A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy for the City

• In Event: The Peter McLaren Reader: Reflecting on Three Decades of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

In an article that served as a sweeping indictment of postmodernism in educational theory and laid out a program of action to reassert critical pedagogy as a dangerous force, McLaren (2005) called critical pedagogy to “move into the direction of challenging new carceral systems of social control through the development of a critical pedagogy of space” (p. 93). McLaren calls for critical pedagogues to turn to the work of critical geography “to explore the spatiality of human life and couple this with its historicality-sociality” (ibid.). This follows from the broader call for educational studies to finally make the spatial turn. Unfortunately, however, McLaren’s important call has not yet been taken up in any sustained manner and considerations of space in critical pedagogy remain underdeveloped.

This presentation takes up McLaren’s call by turning to one particularly important spatial formation in contemporary capitalism. Cities are where the contradictions of capitalism are most concentrated, most acute, and most identifiable. As Merrifield (2014) puts it, the city “is crucial for the expansion of capitalism and for overthrowing capitalism” (p. 1). I begin this task by examining the relationship between capitalism and the city, how the city was subjected to the rule of capital and completely transformed in the process, as well as how and in what ways cities have been central to the maintenance and development of capitalism. I then turn to literature on the right to the city, asking what precisely this right is by tracing its formulation back through the work of Henri Lefebvre (1996), but also calling on the work of others, such as Harvey (2012), Merrifield (2014), and Mitchell (2003).

This paper demonstrates that the agent of revolutionary critical pedagogy is reinforced as an expansive subject after turning to the right to the city. The concept of the working class is not just defined by one’s relationship to the means of production but also to the means of reproduction. A whole host of activities and subjectivities are categorically socially necessary for capitalism to continue to function, including not only domestic labor but also artistic, creative, intellectual, and educational labor. A revolutionary critical pedagogy oriented toward the city thus not only affirms class as an antagonistic structural relation it also causes the pedagogue to completely bridge the classroom and the world, “bring theory into the streets,” as McLaren (2015, p. 26) puts it.

Author

• Derek Ford