Disposable Youth/Damaged Democracy: Youth, Neoliberalism, and the Promise of Pedagogy in the Work of Henry Giroux

Abstract

Perhaps more extensively and provocatively than any other contemporary theorist, Henry Giroux has theorized the relationship between youth and democratic public life. Beginning arguably with his first book, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Temple University Press, 1981), and continuing across a number of critically acclaimed works in the 1980s and early 1990s, Giroux uncompromisingly theorized the relationship between schooling and democracy, implicitly registering the importance of youth to a vibrant, radical democracy. Giroux redefined and expanded his analytic in the early 1990s with forays into postmodern theory, critical feminism, and media and cultural studies, among many other fields. With this redefined (and to this day evolving) analytic frame came an intensified effort to explicitly theorize the category of youth and analyze the broad socio-political, cultural and economic shifts that simultaneously transformed everyday life for youth and the ‘image’ – or figure – of youth across a range of sites, including policy discourse, news reportage and popular film. Yet, unlike other scholars and critics who considered youth in the 1990s (and today), Giroux also situated youth in relationship to the intellectual and her/his re-articulation amid these shifts. Giroux's contributions in this regard are singular and predictably compelling. In this article, the author considers the underlying method by which Giroux has theorized the relationships between youth, the intellectual, and democratic public life, while highlighting the contemporary relevance of this aspect of Giroux's massive body of work by appropriating it in an analysis of one intensification of the current war on youth found in the increasing use of tasers on children and youth in schools.