Giroux, drawing on Hall, sees educators as stuck in a particular conundrum nowadays, either serving the interests of capital or forced to pretend they have no interests at all. Moreover, those who do view education as always political and call for a pedagogy aimed toward popular liberation, often narrow this discourse to the realm of class. Issues of culture, representation, and identity are dismissed as divisive or subsidiary.
But Giroux argues that culture is an asset to liberation pedagogy: “As a pedagogical force, culture is saturated with politics and offers in the broadest sense the context and content for the negotiation of knowledge and skills that enable a kind of critical reading of the world from a position of agency and possibility, within unequal relations of power.” Particularly if we view knowledge production as today a primary productive force, then culture itself is “the site 'of the production and struggle over power'.”
Notably, Giroux associates the New Left class-centric, culture-dismissive camp as adhering to a kind of white supremacist patriotism, like a different flavor of right-wing nationalism. How should we square the asymmetry in the Right and this Left Giroux critiques and their different ideas about the existence of education as political or “objective”? What does this tell us about the work objectivity is doing?
Hall, Morley reminds us, was adamant that common sense has a history. Morley argues that it is more than ‘common sense’ that cultural studies is interdisciplinary, as it is something maintained against the penchant to retreat to “respectable” social sciences like sociology, against attacks on its legitimacy.
In these attacks, cultural studies has been blamed for turning attention away from the “real” and hard facts to the superficial and trivial––an accusation steeped in gendered meaning. Hall, critical of the strands of sociology which mainstreamed--the more essentialist, quantitative ones, deemed more “serious.” Can you think of any examples of the way a subject has been framed in sociology versus in another discipline that demonstrates this point? Or what does it look like to study something by its essences versus by its bonds?
Morley highlights a key quality of Hall’s work is its non-fixedness and opposition to linearity: “rather than thinking in terms of a linear succession of truths, paradigms or models, each displacing the other in some triumphal progress, we are better served by a multidimensional model, which builds new insights on to the old, in a process of dialogue and transformation.” That is, we should not understand sociology (or any discipline) on a linear track to better realizing its goals, but instead see it as yet another battlefield of actors taking up the mantle of this thing “sociology” to pursue different goals, while also feeling the pressure of others to alter their goals. Is it possible to write this way––as pursuing certain goals and grounded in certain assumptions––without violating mainstream criteria for scientific or academic science?
Comments
Post a Comment