environments: a first-generation student’s chronicle

Abstract: ABSTRACT The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious arrangements is the starting point of this paper. It is also the viewpoint from which I probe into my own experience as a first-generation student of Middle Eastern background who experienced intensive socialization processes – from undergraduate to PhD studies in Sociology – at two sociology departments both committed to critical theory. Using the method of autoethnography aided by a critical friend, I explain how, within its academic residency, critical theory’s normative inclination to ‘empower’ marginalized subjects such as myself contained sweeping assumptions and inner contradictions that resulted in disenchantment and an overall estrangement from critical theory and academic writing altogether. I argue that selective acceptance and ongoing questioning of this discourse can revive a more constructive relations of first-generation students with their marginalized identities, and even turn them into valuable resources for writing and educational value.

What Do So-Called Critical Race Theory Bans Say?

Abstract: In the wake of racial justice protests in the United States, many states adopted policies to constrain the discussion of racism, particularly contemporary and systemic racism, in K-12 classrooms. Discursively framed as “critical race theory bans,” these policies enumerate lists of “prohibited concepts” to be eliminated from classroom instruction and curriculum materials. This brief document analysis provides an overview of first-wave prohibited concepts policies among the states to adopt such policies during the 2020-2022 legislative sessions. The analysis summarizes the prohibited concepts, teaching practices that remain allowed, and the nature of the prohibitions.

Why ‘Religion’ and ‘Secular’ Categories in Sociology: Decolonizing the Modern Myth by Mitsutoshi Horii is a major contribution to critical religion

Abstract: An anecdote that Mitsutoshi Horii sets out in his earlier book, The Category of ‘ Religion ’ in Contemporary Japan: Shukyo & Temple Buddhism (2018), illustrates that deconstructing discourse and narrative about matters pertaining to religion is a project that is never far from his mind. He tells his readers that a while ago, on a long fl ight from Tokyo to London, he reached for an in- fl ight magazine to help pass the time. What should have been a sopori fi c, anodyne piece of touristy prose quickly turned into something that provoked him. The following bland sentence stimulated his scholarly brain like caffeine: “ the days when a temple visit was a strictly solemn affair appear to be over, as Japan ’ s ubiquitous places of Buddhist worship open their gates to market traders and even yoga enthusiasts ” (1). Horii sees pervasive in fl uence of distorted narratives about history, au-thenticity, and propriety embedded in this well-intentioned statement. In his fi rst book, with careful and detailed critical scholarship, he counters the fantasies that underlie such prevalent assumptions about what constitutes religion in Japan. He examines the “ classi fi catory practices ” that pertain to Temple Buddhism and explains how the allied occupation imposed and utilized “ religion ” to construct an acceptable post-war Japanese state. “ Religion, ” he argues, operates in contemporary Japan as a constitutional and socio-economic category that, along with the construction of “ non-religion, ” serves particular “ purposes and interests. ” He writes that the term “ religion ” … “ is a rhetorical weapon, which is utilized in relation to speci fi c objectives. It is in this kind of struggle where different meanings of “ religion ” are constructed and

Engels after Frankfurt: Nature and Enlightenment in Critical Theory

Abstract: The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt facilitated the first publication of Friedrich Engels’s controversial Dialectics of Nature manuscripts in the 1920s. Yet the subsequent work of the institute’s most influential members almost entirely turned away from the approach to natural science that Engels had advocated. The result was an indispensably incisive critique of social domination and a deepening skepticism about natural-scientific contributions to the construction of the postcapitalist alternative. Through a new reading of the development of Max Horkheimer’s analysis of empiricism and an original reconstruction of Engels’s unjustly maligned philosophy of nature, this essay outlines how critical theory can move beyond the pessimism about technoscientific practice that characterized the Frankfurt School’s most influential early work—without forfeiting the historical insight such pessimism once animated.

Embracing Theory as Liberatory Practice: Journeying Toward a Critical Praxis of Speech, Language, and Hearing

Abstract: The purpose of this tutorial is to guide practitioners to a critical praxis of speech, language, and hearing. This tutorial provides a foundational knowledge of critical theory as an approach to framing, conceptualizing, and interpreting phenomena and demonstrates its application to the speech, language, and hearing profession.This tutorial reviews critical theory as a category of frameworks that challenge existing power structures and provides a critical analysis of the profession's approach to language using a raciolinguistic framework. Questions are included for the reader to guide self-reflection and preparation for enacting a critical praxis oriented toward justice. Recommended readings are provided for the reader to continue the journey beyond these pages.The author presents a critical praxis of speech, language, and hearing, drawing directly from two additional critical frameworks: Black fugitivity and culturally sustaining pedagogy. This critical praxis is discussed within the context of three major areas-activism, assessment, and intervention-with a reconsideration of how to leverage skills, resources, and strategies in a way that centers (racial) identity formation and multimodal communication.Next steps are suggested, and readers are invited to become theorists who continue to develop a critical praxis for their context.https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22312213.

André Gorz and contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory: Alienation, eco-socialism and post-productivism

Abstract: We argue that Gorz’s work offers a nuanced engagement with alienation that is instructive for contemporary social theory. In keeping with Gorz’s broader politics, we contend that the utility of his framing of alienation derives from his insistence that progressive critique must challenge the ideal of productivism. We start the paper by presenting a sympathetic reconstruction of Gorz’s understanding of alienation. Next, we explicitly detail the strengths his approach carries for furthering sociological research today. We then reinforce this point by arguing that Gorz’s work offers particularly valuable theoretical resources for contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which the study of alienation has been somehow hampered by the ascent of ‘recognition theory’. While not sharing all the methodological commitments of first-generation Critical Theorists, Gorz was well versed in Frankfurt School scholarship and is therefore an apposite interlocutor to engage ‘third-generation’ Critical Theory. Gorz’s insights are thus shown to be important for furthering contemporary social theory, and in particular, for helping to combat the unsustainable productivism of neoliberal capitalism.

Critical global citizenship: Foucault as a complexity thinker, social justice and the challenges of higher education in the era of neo-liberal globalization – A conversation with Mark Olssen

Abstract: This article presents a remarkable conversation on critical global citizenship education (GCE) between Mark Olssen, emeritus professor of political theory and higher education policy in the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey, and Emiliano Bosio, guest-editor of Citizenship Teaching & Learning. In developing the concept for this dialogue, we thought it necessary to frame GCE within a critical perspective that examines the political, economic, ideological and cultural conditions of super-complex societies, particularly in relation to notions of neo-liberal globalization and global justice. Olssen’s copious work has complemented postmodern philosophy by drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and it has brought him high regard in Europe, the United Kingdom and worldwide; his insights, perspectives, concerns and outlooks bring to the centre of international educational debates on critical GCE relevant thoughts through which we can better understand the complex roots and history of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism particularly in relation to notions of democracy, equity, ethics and social responsibility.

A Critical Theory of Global Justice

Abstract: Abstract The idea of a critical theory is famous across the world, yet it is today rarely practiced as originally conceived by the Frankfurt School. The waning influence of critical theory in the contemporary academy may be due to its lack of engagement with global problems and the postcolonial condition. This book offers the first systematic treatment of the idea of a critical theory of world society, advancing the conversation between critical theory and postcolonial and ecological thought. It develops a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School tradition as four paradigms of critical theory, in original interpretations of the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth, and considers how the global context has figured in their work and what might be salvaged for a critical theory of contemporary world society. It advances new interpretations of the relationship between critical theory and justice, the idea of communicative freedom, and three conceptions of power in the Frankfurt School tradition. The book further offers extended discussions of two emerging paradigms in the work of Amy Allen and Rainer Forst. The book argues that a critical theory of world society must combine and integrate a Kantian constructivist approach in a critique of global injustice, as defended by Forst, with the reflexive check of a self-problematizing critique of its blind spots and taken-for-granted assumptions regarding the postcolonial condition, as defended by Allen. Finally, the book rethinks the relationship between society and nature in critical theory, with far-reaching normative and methodological implications.

Synthesis, Dynamis, Praxis: Critical Theory’s ongoing search for a concept of society

Abstract: From its beginning, Critical Theory aimed to explore the laws governing social life as a formational totality and the forces shaping and driving its historical evolution. So the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of ‘society’ encompassing both its structural as well as its cultural components can be considered one of the defining hallmarks of Critical Theory through all its theoretical and generational variations. But what, then, is Critical Theory’s conception of society? To answer this question, the authors make use of a three-tiered heuristic model distinguishing synthesis (what is society?), dynamis (what are the driving forces of social change?) and praxis ((how) can social change be motivated or influenced by social actors?). In this way, they are able to reconstruct not only the divergences and controversies between the different versions and approaches in Critical Theory across the four generations of authors writing in this tradition, but also four core points of convergence which can serve to differentiate between Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition and other critical theories. These four points, we suggest, should be seen to form the backbone of any valid conception of society in contemporary Critical Theory.

Making Sense of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: A Critical Realist View

Abstract: Other SectionsAbstractINTRODUCTIONCARR ON THE INTERWAR CRISISREALIST PERSPECTIVES ON THE BALANCE OF POWER AND THE INTERWAR PERIODWORLD POLITICS AS CONTESTATION OVER SOCIAL ORDERSPUTTING THE INTERWAR CRISIS IN COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVECONCLUSIONFootnoteFigureReference

Theodor W. Adorno and the Negativist Paradigm of Critical Theory

Abstract: Abstract Chapter 3 offers a reconstruction of Theodor W. Adorno’s negativist paradigm of critical theory, which is methodologically grounded in his attempt to free dialectics from Hegel’s affirmative and system-building embrace and unleash negative dialectics as an open-ended remembrance of suppressed non-identity. This method is put to practice in his and Horkheimer’s dark masterpiece, the Dialektik der Aufklärung, which interprets human history and the enlightenment project as a long struggle to wrest power over human life from nature’s hands that ultimately reverts into blind human domination of not only external nature but also inner human nature as well as other human beings, culminating in the collapse of enlightened civilization into fascist barbarism, total war, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Moreover, Adorno also develops an exceedingly bleak sociological account of late-capitalist society, which sees individual subjects in thrall to all-powerful and pervasive forces of social heteronomy through the administered world and a universal system of delusion—maintained, in part, by the culture industry’s reduction of art to the manipulation of needs. The chapter argues that Adorno’s work is animated by a firm albeit dialectical normative commitment to a conception of freedom as autonomy and Mündigkeit, which calls for an individual ethics of resistance to social heteronomy and a mimetic reconciliation with nature that can only, however, be grasped at in our present, comprehensively reified form of life.

Expanding ‘criticality’ in the context of critical ontology and bricolage

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to offer investigate conceptual foundations for critical research, so called, ‘critical ontology’ and ‘bricolage’ research activities, in the perspectives of a critical applied linguist. The critique, as reinterpreted as the arts of existence or critical ontology of ourselves, is placed in the on-going inquiry for the critical and qualitative researchers in this study. Critical understanding of ourselves is also suited with bricolage research. The concept of bricolage can be illustrated in a praxis of interpretation and understanding with getting together of rigorousness, complexity, and criticality. In this study, the combined characteristics of critical ontology and bricolage were to be discussed in the construction of a critical reseacher’ biographical growth. In the preliminary stage for the autobiographical research to find out the combined meaningfulness of the critical ontology and bricolage, I mapped out the prominent and turning knowledges which made myself identified as ‘critical researcher’ in my research career. My research trajectory, based on the published research papers and books of mine, were reflected and divided into the four (narrative, critical, discursive, cultural) major turns. It turned out that I have developed my identity of ‘a critical researcher’ through the perspectives of critical ontology and bricolage. It is hoped that the further writing of autobiographies plays as a autonomous channel for developing the sense of being a critical researcher. Possible areas of research are discussed. This article concluded with some suggestions for future directions of methodological development.

Hayek’s theory of mind and the origins of the neoliberal critique of modern liberalism

Abstract: Although it is broadly accepted that neoliberalism emerged as a reaction to what its foundational thinkers believed was a crisis of modern liberalism, little work has been done to understand either the timing or the nature of the intellectual shift that gave rise to it. Through an assessment of Friedrich Hayek’s thought, this article claims that the neoliberal critique of liberalism is primarily grounded in an epistemological dispute about the capabilities of mind that can be traced to the early nineteenth century and the development of Jeremy Bentham’s universal principle of self-preference. Hayek’s epistemological perspective, anchored in a theory of the understanding, and Bentham’s conception of mind as plastic, knowable, measurable, and reformable, led each thinker to embrace vastly different constitutional models. This epistemological dispute is critical to grasp, not merely for historical precision, but also because many of its essential features lurk at the heart of contemporary debates about the rise of an anti-democratic neoliberalism, and the future of liberal democracy.