Critical Theories in Education
F4P is a voluntary association of over 100 UBC full and part-time faculty and staff who share a commitment to support the struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israeli Apartheid and Occupation based on the principles of anticolonialism, anti-racism and social justice. #UBC #FacultyForPalestine
Posted on September 19, 2025
by BCCLA
BCCLA condemns the Liberal government’s unfounded, biased, and authoritarian decision to bar Irish-language rap group Kneecap from Canada, preventing them from performing their scheduled shows in October. In our view, this is another clear example of how Canadian governments are systematically targeting voices speaking out against genocide.
The Canadian government’s decision to smear Kneecap publicly as promoters of antisemitism, terrorism, and hate reflects not only the dangerous conflation of antisemitism with opposition to Israel’s actions, but also a tired, colonial form of anti-Irish bias that has no place in Canada.
Kneecap is a part of a resurgence of Indigenous Irish language and culture, and a powerful voice against colonial violence and for anti-sectarian connection through art.
Although there have been calls from a pro-Israel lobby for several months to ban Kneecap, the Canadian government has made this decision so close to their concert dates that it effectively ensures their artistic expression in Canada is silenced.
Something similar happened to BCCLA this year, when the BC Ministry of Education attempted to sabotage our 20th Youth Conference by spreading misinformation about BCCLA and one of our conference presenters, Teachers for Palestine, a few days before the event.
Without verification, the Ministry claimed that the Teachers for Palestine presenters were associated with Samidoun – an organization listed under Canada’s extremely flawed, opaque, and heavily-criticized terrorist listing apparatus. Canadian governments have used this listing to suppress free expression in support of Palestine by throwing out claims of association.
The Ministry wrote to all high school Superintendents in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, who then wrote to Principals (who passed this message on to teachers and parents) instructing schools not to attend. Over a hundred students were pulled from the event.
Surrey’s Superintendent told BCCLA: “Students can access a variety of learning resources to enhance their learning in relation to civil rights which do not involve a risk of potential contact with members of a terrorist organization.”
Despite BCCLA giving the government a chance to correct their admitted mistake, no real action has been taken to undo the harm they caused. This was an abuse of power, aimed at undermining our efforts to educate youth about censorship, human rights, and community organizing in the face of authoritarianism and government repression.
We know that Kneecap and BCCLA are not the exception. Across Canada, no matter how big or small, acts of free expression in support of Palestine are being targeted and silenced.
Sign BCCLA petition to reverse Kneecap Travel Ban imposed by the Canadian government.
Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, in collaboration with the Feltrinelli Foundation, invites submissions of critical papers and panel proposals for its upcoming conference and journal issue: Capitalism, Crisis, and Global Reordering.Organizing Committee: Carlo Fanelli, York University; Salvatore Prinzi, National Research Council; Spartaco Puttini, Feltrinelli Foundation; Heather Whiteside, University of Waterloo
When: June 23-24, 2026 Where: Feltrinelli Foundation, Viale Pasubio 5, Milan, Italy
We are living through a time of profound transformation—an era in which the only constant is change and instability. From economic malaise and international uncertainty to political unpredictability, war, genocide, and hunger, volatility now shapes all spheres of social life. As Marx and Engels long ago observed, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations… are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Today, the logic of capital continues to unravel the social fabric, remaking the world at an ever-increasing pace.
Industrial production is being reshaped by artificial intelligence and automation, demanding new raw materials and reorganized global value chains. Free trade orthodoxy is eroding, giving way to a resurgence of tariffs, protectionism, and nationalist economic policy. The geopolitical landscape is shifting rapidly, marked by trade wars, real wars, and a renewed scramble for space— territorial and in orbit. These upheavals are accelerating climate change, fuelling displacements, and sparking new forms of popular resistance – struggles not only for justice but for the survival of all life systems on earth.
Click through to access articles.
Workplace #36 includes the first installment of a series on Teachers’ Work in Contentious Political Times edited by Dana Morrison (West Chester University), Brianne Kramer (Southern Utah University), Lauren Ware Stark (Université de Sherbrooke), Erin Dyke (Oklahoma State University), and Denisha Jones (Defending the Early Years).
Jelena Starcevic (Cornell University) contributes a new article in the Workplace series featuring research from the Global Labour Research Centre Symposium at York University.
Featured articles include studies of: shared governance in academic libraries by Sarah Fitzgerald, Therese Kaufman, and Jaime Taylor (University of Massachusetts Amherst); how activist resistance on campus produces a shared sense of community by Kefaya Diab (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Andrew Bowman (Independent Scholar), Bruce Kovanen (North Dakota State University), Liz Miller (The Ohio State University), and Jonathan Isaac (University of Washington); the relationship between social-well being and multi-locational work in a Finnish university by Maija Nyman, Satu Uusiautti, and Timo Aarrevaara (University of Lapland).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14288/workplace.v36i1
Published: 2025-08-05
The article “Towards an Ideal Model of Education for Critical Citizenship. An Analysis of the Spanish Curricular Change in Social Sciences” published in January 2025 in the European Journal of Education is now available under Open Access license.
The article examines the integration of citizenship education in Spain’s new social sciences curriculum, focusing on primary and secondary education. It highlights the importance of fostering critical citizenship, which involves questioning societal norms, challenging injustices, and engaging in transformative social action. The study uses the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) framework to analyze the curriculum, revealing a stronger emphasis on cognitive skills and content knowledge compared to attitudes and engagement.
Key findings include:
The study concludes that while the curriculum incorporates cognitive and content domains effectively, it falls short in promoting critical social action and engagement. Future efforts should focus on aligning curriculum elements and fostering interdisciplinary approaches to empower students as active participants in democracy. Researchers are encouraged to examine the practical implementation of these curricular changes to advance education for social justice.
Navarro Medina, E , Ross, E. W., Pérez-Rodríguez, N., & De Alba Fernandez, N. (2025). Towards an ideal model of education for critical citizenship. An analysis of the Spanish curricular change in social sciences. European Journal of Education, 60(1), e70010. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70010
It has been a great honor and a learning experience for me to have connected with history education researchers in Brazil in recent years.
Prof. Dr. Luis F. Cerri (State University of Ponta Grossa, Brazil) contributed a chapter for the book Social Studies Education in Latin America: Critical Perspectives from the Global South , which I edited with Sebastián Plá .
Cerri’s chapter presents outcomes of an international project researching young peoples’ view of teaching and learning history, historical awareness and culture, political position and culture. The chapter presents comparative data on political position and views regarding history from young people across Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.
Subsequent to the book project, I had the opportunity to speak at the National Meeting of Researchers on the Teaching of History in Brazil and then last summer participated in a video interview with Dr. Cerri as well as Prof. Dr. Maria Lima (Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul) and Prof. Dr. Juliana Andrade (Federal Rural University of Pernambuco).
The interview has just been published in Revista Docentes:
Ross, E. W., Cerri, L. F., Lima, M. A., & Andrade, J. (2025). Entrevista com o professor E. Wayne Ross. Revista Docentes, 10(35), 99-111. https://periodicos.seduc.ce.gov.br/revistadocentes/article/view/1474
E. Wayne Ross, together with Sebastián Plá, organized a collection on the teaching of Social Studies in Latin America, resulting from the understanding that the Global South is rapidly changing its role in the various spheres of contemporary life, and among them, the debate on the teaching and learning of subjects such as History. In 2022, he opened the proceedings of the National Meeting of Researchers on the Teaching of History held at UFRPE, reflecting on the impacts of neoliberal policies on the teaching of History and other human and social sciences. In this interview, conducted by videoconference on July 14, 2024, three leaders of the ABEH Associação Brasileira de Ensino de História spoke with the professor about their experiences of civic and professional resistance to the advances of militarism, the business perspective and reactionism in education, themes that are older there than here, which resulted in a fruitful debate.
New issue launch Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor #35 (2024-2025)
Articles in Workplace #35 address a variety of labour issues on campus and beyond, including the first in a series of articles by graduate student participants in the Global Labour Research Centre Symposium at York University.
Find the Workplace #35 here: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/index
Consider the thoughts below as part of your May Day activities:Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch! – Marx & Engels
“Think! It ain’t illegal yet!”
—George Clinton [“Lunchmeatophobia”]
“… the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.”
— Guy Debord et al [“Position of the Lettrist International,” 1952]
“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
—Karl Marx
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.”
—Marx & Engels
“When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.”
– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
—Raoul Vaneigem
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
— Guy Debord [Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 1, 1967]
“[In The Power Elite (1956) C. Wright Mills quoted] Sophie Tucker (without either approval or disapproval in the context) ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is best.’ For a radical, the corollary of the this attitude is that it is not wealth that is wrong with America but poverty, and that what is reprehensible about the rich is not that they enjoy the good things of life but that they use their power to maintain a system which needlessly denies the same advantages to others.
—Paul M. Sweezy, “Power Elite and the Ruling Class,” Monthly Review, September, 1956
“Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy and let it be a war of extermination without pity.”
—Lucy Parsons quoted in Women Building Chicago, 2001, p. 671
UBC Profs’ perverse interpretation of the University Act lays bare a hidden agenda
Posted on April 16, 2025
by Liza Hughes
Universities are a crucial social space of free expression, exchange of ideas, and academic debate.
Universities are not meant to be sanitized from political thought or discourse. The recent lawsuit brought by UBC professors and one former graduate student in the name of free expression is a perverse interpretation of the prohibition of political activity under the University Act that cannot be justified from a civil liberties lens.
The University Act requires that universities be “non-sectarian and non-political in principle.” In our view, this is to create a buffer between government and university. It functions to ensure that universities do not become tools of indoctrination for state-sponsored religions or ideologies.
BCCLA fully supports the need to keep universities free from state interference, which is why we condemn this case. We disagree with the interpretation of the University Act advanced by the petitioners and raise alarm at a lawsuit that considers diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) values, land acknowledgements, and faculty statements of solidarity to be inconsistent with civil liberties.
The UBC petitioners allege that acknowledging unceded territories, promoting DEI values, or faculty members denouncing state violence are political actions prohibited by the legislation and that they limit academic freedom.
However, their interpretation of “political” is ultimately self-defeating. Acknowledging that you are on unceded land is no more political than refusing to do so. Muzzling faculty will not advance academic freedom. Claiming that DEI values are “political”, while other value-laden concepts like academic freedom are not, is nonsensical.
Academic freedom includes the rights of university groups to speak out about important social issues including Indigenous Peoples’ inherent rights, issues of power and oppression, and genocide. Civil liberties include the rights of diverse voices to be heard and protected through promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion values.
It is paradoxical to claim that an acknowledgement of Indigenous rights undermines the colonial state and is therefore political.
Remaining “neutral” necessarily supports the status quo, which in itself is a political act.
Advancing a legal argument that universities should be prevented from acknowledging land theft or colonial occupation enforces and enables genocide denialism.
Genocide can only occur when it is supported and enabled by powerful institutions, both in Canada and abroad. Canadian institutions have supported, enabled, and enacted genocide of Indigenous Peoples since the formation of the country, and these genocidal acts and their legacy continue to this day. Denial of these facts is support for genocide and ought to be condemned by any rights-respecting person or institution.
The petitioners use the guise of civil liberties as a thin veil to cover genocide denialism.
It undermines the very ethos of civil liberties to assert that these liberties are incompatible with free expression on important political issues.
As civil libertarians, we believe that free expression, including expression of faculty members, drives critical, constructive discourse. We disagree that it is necessary or beneficial to silence faculty members in order to protect dissenting voices.
If academic freedom is at stake here, it is a matter to be dealt with by the University itself. This case invites the very political interference that the University Act is meant to prevent.
A principled civil libertarian would conclude that complete deference to the state, enforced by the courts and legislation against a university, is an inexcusable overreach of political power.
There is no social space free from political context. Outside university walls, Land Defenders are stripped of civil liberties; small gains towards uprooting oppression through promoting DEI values are being thwarted by powerful institutions; and voices expressing solidarity with Gaza are being systematically repressed.
This lawsuit is a calculated step backwards. It is not about freedom, academic or otherwise. It is telling that the petitioners challenge these three acts in tandem. Although they are conceptually and legally distinct, they all represent a shift away from colonial dominance. It aligns with a broader global trend moving away from equity values and actively concentrating power and resources within a small, privileged group.
People in Canada have come to understand that our diversity is our strength. That there is room for all of us.
The acknowledgement of existing power dynamics is one small step towards creating a more equitable environment where true freedom, including academic freedom, can flourish.
The notion that DEI commitments are unacceptably political for the university environment weaponizes the fact that marginalized people are politicized just by existing, participating, and taking up space.
This claim is a desperate attempt to hold onto power. It is not a new or edgy idea; it is the tired and dying battle cry of an old guard that is not willing to accept true competition in ideas or opportunities. It is an attempt to maintain status quo and the privilege it offers some, not an effort towards political neutrality.
BCCLA is deeply disturbed to see a past member of our Board of Directors, Andrew Irvine, taking a position that is so deeply antithetical to civil liberties and values of liberty, equality, and justice. We emphatically denounce the notion that land acknowledgements conflict with civil liberties, or that equality initiatives that acknowledge and attempt to remedy structural power dynamics are unacceptably political.
Civil liberties are not a commodity to be horded by the privileged few. Freedom cannot exist alongside oppression. At a time when equality rights and freedom of expression for equity-denied groups are increasingly under attack, BCCLA continues to champion an expansive interpretation of civil liberties that includes the rights of all.