Henry Giroux - Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling, A Critical Reader

Henry Giroux – Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling, A Critical Reader
1997 | ISBN: 0813332745 | English | 304 pages | PDF | 30 MB

Henry A. Giroux is one of the most respected and well-known critical education scholars, social critics, and astute observers of popular culture in the modern world. For those who follow his considerably influential work in critical pedagogy and social criticism, this first-ever collection of his classic writings, augmented by a new essay, is a must-have volume that reveals his evolution as a scholar. In it, he takes on three major considerations central to pedagogy and schooling.The first section offers Giroux’s most widely read theoretical critiques on the culture of positivism and technocratic rationality. He contends that by emphasizing the logic of science and rationality rather than taking a holistic worldview, these approaches fail to take account of connections among social, political, and historical forces or to consider the importance of such connections for the process of schooling.In the second section, Giroux expands the theoretical framework for conceptualizing and implementing his version of critical pedagogy. His theory of border pedagogy advocates a democratic public philosophy that embraces the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life. For Giroux, a student must function as a border-crosser, as a person moving in and out of physical, cultural, and social borders. He uses the popular medium of Hollywood film to show students how they might understand their own position as partly constructed within a dominant Eurocentric tradition and how power and authority relate to the wider society as well as to the classroom.In the last section, Giroux explores a number of contemporary traditions and issues, including modernism, postmodernism, and feminism, and discusses the matter of cultural difference in the classroom. Finally, in an essay written especially for this volume, Giroux analyzes the assault on education and teachers as public intellectuals that began in the Reagan-Bush era and continues today.

A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics

A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics by Mady Schutzman
English | Jan. 15, 2006 | ISBN: 0415322936, 0415322944 | 224 Pages | PDF | 1 MB

A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible.

Scott L. Greer - Nationalism and Self-Government: The Politics of Autonomy in Scotland and Catalonia

Scott L. Greer – Nationalism and Self-Government: The Politics of Autonomy in Scotland and Catalonia
2007 | ISBN: 0791470482 | English | 223 pages | PDF | 1 MB

Scotland and Catalonia, both ancient nations with strong nationalisms within larger states, are exemplars of the management of ethnic conflict in multinational democracies and of global trends toward regional government. Focusing on these two countries, Scott L. Greer explores why nationalist mobilization arose when it did and why it stopped at autonomy rather than statehood. He challenges the notion that national identity or institutional design explains their relative success as stable multinational democracies and argues that the key is their strong regional societies and their regional organizations’ preferences for autonomy and environmental stability. “Greer offers a very important set of general questions and issues related to the broader context of devolution and global-local relations. The idea of civic nationalism presented here has a strong potentiality to become a `new’ form of diversity governance.” – Joan Subirats, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

Adam"s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins

David N. Livingstone, “Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins”
English | 2008 | ISBN: 0801888131 | PDF | pages: 314 | 5 mb

Although the idea that all human beings are descended from Adam is a long-standing conviction in the West, another version of this narrative exists: human beings inhabited the Earth before, or alongside, Adam, and their descendants still occupy the planet.

In this engaging and provocative work, David N. Livingstone traces the history of the idea of non-adamic humanity, and the debates surrounding it, from the Middle Ages to the present day. From a multidisciplinary perspective, Livingstone examines how this alternative idea has been used for cultural, religious, and political purposes. He reveals how what began as biblical criticism became a theological apologetic to reconcile religion with science—evolution in particular—and was later used to support arguments for white supremacy and segregation.

From heresy to orthodoxy, from radicalism to conservatism, from humanitarianism to racism, Adam’s Ancestors tells an intriguing tale of twists and turns in the cultural politics surrounding the age-old question, “Where did we come from?”

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