This book offers a re-examination of art production in terms that understand the process of learning as the production of art itself. Drawing on the thought of Ranciere, Freire, Gramsci and Mouffe, it provides an account of the politics of art production and a theoretical understanding of hegemonic power, while developing a view of method in critical pedagogy founded on the process of ‘making adversaries’. Through a re-evaluation of the relationships between process, arts production and pedagogy within accelerated developments of neoliberalism, the author uncovers ways of forming a more co-operative and less conflictual approach to democratic politics. An investigation of ways in which art practice can be used to engage with critical pedagogy in relation to a commodity driven neoliberal agenda, Art, Critical Pedagogy and Capitalism constitutes a radical rethinking of art making, and an attempt to address the paradox between the proliferation of the commodity of learning and the perceived crisis of arts education. As such, it will appeal to scholars of education, pedagogy and the arts with interests in social and critical theory.

This timely and compelling volume furthers understandings of contemporary art education in international contexts and the position of alternative art colleges in relation to the neoliberal academy and arts economy. Defining the concept of ‘co-operative education’ and articulating its centrality and relevance to the so-called alternative or autonomous art schools it examines, the book presents innovative explorations of its central topics such as art educator identities, the non-profitisation of arts studios, and the Anthropocene while drawing these into relation with important contemporary political and academic concerns such as decolonisation, feminism, and neoliberalism. Chapters showcase a range of international viewpoints, dialogues, and empirical research contributions from notable scholars, renowned artists, and experienced educators. This book will be of use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in education policy and politics, arts education, and higher education. Members of professional bodies such as art historians, critics, and curators may also find the volume of interest.

Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance brings cultural studies’ perspectives to bear on Arts practices. Each contribution synthesizes creative approaches to philosophy and new materialist understanding of practice to show how human-nonhuman interaction at the core of Arts practice is a critical post human pedagogy. Across fine art, dance, gallery education, film and philosophy, the book contends that certain kinds of Arts practice can be a critical pedagogy in which tactical engagements with community, space, place and materiality become means of not only disrupting dominant discourse but also of making new discourses come to matter. It demonstrates how embodied, located acts of making can materially disrupt cultural hegemony and suggest different ways the world might materialize. It argues that the practice of Arts making is a post human cultural pedagogy in which people become part of a broader assemblage of matter, and all aspects of this network are solidified in objects or processes that are themselves pedagogical. In doing so the book offers a fresh and theoretically engaged perspective on arts as pedagogy.

Postdigital Dialogues on Critical Pedagogy, Liberation Theology and Information Technology presents a series of dialogues between Peter McLaren, a founding figure of critical pedagogy, and Petar Jandric, a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections between critical pedagogy and information technology. The authors debate the postdigital condition, its wide social impacts, and its relationship to critical pedagogy and liberation theology, as part of a transdisciplinary effort to develop a new postdigital revolutionary consciousness in the service of humanity. Throughout the dialogues we see how McLaren's thinking on critical pedagogy and liberation theology have developed since the publication of Pedagogy of Insurrection, and how these developments play out in Jandric's theory of the postdigital condition. The book includes a foreword by Peter Hudis and an afterword by Michael A. Peters.

Art is a multi-faceted part of human society, and often is used for more than purely aesthetic purposes. When used as a narrative on modern society, art can actively engage citizens in cultural and pedagogical discussions. Convergence of Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Global Civic Engagement is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the relationship between popular media, art, and visual culture, analyzing how this intersection promotes global pedagogy and learning. Highlighting relevant perspectives from both international and community levels, this book is ideally designed for professionals, upper-level students, researchers, and academics interested in the role of art in global learning.

Social Ghosts and the Dead of World History looks at the global phenomena of the dead in world history, examining the phantasms and spirits of classical social science and philosophy. From Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’ to Max Weber’s ‘Verstehen’ and Marx’s phantasms, there is a recurring obsession with the ‘spirits’ of modernity. This book explores the relationships and interactions between those spirits and materiality in five broad areas: the nature of the dead in modernity, shape-shifting and mobile souls, the spirit in accounts of prehistory and archaeology, the phenomenology of spirits and the relation to statues and stone, and the nature of spirit as it is manifested in wooden artefacts and folklore. It offers a counter-modernity to that of classical social science and philosophy and new ways of thinking about our crises and catastrophes in social theory and the world and the worlds beyond this world. Building on the author’s previous work on the sociology of haunted houses and landscapes, it examines the body and the individual as the locus of haunting. The book will appeal to academics in philosophy, history, social theory, anthropology and cultural studies in its omni-disciplinarity and in its import for rethinking the histories of social thought.

With a focus on I Am Legend and Day of the Dead—two series of film remakes of popular science fiction stories—this book addresses the social origins of the recent surge in authoritarian and populist social movements. Exploring the ways in which the themes of tribalism, confidence in medical science, and confidence in military violence changed over the years in the process of re-telling these stories in popular culture, the author identifies the shift towards a narrowing of moral scope, an embrace of military violence and a distrust of medical science with three elements of authoritarian populism: tribalism, distrust of rational elites and their institutions, and willingness for violent coercion. An engaging study of popular culture that sheds light on contemporary political attitudes, Pandemics, Authoritarian Populism, and Science Fiction will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, and cultural studies with interests in critical theory, film studies, and science fiction.