Possibilities for Radical Social Change Across Schools and Society: Exploring Tensions via Fanon and Freud

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Abstract

Taking the social liberatory objectives of anti-oppressive (especially decolonial and antiracist) approaches to education seriously, this theoretical-conceptual paper recognizes our shared contemporary human predicament in the face of multiple encroaching threats to human survival and wellbeing, globally, regionally, and locally. In response, it asks if radical social change for greater human equality is possible. To engage this question, it offers intertextual discussion of Fanon’s (1952/2008; 1963/2004) concerted appeal for the existential invention of a new man relative to the challenge of Freud’s (1920/1961; 1930/2010) ontological delineation of human nature as dyadic, torn between erotic (life-producing) and aggressive thanatotic (death-producing) psychosocial drives. At its core, it provokes questions for how educational researchers and practitioners think about radical social change and freedom.

Authors

• Pauli Badenhorst, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley

• James C. Jupp, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley