This chapter contains sections titled: Characteristics and Development of Critical Theory The Educational Relevance of Critical Theory Distinctive Insights and Contributions Differing Receptions of Critical Theory Critical Theory and the Student Movement An “Other” Critical Pedagogy?

This chapter contains sections titled: Subjection and Autonomy: Foucault contra Habermas What Is Fallacious About the Genetic Fallacy? Conclusion References.

What is the trouble with schools and why should we want to make ‘school trouble’? Schooling is implicated in the making of educational and social exclusions and inequalities as well as the making of particular sorts of students and teachers. For this reason schools are important sites of counter- or radical- politics. In this book, Deborah Youdell brings together theories of counter-politics and radical traditions in education to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and explores a (...) range of resources for thinking about and enacting political practices that make ‘school trouble’. The book offers a solid introduction to the much-debated issues of ‘intersectionality’ and the limits of identity politics and the relationship between schooling and the wider policy and political context. It pieces together a series of tools and tactics that might destabilize educational inequalities by unsettling the knowledges, meanings, practices, subjectivities and feelings that are normalized and privileged in the ‘business as usual’ of school life. Engaging with curriculum materials, teachers’ lesson plans and accounts of their pedagogy, and ethnographic observations of school practices, the book investigates a range of empirical examples of critical action in school, from overt political action pursued by educators to day-to-day pedagogic encounters between teachers and students. The book draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make sense of these practices and identify the political possibilities for educators who refuse to accept the everyday injustices and wide-reaching social inequalities that face us. _School Trouble_ appears at a moment of political and economic flux and uncertainty, and when the policy moves that have promoted markets and private sector involvement in education around the globe have been subject to intense scrutiny and critique. Against this backdrop, renewed attention is being paid to the questions of how politics might be rejuvenated, how societies might be made fair, and what role education might have in pursing this. This book makes an important intervention into this terrain. By exploring a politics of discourse, an anti-identity politics, a politics of feeling, and a politics of becoming, it shows how the education assemblage can be unsettled and education can be re-imagined. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, cultural studies, and social and political science as well as to critical educators looking for new tools for thinking about their practice. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some thoughts Judith Butler presents regarding corporeal vulnerability. This might help to elucidate the problem of whether critical education is still possible today. I first explain why precisely the possibility of critique within education is a problem for us today. This is because the traditional means of enhancing a critical attitude in pupils, stimulating their self-reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. A way out of this (...) deadlock is offered from within a Foucauldian perspective. Criticality here refers to an experience of exposure and expropriation of the self. This kind of limit-experience is also of a central importance in the most recent work of Judith Butler. She links this experience to the corporeal condition of susceptibility. Our bodies have a public dimension as we are inescapably exposed to one another. The main argument of my paper has to do with whether this appeal to corporeal vulnerability might offer a new way of thinking about the public realm and about the possibility of critique, especially within the field of education. I conclude the paper by showing the originality of Butler’s thought in this respect and the possibilities it opens for thinking in a radically new way about critical pedagogy. (shrink)