E Wayne Ross – Critical Theories in Education

Conference Call for Papers – Starting Over: Mass Politics and the Future of the Left

Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research and the University of Naples Federico II invite individual paper and panel submissions for our 48th annual conference and special issue Call For Papers. Topics may include but are not limited to: Inequality and (De)Democratization; Left Economic Policy and Labour Market Restructuring; War, Imperialism and Colonialism; Race, Gender and Other Disparities; Austerity and the State; Climate Change; Digital Labour and Platforms; Unions and Social Movements; Populism and Political Realignment; Global Governance.

The deadline for conference submissions has been extended to: January 1, 2025. Please see the attached CFP or below for more information. We would appreciate if you could share with any departmental colleagues and networks you believe may be interested.

Starting Over: Mass Politics and the Future of the Left Conference and Special Issue Call For Papers

Organizing Committee: Carlo Fanelli, York University; Francesca Gabbriellini, University of Bologna; Luca Mandara, University of Naples Federico II; Marco Marrone, University of Salento; Salvatore Prinzi, University of Naples Federico II; Heather Whiteside, University of Waterloo

When: May 27-30, 2025

Where: University of Naples Federico II

From the economic downturn of the early-2000s, to the Great Recession and COVID-19 crisis, the last twenty-five years have been characterized by mounting economic volatility and accompanying political unrest. While precipitating this period, the broadly defined “left” has increasingly shown itself to be a spent force – either unable to convince the masses that real alternatives to market rule do exist, or abject failures in their ready willingness to reproduce the status quo.

The decline of organized labour as a social and political force, combined with social movements’ recurring inability to scale-up demands, has exacerbated the decoupling of class from political identity. In its place, the radical right has thrived as evinced by the mainstreaming of neofascist politics, rise of authoritarian populisms and accompanying assault on democratic rights and freedoms. Despite a working class larger and more heterogeneous than ever, a yawning chasm now separates the left from working class politics. In this void have flourished deepening forms of anti-politics, from political disengagement to acquiescence of authoritarian rule. How has the working class and left been transformed? What accounts for the growing divide? What is the next new left project? And how can left movements challenge wider forms of depoliticization?

To submit your proposal, please click HERE or visit www.alternateroutes.ca.

UBC Faculty for Palestine: Statement of Support for Professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou

Statement of Support for Professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou
UBC Faculty for Palestine

November 25 2024

We write as members of University of British Columbia’s Faculty for Palestine, a solidarity network of over 100 members. We express our strong support for Professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou, who has been the target of unauthorized classroom surveillance and a smear campaign for her teaching on Palestine. On September 18, Professor Chatzivasileiou gave a lecture in her course titled “Global Issues and Social Justice” drawing on a series of scholarly sources, including the internationally recognized work of Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and legal scholar Khaled Beydoun. During this lecture, Professor Chatzivasileiou was audio-recorded by an unknown person in violation of university policy.

A 12-minute recording of her lecture was shared with a journalist and subsequently two factually incorrect and inflammatory articles were released by CTV News Vancouver on November 20th and 21st. The headlines falsely claim that UBC is investigating her, a clear case of misreporting as there is no investigation happening or pending. Not only is she not being investigated, but in fact Campus Security at UBC is investigating numerous threats against Dr. Chatzivasileiou and her family that have resulted from this smear campaign. The article grossly misrepresented Professor Chatzivasileiou’s rigorously researched lecture, misquoting her in the written article and randomly deploying Youtube footage from a 2012 lecture for the video newsclip version. What CTV News describes as a “rant” was a careful elaboration of the critical thinking of important legal and feminist scholarship on the impact of the genocide on Gaza. It was delivered by an instructor with more than 20 years’ experience teaching at UBC who is beloved by her students as well as her colleagues and staff. The CTV segment falsely implied that Professor Chatzivasileiou’s words and actions were antisemitic – an assertion that we categorically reject.

This is not simply a case of poor journalistic standards as articles in this vein have real consequences. Since the publication of the article, Dr. Chatzivasileiou has received numerous threats of physical and sexual violence against her and her family. Such threats are meant to create a chilling effect in university classrooms, erecting obstacles to teaching and discussing the most pressing issues of our times. These intimidations constitute alarming threats to the academic freedoms of faculty and students and therefore fundamentally endanger the mission of the university.

Furthermore, according to UBC’s Principles for Recording Classroom Activities dated September 2021 students must seek recording permission from faculty and other students in the course directly “either from the instructor or through the academic accommodation process.” No such permission or accommodation was sought in Dr. Chatzivasileiou’s class. Even when the proper permissions are sought “such recordings are made for personal academic use, and are not for distribution (within or beyond the course)” according to UBC’s policies. The unauthorized taping of Dr. Chatzivasileiou’s class therefore violated not only university policy protecting faculty but also the rights of her students. There has been no prior or subsequent student complaint or grievance filed about the class, further suggesting that Dr. Chatzivasileiou was deliberately targeted for harassment. Absent a filed university complaint, the delay between the recording (September 18) and the release of the articles (November 20 and 21) suggests the goal was not to address a classroom situation but to publicly discredit and cause harm to Dr. Chatzivasileiou.

Misinformation and information warfare have served to dehumanize the Palestinian people and legitmize the Israeli state’s current campaign of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. As faculty in support of Palestinian liberation, we firmly believe that rigorous education based on scholarship and faculty’s expertise–like the teaching of Dr. Chatzivasileiou– is more critical than ever. Surveillance, threats, and intimidation campaigns aim to silence faculty and students, and inhibit their rights to academic freedom, education, and freedom of expression. These smear campaigns are dangerous affronts to the university and all its community members.

We call for UBC to immediately 1) reiterate and uphold the university policy banning the unauthorized recording and sharing of lectures and classroom discussions; 2) reaffirm faculty and students’ rights to academic freedom with regards to education on Palestine, Palestinian liberation, and the Israeli state’s apartheid policies, military occupation, and genocide; 3) confirm, contrary to CTV’s claims, that no investigation of Dr. Chatzivasileiou has occurred; and 4) provide material support for faculty like Dr. Chatzivasileiou who are targeted and defamed through surveillance and smear campaigns.

Endorsed by:

Graduate Students for Palestine–UBC
Independent Jewish Voices–UBC
Jewish Faculty Network–UBC
UBC Social Justice Centre
UBC Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights
UBC Staff for Palestine

In conversation: Professor E Wayne Ross and Professor Alpesh Maisuria

I was delighted to conduct a seminar and reading group exploring critical social education in September 2024 at with the Education and and Childhood Research Group at University of the West of England. ECRG is lead by Professor Alpesh Maisuria and here is a short “in conversation” between Professor Maisuria and me.

Critical Education v15 n4 – Just published

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New issue of Critical Education just published. Critical Education15(4): https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/index

Table of Contents

Designing Curriculum for Critical Consciousness: A White Teacher’s Process
Allarie Coleman

“Maybe Tightening the Collar is the Way to Do It”: Naturalizing Oppression in Teacher Discourse on Student Learning

Hope Kitts

Playing Around: Basketball Personhoods as Sites of Dialogue, Education Research, and Epistemic Disobedience
Juan F. Carrillo, Dan Heiman, Noah De Lissovoy

“I just can’t say ‘Fuck it, and walk away’”: Classing Labor in Neoliberal Academia

Maiyoua Vang

Literacies of the Heart and Antiracist Pedagogy

Lilia Monzo, Elena Marquez

The Body in the Classroom after Covid-19: An Exercise in Pedagogical Reflexivity

Molly Wiant Cummins

Using Virtual Learning Labs to (Re)Mediate Exclusionary Discipline Practices for Young Children of Color with Disabilities
Saili Kulkarni, Sunyoung Kim, Nicola Holdman

Call for submission: Heed the Call of the Dreamers! Imagination and the Frontiers of Critical Scholarship

Heed the Call of the Dreamers! Imagination and the Frontiers of Critical Scholarship

Guest Editor
Abraham P. DeLeon
University of Texas at San Antonio

What happens when critical scholarship takes seriously, the potentials imbued within a collective social imagination? What occurs when radical ways of knowing and doing activate the imagination that points to a different kind of past, present, and future? These kinds of questions are what I hope will inspire the papers I am seeking for this special issue in Critical Education. The empiricism that dominates much of academic scholarship, especially within the social sciences and education in particular, casts aside the transformative potentials of the imagination. Concerned too much with measurement, validity, replicability, and fundable projects that reify a particular kind of reality, mainstream scholarship does not engage with an imaginary that animates humanity’s potentials that is radical, creative, imaginative, and weird. The imagination runs through our social body like connective tissue, capillaries of radical potentiality. Our history is imbued with the imaginary, crossing not only fictional works that appear in film or literature for just two examples, but also that have animated a utopian impulse of a radical kind of difference: a different future, a different world, a different way of being with each other.

The imagination cannot be reduced to simply cognition or a neuro-functionality that activates a purely Western, scientific understanding. A radical social imagination can begin from a place of nowhere (Ricoeur, 2024), a non-space that allows a new kind of freedom of form to materialize that exists beyond scientific discourses that try to ensure its capture. Like Sartre’s (1948) work that the imagination has the potentials for negation, freedom, and engagement with nowhere, this special issue wants to explore the limits and potentials for the imagination for a radical and different kind of social imaginary. This space of nowhere becomes a productive frontier for larger questions about the future, the potentials for social action, and the possibilities for new epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical encounters. This special issue is a call for us to begin a new kind of radical project that attempts to break free from the current shackles of this intellectual culture, what Foucault (1998) might have called “inventing a new body”, one that is “volatile” and “diffused” (p. 226-227). We heed the call of the dreamers and allow the imagination to burst furth in new scholarly directions.

Here are some possible provocations to guide a submission, but are just meant to act as creative sparks.

I welcome any submission with a creative and imaginative vision for the past, present, and future.

What have been past historical examples by a variety of political, creative, or other affinity groups animated by the imagination?

What would it mean to embody a rhetoric of the future?
How can the avant-garde animate scholarship in new imaginative directions?
Do historical or cultural myths possess a generative moment that can inform social theory in fundamentally new ways?
What happens when social theory engages with the imagination? What kind of transformations are possible?
How can the imagination inform political organizing in fundamentally new ways?
What happens with social theory when it embodies the fictional worlds of a social imagination?
What become the limits of inquiry when the imagination is activated?
What would it mean to decolonize the future? How do indigenous ways of knowing inform our futures?
What kind of alternative futures emerge when we utilize an imaginative lens?
What are some examples of indigenous or non-Western forms of imagination that are instructive or visionary?
What do specific genres of fiction (horror, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, romance) offer the critical scholarly project?
How can fiction and creative writing inform social and critical theories?

The editor is available for any inquiries or questions on ideas about potential manuscripts and encourages conversations around potential ideas. Please email him at abraham.deleon@utsa.edu.

Manuscripts will be due on May 1^st, 2025. Please see the guidelines for submissions at Critical Education: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

References

Foucault, M. (1998). Aesthetics, method, and epistemology: Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2. (R. Hurley and Others, ). The New Press.

Ricœur, P., Taylor, G. H., Sweeney, R. D., Amalric, J.-L., & Crosby, P. F. (2024). Lectures on imagination. The University of Chicago Press.

Sartre, J.-P. (1948). The psychology of imagination. (B. Frechtman, Trans.). Philosophical Library.

Research seminar at UWE Education and Childhood Research Group

I was delighted to have the opportunity to lead a research seminar with the Education and Childhood Research Group at the University of the West of England in Bristol this week.

The seminar was titled “Critical Social Education: Insurgent Pedagogies & Dangerous Citizenship” and explored how social studies education in the Americas is being used to contribute in significant ways to creating a society where individuals have the power and resources to realize their own potential and free themselves from the obstacles of classism, racism, sexism, and other inequalities often encouraged by schools, the state, and oppressive ideologies.

The seminar also framed the role and nature of social studies education in the Americas, with an emphasis on critical perspectives in the field, drawing on my recently published edited collection, The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Edition, SUNY Press) as well other critical scholars including contributors to the book Insurgent Social Studies: Scholar-Educators Disrupting Erasure and Marginality (2022, Myers Education Press), edited by Natasha Hakimali Merchant, Sarah B. Shear and Wayne Au.

I also touched on related research on social studies in the Latin American context based on the book Social Studies Education in Latin America: Critical Perspectives from the Global South, which I edited with Sebastián Plá.

The ECRG is led by Alpesh Maisuria, Professor of Education Policy in Critical Education at UWE Bristol, who I thank for the opportunity.

I also want to thank UWE Bristol education Professor Jane Andrews for the chance to participate in their monthly reading group which discussed a recent chapter of mine titled “Society, Democracy, and Economics: Challenges for Social Studies and Citizenship Education in a Neoliberal World”. I enjoyed the lively and diverse discussion.

Call for manuscript reviewers – Critical Education

Critical E ducation is a looking to expand its pool of manuscript reviewers.

If you are interested in contributing to the broad, multi-disciplinary field of critical education by participating in the peer review process, we encourage you to register with Critical Education as a reviewer.

We define critical education broadly as a field or approach that works theoretically and practically toward social change and addresses social injustices that result from various forms of oppression in globalized capitalist societies and under neoliberal governance.

We are looking for reviewers with expertise from across the broad range of education scholarship including but not limited to various: forms of research (e.g., empirical, theoretical, philosophical), contexts (e.g., early childhood, primary and secondary education, higher education, informal and popular education), conceptual orientations (e.g., critical pedagogy, anarchism, Marxism, critical postmodernism) and subfields (e.g., anti-racism, alternative education, critical and media literacy, disability studies, gender and sexuality, de/colonial and Indigenous education, leadership and policy studies, climate, outdoor, and place-based education, teacher education, solidarity and social movements, disciplinary subjects, etc.).

Critical Education uses a double-blind review process and follows the guidelines and practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics.

How do I sign up as a reviewer for Critical Education?

If you are already a registered user of the journal, sign in and from the drop-down menu below your username (top-right corner) choose View Profile > Role > check Reviewer box and list the key words that describe your areas of expertise. Before closing the profile window be sure to click the Save button on the bottom left of the page.

If you are not yet registered with Critical Education, use the Register link at the top of the journal home page and create an account. When creating your profile be sure to check the Reviewer role box and list the key words that describe your areas of expertise. Don’t forget to click the Save button.

Founded in 2010, Critical Education is an international, diamond open-access (no fees to read or publish), peer-reviewed journal, which publishes articles that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies and hosted by The University of British Columbia Library. Critical Education is indexed in a number of scholarly databases including Scopus, EBSCO, DOAJ, and ERIC and is a member of the Free Journal Network. For more about Critical Education see: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about

Rouge Forum Archive

The Rouge Forum Archive is now available at RougeForum.com The RF Archive includes flyers, broadsides, conference programs, issues of our zine The Rouge Forum News, the Adam Renner Education for Social Justice Lectures, and more. And also check out RougeForum.org for additional information about RF activities.

The Rouge Forum is a group of educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society.

We are concerned about questions like these:

How can we teach against racism, national chauvinism, and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society?
How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals and still teach—or learn?
Whose interests shall schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal?

We are both research and action oriented. We want to learn about equality, democracy, and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring into practice our present understanding of what these are.

We seek to build a caring inclusive community that understands an injury to one is an injury to all. At the same time, our caring community is going to need to deal decisively with an opposition that is sometimes ruthless.

Read about the origins and history of The Rouge Forum here.

Why do you call it The Rouge Forum?

The River Rouge runs throughout the Detroit area—where the Rouge Forum was founded in 1998. Once a beautiful river bounteous with fish and plant life, it supported wetlands throughout southeast Michigan. Before industrialization, it was one of three rivers running through what is now the metropolitan area. Today the Rouge meanders through some of the most industrially polluted areas in the United States, past some of the poorest and most segregated areas of North American, only to lead some tributaries to one of the richest cities in the U.S.: Birmingham. The Rouge cares nothing for boundaries. The other two Detroit rivers were paved, early in the life of the city, and now serve as enclosed running sewers. Of the three, the Rouge is the survivor.

The Ford Rouge Plant was built before and during World Way I. By 1920, it was the world’s largest industrial complex. Everything that went into a Ford car was manufactured at the Rouge. It was one of the work’s largest iron foundries and one of the top steel producers. Early on, Henry Ford sought to control every aspect of a worker’s life, mind and body, in the plant and out. Using a goon squad recruited from Michigan prisons led by the infamous Harry Bennet, Ford instituted a code of silence. He systematically divided workers along lines of national origin, sex, race, and language groupings–and set up segregated housing for the work force. Ford owned Dearborn and its politicians. He designed a sociology department, a group of social workers who demanded entry into workers’ homes to discover “appropriate” family relations and to ensure the people ate Ford-approved food, like soybeans, voted right, and went to church.

While Ford did introduce the “Five Dollar Day,” in fact only a small segment of the employees ever got it, and those who did saw their wages cut quickly when economic downturns, and the depression, eroded Ford profits.

The Rouge is the site that defined “Fordism.” Ford ran the line mercilessly. Fordism which centered on conveyor production, single- purpose machines, mass consumption, and mass marketing, seeks to heighten productivity via technique. The processes are designed to strip workers of potentially valuable faculties, like their expertise, to speed production, expand markets, and ultimately to drive down wages. These processes seek to make workers into replaceable machines themselves, but machines also capable of consumption. Contrary to trendy analysis focused on globalization and the technique of production, Ford was carrying on just-in-time practices at the Rouge in the early 1930’s. Ford was and is an international carmaker, in the mid 1970’s one of Europe’s largest sellers. In 1970, Ford recognized the need to shift to smaller cars, and built them, outside the U.S., importing the parts for assembly—early globalism.

Ford was a fascist. He contributed intellectually and materially to fascism. His anti-Semitic works inspired Hitler. Ford accepted the German equivalent of the Medal of Honor from Hitler, and his factories continued to operate in Germany, untouched by allied bombs, throughout WWII.

At its height, more than 100,000 workers held jobs at the Rouge. Nineteen trains ran on 85 miles of track, mostly in huge caverns under the plant. It was the nation’s largest computer center, the third largest producer of glass. It was also the worst polluter. The Environmental Protection agency, in 1970, charged the Rouge with nearly 150 violations.

Today there are 9,000 workers, most of them working in the now Japanese-owned iron foundry. Ford ruthlessly battled worker organizing at the Rouge. His Dearborn cops and goon squad killed hunger marchers during the depression, leading to massive street demonstrations. In the Battle of Overpass Ford unleashed his armed goons on UAW leaders, a maneuver which led to the battle for collective bargaining at Ford, and was the founding monument to what was once the largest UAW local in the world, Local 600, led by radical organizers for years.

On 1 February 1999, the boilers at the aging Rouge plant blew up, killing six workers. The plant, according to workers, had repeatedly failed safety inspections. UAW local president made a statement saying how sorry he was for the families of the deceased–and for William Clay Ford, “who is having one of the worst days of his life.” Papers and the electronic press presented the workers’ deaths as a tough day for the young Ford who inherited the presidency of the company after a stint as the top Ford manager in Europe. The steam went out of Local 600 long ago. The leaders now refer to themselves as “UAW-FORD,” proof that they have inherited the fascist views of the company founder.

When environmentalist volunteers tried to clean the rouge in June 1999, they were ordered out of the water. It was too polluted to clean. So, why the Rouge Forum? The Rouge is both nature and work. The Rouge has never quit; it moves with the resilience of the necessity for labor to rise out of nature itself. The river and the plant followed the path of industrial life throughout the world. The technological advances created at the Rouge, in some ways, led to better lives. In other ways, technology was used to forge the privilege of the few, at the expense of most–and the ecosystems, which brought it to life, The Rouge is a good place to consider a conversation, education, and social action. That is why.