Resisting Capitalist Education: Insurrectionist Pedagogies and the Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Democracy, Hegemony, and Totalitarianism: An Educational Study

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities of a critical democratic education within the contexts of today’s increasingly socially-networked society and the continuing and power-laden educational “will to standardize.” While critical theoretical views have made significant contributions to democratic education, today the revolutionary social, cultural, political, and economic changes brought on by contemporary digital cultural and new social movements present unique and new challenges and opportunities for democracy and democratic education. Drawing upon a range of emerging critical approaches, the paper develops the notion of “dangerous citizenship” as a useful mode of critical civic praxis.
The primary purpose in this paper involves rethinking contemporary notions of democratic education, which emphasizes social justice and approaches to education that promote the development of a democratic citizenry able to: (1) make sense of various forms of societal hegemony, social control in favor of dominant groups and individuals, and unequal and reproductive relationships of power; and (2) work collectively to challenge, disrupt, and eliminate these various undemocratic social conditions. This is an approach to democratic education that provides students with and assists them in creating ways of understanding and making sense of their societies, particularly with respect to their roles as citizens in terms of promoting such democratic values as fairness, equality, anti-discrimination, opportunity, and voice. It helps them, as future citizens, to build both understandings of social injustice and various tools by which to challenge such social injustice. The intention is to demonstrate that the revolutionary changes brought on by social networking have brought with them as well potentially stronger modes of social control in favor of society’s elites (for instance, by strengthening the possibilities inherent in newer forms of surveillance and spectacle). Recognizing, as well, that these mechanisms of technology make possible new mechanisms of resistance. Lastly, the paper develops the concept of “dangerous citizenship” as a relevant new direction for contemporary democratic education. The very status of citizenship today presents dangers (as anti-immigration and anti-ethnic studies laws have indicated in Arizona). And contemporary critical citizenship itself may demand that the citizen him/herself face certain dangers. Of course, the implication is that the values, understandings, and acts of contemporary critical citizens may also pose dangers to those individuals and groups who advocate today for the perpetuation of racism, classism, sexism, heteronormativity, and discriminatory fundamentalist views. Drawing sources from direct action anarchists to performance artists whose aim is the creative disruption of everyday life, the paper explores potential pedagogical practices that upend traditional approaches to democratic education, including “parrhesia,” “la perruque,” “sabotage,” the “dérive,” and “detournement.”

Author

• E. Wayne Ross, The University of British Columbia