Rethinking Education, Labor, and Subjectivity

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The following symposium consists of five papers that attempt to challenge the movement towards austerity in education that rest on the assumption that social institutions require radical restructuring to account for their inherent inefficiency. Central to this restructuring are policy/curriculum reforms that work to create a flexible workforce of entrepreneurial subjects. The papers below seek to challenge this narrative, and add to the existing critical education curriculum studies literature, presenting analyses that link macro political economic forces and education practices ranging from employment training, financial literacy education, science education to the impact of pharmacology in the classroom, illustrating how these practices depoliticize and individualize questions of labor, work, and subjectivity in relation to extant racial, gender and class divisions.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Section 1: Critical and Post-Foundationalist Perspectives and Practices

Chair

• Sara Carpenter, OISE/University of Toronto

Papers

• Financial Literacy Education as Risk Management for Capitalism - Chris Arthur, York University

• The Myth of the Undereducated American and the Overeducated Canadian - Alexander James Means, SUNY - Buffalo State

• Science Education, Subjectivity, and the Reproduction of Labor - Jesse Bazzul, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Smart Drugs: Public Pedagogies of Education, Labor, and the New Intelligence - Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Radical Subjects in Adult Education: Critical Feminist Perspectives on the History of Social Movement Schools - Tara Silver, OISE/University of Toronto

Discussant

• Sheila L. Macrine, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth