In this essay, I explore the contemporary value of John Dewey’s conception of democracy to addressing the challenges of neoliberal globalization. I begin by describing his vision of democracy as a way of life that requires habits of experimentalism, pluralism, and hope. I then suggest that contemporary forms of mobilization, resistance, and insurgency—specifically, alter globalization activism, the Occupy Movement, and the Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina—model aspects of Deweyan democracy that are especially important for our times. These forms (...) of civic activism can help reinvigorate Dewey’s vision of democracy as rich, deep, participatory, and creative. I argue a significant value of these movements is the democratic habits and ways of life they encourage and support. (shrink)

Le féminisme est un mouvement théorique et politique pluriel et en perpétuelle évolution. Aussi ce travail se situe dans les champs de la philosophie de l’éducation et plus particulièrement au sein des débats entre plusieurs courants philosophiques se réclamant du féminisme. Il cherche à évaluer l’intérêt de deux de ces approches philosophiques au regard de la construction d’une pédagogie féministe. Se trouve ainsi comparées l’approche de la théorie critique (proche du marxisme matérialiste et de l’école de Francfort) et l’approche pragmatiste (...) (issue des travaux de Jane Addams et John Dewey) par rapport au problème du “consciousness-raising” en pédagogie. Ce dernier présente en effet des difficultés à l’approche critique qui seront exposées dans la première partie de l’argumentation. L’hypothèse de notre travail est que le pragmatisme peut apporter des outils théoriques répondant à ses difficultés et venant ainsi compléter ceux de la théorie critique au profit de la pédagogie féministe. Ainsi la deuxième partie de notre argumentation se concentre sur l’intérêt épistémique de ces outils pédagogiques que propose le pragmatisme. Ces derniers sont rendus possibles par la valorisation épistémique de la perplexité et de l’empathie, et nous verrons en quoi ils permettent d’augmenter l’efficacité du “consciousness-raising” lors des pratiques pédagogiques quotidiennes. (shrink)

This essay contributes to scholarly discussions on the affective politics of demagoguery, especially in relation to the rhetoric of white victimhood and resentment, by exploring how civics education could formulate an anti-demagogic pedagogical response. Contemporary understandings of demagoguery as a rhetoric that emphasizes in-group identity and frames solutions as a matter of punishing an out-group, while also converting the shared vulnerability of life into an affective politics of white victimhood, create a new urgency to reconsider how civics education may help (...) students identify and interrogate demagoguery. This essay discusses potential risks in pedagogical efforts of civics education to confront demagoguery and examines ways out of these pedagogical missteps. The essay joins other scholars who call for a reorientation in how educators promote and practice civics education so that it takes into consideration that we live in a culture that is already demagogic. (shrink)

This article scrutinises the ontological nature of democracy and the implications that different ontological assumptions might have for educational practice. To achieve this, we use Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction to read John Dewey’s, Ernesto Laclau’s and Barad’s theoretical insights through one another. Our starting point is Dewey’s famous sentence that ‘democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living’ (2001, p. 91). Based on this, we pose two questions. Firstly, we ask, ‘How (...) can we understand democracy as a mode of associated living?’ We explore Dewey’s quotation first, then fold in Laclau’s conflictual understanding of democracy, followed by Barad’s agential realist notion of intra-action. Secondly, we ask, ‘What are the educational consequences of these ontological understandings?’ Here, we make three assertions: (a) democracy and education could be understood as emerging together involving entanglements that cut across micro-macro levels of scale; (b) democratic processes always contain exclusions carrying risks for educators and (c) ‘living’ needs to trouble the well-worn human/non-human binary and consider wider naturalcultural phenomena. (shrink)