Critical Theory

Students often enter a philosophy class believing that philosophy is the practice of logical one-upmanship. Defusing the in-class strategies that endorse this view is pedagogically challenging, but the theoretical tradition of immanent critique offers an opportunity to mobilize students’ thirst for honest philosophical debate in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of critique in philosophical discourse. In these reflections, I argue that what I will call the “gotcha” critique, often employed by students to fend off a more serious encounter with ideas, in fact provides an opening for the insights of immanent critique to convert the glib aims of the “gotcha” toward a more critical approach to philosophical reflection.

Representations of helpless, victimized and destitute children located in the global South and tragic autistic subjects isolated and suffering in worlds of their own saturate television screens, popular culture, fundraising campaigns, mediated awareness events, news and documentary productions, social media and online and print journalism. These expressed assumptions of difference lack essential context for us to appreciate the relatable human experiences, histories and political stories of those fixed within the image, framed for eternity as helpless wanting victims and tragic icons primed for a humanitarian call to action. This capstone project combines mixed methods of critical cultural analysis with conventions of digital radical cartography to explore similarities in how developmental disability service agencies, global development, and humanitarian projects and the structures they depend on represent difference, and how these representations shape social understandings and ass...

This Journal of Consumer Culture Special Issue reviews core perspectives of touring consumption as a means to explore tourism and mobilities as categories of meta-analysis for consumption and consuming. It advances theory and research on various kinds of ‘touring’ that shift towards the agencies of the tourist/traveller as consumer and consumption as being embodied as part of everyday practice in transitional states of touring. What becomes evident is the incorporation of co-consumptive practices based on a reflexive touring, especially in how we consume, authenticate and experience. The objectives for the special issue include (1) a critical understanding of how the material and imagined worlds intersect through commodification processes in touring contexts, (2) an in-depth appreciation of how touring consumption may contribute to our understanding of mobile and fluid states of consumption practices and (3) a critical insight into the expanding implications of how the everyday is b...

This study investigates the genealogy of rescaling the cultural armature of heritage in the Global South rooted within the colonial culture and postcolonial aid programs. Taking the case of historic Cairo, it explores how policies have developed through experimental practices of conservation to scale up authority, control, and power over residents and neighborhoods from the 19th century to the present. The paper theorizes two paradigmatic approaches of conservation practices – by aesthetics and development – which have expanded Cairo’s inventory of monuments. The infatuation of heritage experts (the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe and Aga Khan Trust for Culture) with old neighborhoods has fostered accumulation by dispossession, disrupting people’s environments to generate a worlding image of heritage. The paper concludes with the metaphor of conservation practices as re-construction sites, as they repurpose the relationships between heritage, people, and their me...

The field of media literacy education is maturing, as evidenced by the quality of presentations of research and practice shared at the 2010 World Summit on Children and Media in Karlstad. In this article, we offer our reflections on the opportunities and challenges faced by media literacy educators as we build our global community network, develop a shared theoretical framework that transcends culture and nationality, and return to consider foundational questions about the relationship between power and agency as new visions ...

This article offers an epistemological framework to analyse how hegemony is constructed in the field of education, as part of current debates in the social sciences on the aperture and closure of the social. Our central thesis is that, beyond the post-structuralist tendency that dominates these debates, we must reconsider the potential effects of its theoretical assumptions on the social world, i.e. not only on its representation, but also on its structures, subjects, objects, and phenomena in general. To that end, we will analyse by the way of example the discourses on quality of education, core in education policies since 1980s, from this epistemological framework. Moreover, this type of discourses also allowed the instituted powers to connect the traditional forms of production and reproduction of ‘the social’ to new forms that help consolidate its hegemony by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the ways to produce and accumulate capital, and thus legitimize them. Indee...

Review Essay of Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek. The author argues that European Continental philosophers have a problem with “religion”: they repeatably try to surpass, use, or transform religion to define the proper ends of philosophy but rarely stop to question the predominately Christian or theological assumptions that inform their parochial ideas about the category.

This essay offers a critique of how “religion” is defined and studied in the academic field of religion and film, and calls for a more nuanced application of ideological analysis to the subject. Surveying the dominant scholarship in the field, it exposes a tendency to provide either theological or mythological definitions of religion and to privilege the category as something sui generis—a unique, special, or “spiritual” domain of things in the world. Moreover, it shows how this scholarship disparages ideological analysis as reductive, abstract, and elite, and fails to consider how religion itself functions ideologically in film and film criticism. Drawing upon the work of critical scholars of religion to support this latter claim, as well as contemporary film studies theory, the article closes with a call for a more nuanced understanding of how ideology is constructed at both an individual and cinematic level.