Despite current rhetoric around the civic purposes of higher education, in practice higher education has been increasingly captured by ‘market values’, the ‘corporate’ university and a technicist language of ‘teaching and learning’ that displaces more complex notions of curriculum and pedagogy. This article seeks to develop alternative languages of teaching and learning in higher education to enable explorations of the intersections of pedagogy, culture and power. Two languages are described: a pedagogy of ‘recognition’ and an ‘Arendtian’ pedagogy. A case study (...) of teaching German Popular Culture is then presented as an exemplar of what such critical pedagogies might look like in action. At issue is the keeping open of the spaces in higher education wherein the democratic possibilities and social justice purposes of universities might be argued for and practised through curriculum and pedagogical work in concrete sites. (shrink)