The troubling concept of class: reflecting on our ‘failure’ to encourage sociology students to re-cognise their classed locations using autobiographical methods

This paper provides a narrative of the four authors‟ commitment to auto/biographical methods as teachers and researchers in „new‟ universities. As they went about their work, they observed that, whereas students engage with the gendered, sexualised and racialised processes when negotiating their identities, they are reluctant or unable to conceptualise „class-ifying‟ processes as key determinants of their life chances. This general inability puzzled the authors, given the students‟ predominantly working-class backgrounds. Through application of their own stories, the authors explore the sociological significance of this pedagogical „failure‟ to account for the troubling concept of class not only in the classroom but also in contemporary society

Whither critical education in the neoliberal university? Two practitioners’ reflections on constraints and possibilities

This paper, based on the reflections of two academic social scientists, offers a starting point for dialogue about the importance of critical pedagogy within the university today, and about the potentially transformative possibilities of higher education more generally. We first explain how the current context of HE, framed through neoliberal restructuring, is reshaping opportunities for alternative forms of education and knowledge production to emerge. We then consider how insights from both critical pedagogy and popular education inform our work in this climate

Cracking capitalist realism: the new student movement and its post-capitalist politics

There is much talk of =the crisis‘ in higher education, often expressed in fatalistic narratives about the (im)possibility of critical resistance or alternatives to the deepening domination of neoliberal rationality and capitalist power throughout social life. But how precisely are we to make sense of this situation? In what ways is it experienced? And what knowledges and practices may help us to respond? These questions form the basis for a series of explorations of the history and character of this crisis, the particular historical conjuncture that we occupy today, and the different types of theoretical analysis and political response it seems to be engendering. Our talk will explore the tensions between readings of the situation as a paralyzing experience of domination, loss and impossibility, on the one hand, and radical transformation and the opening of future possibilities, on the other. We will finally consider what implications new forms of political theory being created in the new student movements have for reconceptualising praxis in higher education today, and perhaps for a wider imagination of post-capitalist politics

Bullshit Jobs: A Critical Pedagogy Provocation

I precede the ‘provocation’ —a word I first heard used by my colleagues Gordon Asher and Leigh French—below with the following caveats. First, I produced this provocation as part of a workshop on Critical Pedagogy that Gordon Asher, Leigh French and I co-organised preceding a day conference on Critical Pedagogies. Second, the provocation that follows, like those of Asher and French, sought to spark off debate; it used David Graeber’s rhetorical argument about paid work today, with its explicit use of the ‘b’ word, to encourage academics at the event to re-contextualise regimes of accountability in the university that they are experiencing and to consider how critical pedagogy could help them do so. Finally, I have been lucky enough to leave full time employment when voluntary redundancy was on offer (being already off work on stress-related sick leave, for the first and last time in my full-time, paid working life). This allowed me to stop being a wage slave and become, instead, as one of my colleagues put it, like Tony Benn who left Parliament to take up politics; I was leaving the university to take up education

Resistance in Britain

In recent years there have been expressions of anger and frustration against the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government and the predecessor New Labour government’s neoliberalising policies. The momentum against government policies that immiserate a larger proportion of the population (whilst the income of the super rich globally grows at a staggering rate of 14% per year (Bower, 2013)), may seem to have diminished at present (summer 2013) but it is likely to rise, especially as direct action and local and national demonstrations continue, and as new webs and political formations of and strategies for resistance are created. As Gramsci (1971) observed, hegemony is never won outright, and the continuation of such struggles is important in building class consciousness. Whilst we recognise the powerful and growing penetration of the idea that there is no alternative (TINA) to austerity neoliberalisation, and the concomitant imposition of increasing severe sentences on those who revolt against (and not merely evade) the status quo, we believe that resistance must strengthen at the levels of ideas and activism. This belief impels this chapter. The chapter has four sections. First we outline the current political landscape that has been moulded by the ruling capitalist class embarking on an aggressive policy agenda to expand, accelerate and deepen the reality and ideology of neoliberalisation. We examine expressions and demonstrations of public anger that are resisting the neoliberal and neoconservative status quo. We then, in section two, focus on the accumulation of anger/resistance and government/media responses to this. The third section focuses specifically on anger, activism, protest and resistance in education, at school, further/vocational college level and at university level.2. A brief fourth section reports on and analyses the current state of organisation and development of resistance to immiseration capitalism in England

Critical pedagogy/popular education group

Few today doubt that English Higher Education (HE), like the wider world in which it is located, is in crisis. This is, in part, an economic crisis, as the government response to the current recession seems to be that of introducing the kind of neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein 2007) or ‘shock therapy’ (Harvey 2005) that previously resulted in swingeing cuts in public services in Southern nations. Our aim in producing this volume is that these contributions help develop a collective response to the seeming limits of these conditions. We view the strength of these contributions in part as providing palpable evidence of how we and our colleagues are acting with critical hope under current conditions so that we might encourage others to work with us to build, together, more progressive formal and informal education systems that address and seek to redress multiple injustices of the world today

Bullshit Jobs: A Critical Pedagogy Provocation

I precede the ‘provocation’ —a word I first heard used by my colleagues Gordon Asher and Leigh French—below with the following caveats. First, I produced this provocation as part of a workshop on Critical Pedagogy that Gordon Asher, Leigh French and I co-organised preceding a day conference on Critical Pedagogies. Second, the provocation that follows, like those of Asher and French, sought to spark off debate; it used David Graeber’s rhetorical argument about paid work today, with its explicit use of the ‘b’ word, to encourage academics at the event to re-contextualise regimes of accountability in the university that they are experiencing and to consider how critical pedagogy could help them do so. Finally, I have been lucky enough to leave full time employment when voluntary redundancy was on offer (being already off work on stress-related sick leave, for the first and last time in my full-time, paid working life). This allowed me to stop being a wage slave and become, instead, as one of my colleagues put it, like Tony Benn who left Parliament to take up politics; I was leaving the university to take up education

Teaching Social Theory in Trying Times

Articles written to date in Sociological Research Online as part of the rapid response to the events of 11 September and their aftermath have considered how sociology understands the contemporary world, as Larry Ray (2001) suggested. These articles have suggested that sociology can helpfully consider a number of issues that are emerging as a consequence of these events and that there is an urgency for sociologists to address these questions in the present context. This paper adds to the current debate by considering some implications of 11 September and its aftermath for the teaching of sociology. It does so by first exploring the current marketising context in which we teach and our students learn. It then considers my response to these events as a lecturer teaching Contemporary Social Theory and Globalisation in autumn 2001 and suggests that we as lecturers need to demonstrate to our students now more than ever the usefulness of sociology to developing a fuller understanding of the contemporary world.Benchmarking Sociology; Knowledge-Based Economic Restructuring; Marketising Higher Education; Teaching Social Theory

Critical hope in English higher education today, constraints and possibilities in two new universities

This paper questions how far it is possible to teach for critical hope in English higher education given changes now taking place and that can be anticipated from the self-styled 'free-market reform' introduced by the 2003 HE Act. It draws upon Gramsci and Freire to develop a dialogic pedagogy with students at two former polytechnics. It then describes interactions aiming to develop such a pedagogy with ethnically mixed, predominantly female, locally living and working class sociology students at one institution and similar students on an introductory core course for a youth and community degree at the other. The paper invites contributions to what is in effect an evidence-based conversation between the co-authors on how far critical pedagogy can afford students and teachers opportunities to go beyond the commodified transmission of information in specialist academic disciplines and of competences specified for future occupation in the emerging hierarchy of researching, teaching and training universities