Greene and Freire's Blue Guitar Duet of Radical Hope in Hopeless Times

• In Event: 47.015 - Biographical and Documentary Research SIG Business Meeting: Imagining an Activist Future for a Blue Guitar

Abstract

In this paper, sounds of Maxine Greene’s (1995, 2001) and Paulo Freire’s (1970, 1992) harmonic pairings of wide-awakeness and critical consciousness, aesthetic education and “reading the world”, social imagination and radical hope will be resound anew within the present atonal climate of dehumanization and despair. Inspired by the metaphor of playing music on the blue guitar, this paper takes a “call and response” approach to examining these key ideas from the works of Greene and Freire that are parallel and complementary to each other. Particular attention will be given to ways that both Greene and Freire define hope above and beyond passive and wishful thinking that leads to fatalistic despair. Applications to critical aspects of imagination and praxis are surfaced by drawing a connection between the loss of hope and personal agency derived from “official”, overly prescribed definitions and frequent use of the “rotted names”(p.183) of abstract subject matter in the contemporary climate of neoliberal education reform. We conclude by reframing radical hope as a “theory of change” (Tuck & Yang, 2014) in which imagination can be understood as an insurgent praxis useful for destabilizing the contemporary neoliberal order.

Authors

• Robert Lewis Lake, Georgia Southern University

• Tricia M. Kress, University of Massachusetts - Boston