While it is true that the media is largely in the hands of a relatively few corporations and represent one of the most powerful forms of public pedagogy, it does not mean that everything they produce lies entirely on the side of domination or that it is not possible to challenge their pedagogical functions and messages. There are also alternative sources of information that are being produced in counter public spheres by many groups in the forms of magazines, newspapers, journals, videos and on the Internet. For instance, in the United States the Media Education Foundation provides, online and through its distribution process, an amazing array of sources of entertainment.
We need to remember that power and domination are not the same thing. This suggests that conditions have to be created in as many sites as possible to provide people with the intellectual skills, knowledge and motivation to both be able to understand how power works as a form of domination but also how it can be used as a mode of critique and transformation.
Fourthly, we need to organize, on an international level, to not only fight the corporate forces of neo-liberalism, but also to create alternative public spheres that would offer new spaces for creating those vital discourses and technologies that would enable people to come together to defend vital public goods and the ongoing process of democratization on a global level.
In every instance, it is crucial to create world wide organizations that come together to defend the notion of the public good, democracy, and social justice and do so in a way that repudiates the powerful neo-liberal assumption that democracy and the market are the same. It is crucial to reclaim the language and project of radical democracy as a weapon to both critique and overcome the collapse of social orders into market relations.
This means redefining the importance of the democratic social, citizenship, political agency, transformative politics, and critical education. We need an inventive democratic imaginary as a basis for linking education and pedagogy to the broader processes of democratization itself. Hope must lie not only in the ongoing damage that neo-liberal capitalism is doing to the planet but also to the hard pedagogical task of making contradictions visible, affirming and reclaiming the ethical imperatives of realizable democracies, and resurrecting educated hope as a basis for creating the conditions for self and social determination.
Combining the discourse of criticism and hope is crucial to affirm that critical activity offers the possibility for social transformation. One option that progressive educators could consider is to develop an oppositional cultural politics that engages basic considerations of global social citizenship aimed at expanding democratic rights while developing collective movements that can challenge the subordination of social needs to the dictates of capital, commodification, and commercialism.
Central to such a politics would be a public pedagogy that attempts to make visible, in a wide variety of sites throughout the globe, alternative models of radical democratic culture that raise fundamental questions about the relationship between political agency and social responsibility, technology and globalization, and the re-inscription of the state as a force for domestic militarization. At the very least, such a pedagogy involves understanding and critically engaging dominant public transcripts and values within a broader set of historical and institutional contexts.
Making the political more pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirm oppositional cultural work but offer opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage, if not collective action, against glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that today’s culture of investment and finance makes it impossible to address many of the major social problems facing both the United States and the larger world.
Most importantly, such work points to the link between civic education and modes of oppositional political agency that are pivotal to elucidating a politics that promotes autonomy and social change. Unfortunately, many progressives have failed to take seriously Antonio Gramsci's insight that “[e]very relationship of `hegemony' is necessarily an educational relationship” – with its implication that education as a cultural pedagogical practice takes place across multiple sites as it signals how, within diverse contexts, education makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power.
Hopefully, the challenge facing educators as public intellectuals in an age of global plunder by an unchecked market authoritarianism will manifest itself in a plurality of forms of political and pedagogical interventions, including challenging the historical inevitability of global capitalism, defending the historical advances associated with nation states by pushing for “more education, more health, more guaranteed lifetime income,” mobilizing marginalized groups on all fronts, and making anti-racist and class struggles paramount to any struggle for democratization. Economic restructuring on a global level makes class a more central category than ever before as a result of the increasing divisions between the rich and the poor, accelerated by the massive transformation of power from nations to transnational corporations, on the one hand, and the equally massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the upper classes on the other hand. But any attempt to abolish forms of class, racial, gender, and other types of oppression requires a different kind of politics than what has been traditionally associated with the politics of class struggles.
A new politics must be steeped in an attempt to publicly confront oppressive relations, explain them, situate them historically, engage how they are worked in the intersection between the local and the global context, and refuse to accept their inevitability. A pedagogy of persuasion and transformation in this instance becomes crucial to any viable politics of democratization. Any feasible movement that challenges neo-liberalism and corporate globalization will need to develop pedagogical strategies that debunk the cherished myths of capitalism, offer knowledge, skills, and tools that “will be immediately useful in people’s lives” and, at the same time, “point to longer-run, more fundamental changes.”
Simultaneously, it is crucial for educators and others to fight against the effects of neo-liberalism and finance capital by becoming border crossers and working collectively with other groups spread out across the planet to develop global institutions “of effective and political action as could match the size and power of the already global economic forces and bring them under political scrutiny and ethical supervision.” Such projects and interventions while not offering a politics with guarantees can unleash the pedagogical and political energies necessary to combine a strong hostility to the existence of human suffering and exploitation with “a vision of a global society, informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.”
Instances of such movements can be glimpsed in the peaceful globalization protests that have taken place against the WTO, IMF, G8, and WEF in Seattle, Washington, Genoa, Italy, and more recently, New York City. The move from protest to building astute analyses and international alliance can also be seen in meetings such as the World Social Forum that took place recently in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Both of these movements echo David Held and Mary Kaldor’s call for a left that is willing to address as part of a broader notion of global justice the ethical issues “posed by the global polarization of wealth, income and power, and with them the huge asymmetries of life chances,” none of which can be left to market solutions.
This suggests a non-hierarchical, popular movement on a global scale which makes pedagogy, economic justice, and cultural recognition central to the goal of creating a world in which democratic principles provide the fertile ground for spreading the values of human rights, the rule of law, and social justice as a way of connecting people of all cultures and places not merely through the abstractions of theory but through the everyday, place-based experiences that shape their lives.
I think that the issue of pedagogy must be central for any movement for democratic change. What this suggests for educators both inside and outside of the university is that they need to take seriously their role as oppositional public intellectuals who believe that what they say and do can make a difference in creating strategies of understanding, engagement, and transformation. Such a position would suggest that educators attempt to understand and engage how capital works pedagogically to secure its political interests, how it uses cultural politics precisely as an educational force in shaping a new generation of accommodating intellectuals.
It would also show how capital legitimates the dismantling of the gains of the welfare state and eliminates those public spaces that provide the conditions for social movements to organize and spread their messages. Additionally, such pedagogical politics requires greater attentiveness to linking studies about the ownership of the media to how the media functions pedagogically as a form of cultural politics; how the decline of the military-industrial complex has given rise to a prison-industrial complex buttressed by a politics of race and identity politics that permeate the cultural institutions of everyday life; and how cultural work in the academy might articulate with and play a role in expanding the possibilities of radical democratic struggles. This focus requires, in part, that critical educators help to strengthen and build social movements and organizations capable of addressing and mobilizing against the numerous forms of violence and oppression that increasingly are being waged against large segments of the global population.
Publicizing the myriad forms of educational and political work that are attempting to reclaim public spaces such as the schools and expanding democratic relations should be made available not only among politically similar allies but in the larger public sphere. Such work provides a concrete opportunity to challenge the culture of political cynicism and indifference. There is little doubt in my mind that such work goes a long way in challenging the culture of political avoidance while demonstrating that, as Bourdieu succinctly puts it, democracies cannot exist “without genuine opposing powers.” It is particularly crucial that academic intellectuals assume some responsibility and engage what Bourdieu calls “the function of education and culture in economies where information has become one of the most decisive productive forces.” Because it is precisely through such cultural and institutional formations that cultural studies practitioners – in conjunction with broader social movements – can produce analyses, questions, ideas, and pedagogical practices that the media both ignore and offer the conditions through which people might be mobilized.
Educators must revitalize a radical pedagogy and politics that links political economy and the economy of representations, desires, and bodies to scholarly work, public conversations, and everyday life. Moreover, such work can be addressed as part of a broader attempt to reclaim the culture of politics, to rethink and expand the possibilities for social agency as part of an ongoing effort to reverse the evisceration of public goods, and to prevent the increasing commodification and privatization of public spaces, especially the public schools and higher education. Similarly, cultural studies must directly engage the question of how to imagine and build political alliances and social movements.
This suggests producing, whenever possible, the theoretical tools, political strategies, and pedagogical practices necessary to wage multiple struggles in a variety of sites against those institutions and cultural formations that provide social guarantees only to the privileged, and that provide suffering, uncertainty, and insecurity to everybody else.
Educators should continue their efforts to raise questions about and rethink not only diverse articulations of culture and power, but also how such relations work both to close down and open up democratic relations, spaces, and transformations both within and outside of the classroom, and what the latter mean theoretically and strategically for how we think the meaning and purpose of education and politics. As admittedly difficult as such a task might appear, it offers the opportunity for cultural studies advocates to rethink their role as oppositional public intellectuals within a global context, and provides incentives for mastering new technologies of communication, exchange, and distribution.
If the future is to have any meaning, educators from around the globe must demonstrate that issues linking learning to political agency and democracy are central to both understanding struggles over resources and power as well as organizing a politics that enables people to have a voice and an investment in shaping and transforming the conditions through which they live their everyday lives. Such a collective voice and investment requires that people experience themselves as critical social agents along multiple axis of identification, investment, and struggle. Only then can we provide the basis for opening up the space of resistance, for imagining different futures, for drawing boundaries and making connections, and for offering a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of politics and the promise of a vibrant and radical democracy.
If one of the characteristics of the present time is a retreat from the political accompanied by a growing disdain, if not cynicism, towards public life, it is a crucial task of critical educators to keep alive what it means to recognize that changing consciousness and transforming institutions is as much a pedagogical issue as a strictly political one. Any worthwhile notion of politics must acknowledge that while it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, any viable notion of struggle must foreground the crucial relationship between critical education and political agency and recognize that the longing for a more just society does not collapse into a retreat from the world, but emerges out of critical and practical engagements with present behaviors, institutional formations, and everyday practices.
About Henry Giroux
Henry A. Giroux received his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977. He has taught at Boston University and Miami University and accepted the Waterbury Chair Professorship at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Giroux has published extensively in a wide ranging number of scholarly journals and books. His recent books include: Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth, Channel Surfing: Racism, the Media and the Destruction of Today's Youth, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. He is currently the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies at Penn State University. He is also on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals. He also serves as the editor or co-editor of three scholarly book series. Professor Giroux lectures widely on a variety of cultural, social and educational issues in the United States and abroad.
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