From Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, “Public
Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Stuart Hall and the ‘Crisis’ of Culture” by Henry
Giroux
In this piece, Giroux makes the following statements about Stuart Hall’s legacy: (1) “For Hall, culture provides the constitutive framework for making the pedagogical political”; and (2) “One of Hall’s lasting contributions has been also to make the political more pedagogical” (140). In these first several weeks of this course, I am understanding more and more that politics and political engagement/commitment were incredibly important to Stuart Hall’s work. Giroux’s article now adds another element: pedagogy and politics are as intertwined as culture and politics. Though Giroux discusses this in the context of public pedagogy (therefore, outside of formal education settings), I am wondering how this might apply to formal settings. As I continue to sit with this and think through it more deeply, here is my question:
What would it mean to bring the political into pedagogical practices in a formal education/schooling setting? And are graduate students empowered to do in our classrooms?
From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
“The Formulation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing
Chen”
In the interview, Stuart Hall said, “Living the politics is different from being abstractly in favour of it” (502). Though he makes this statement specifically in the context of the relationship between cultural studies and feminism, I found it to be incredibly profound and applicable to a variety of other contexts. Many of us want our work to mean something or improve the world in some way. This is my primary motivator as a budding scholar and also the context for the following question:
How do we live the politics that we engage in our scholarship? Is this just another way to phrase/term “scholar activism” or is there something deeper at work here?
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