Intellectual Emancipation Research Articles

Bookshelf: Kappan authors on their favorite reads

In this regular column, Kappan authors recommend books that have influenced their thinking about education. In this issue, James Paul Gee recommends The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation by Jacques Rancière, and Ayesha Hashim recommends Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality by Erica O. Turner.

Partilha sensível e a corda de nó(s): emancipação e autonomia no ensino de Artes

ABSTRACT This article proposes to discuss the aesthetic and poetic praxis in the performance art Corda de Nó(s),1 based on theatrical and visual narratives directed towards intellectual emancipation and the expansion of the sensibility from the teaching experience within a municipal public school unit, in the city of Palmas (TO). This study focuses on a qualitative methodology of oral and exploratory narrative as well as the researchers’ field notebooks, prepared during the activities referred to in this text, in conjunction with bibliographic studies, on the concepts of preparation, development and conclusion of the lesson plan of Arts discipline, based on universal education, as proposed by Jacques Rancière.

Beyond the author: Artificial intelligence, creative writing and intellectual emancipation

This study explores university students’ engagement with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools for creative writing and graphic storytelling, drawing on Jacques Rancière's philosophy of intellectual equality and emancipation. Qualitative data analysis from a co-curricular creative writing programme, including reflections, surveys, and focus-group interviews, reveals emerging artificial intelligence literacies and students’ improvisational aptitudes for interpreting, subverting, and transforming notions of authorship. Students decentred authorial attribution through the pragmatic adoption of the technology as a creative catalyst, negotiated creative conventions by adopting non-conventional communication strategies, and reconceptualised creativity as distributed across human and non-human agents. Our approach of student-driven learning for autonomous exploration, sense-making, and criticality with GenAI indicates the potential for promoting conditions for students to exercise intellectual equality and emancipation. The findings contribute to the understanding of authorship and creativity; begin to contour emerging GenAI literacies and competencies; and suggest that creative collaborations with GenAI may be a promising way to foster emancipatory practices in the classroom, while nurturing creative and critical skills.

Reframing the Global Hispanophone: A Conversation with Inés Dussel on Pedagogical Pasts and Educational Futures

Half a year after publication of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies ’ centennial special issue, ‘Education and the Global Hispanophone’, the editors reflect on its key contributions and areas for future research. Our effort departed from a distinction made by philosopher Enrique Dussel (1934–2023) between ‘pedagógica’ and ‘pedagogía’, with the latter opening up an entire, cross-disciplinary field of ethical and existential philosophical inquiry. To what extent, we asked, are the development of pedagogical traditions and practices marked by networks of linguistic, literary and cultural ties, and vice versa? Fundamentally, the centenary issue made one crucial point: that educational renovation has shaped cultural production across the Global Hispanophone. Testing this claim in practice, we turned to one of the world’s leading historians and theorists of education, Inés Dussel (CINVESTAV, Mexico), for a conversation on transnational perspectives and contemporary convergences between Hispanic visual, cultural and literary studies and active, engaged educational work today. Ultimately, Dussel urges a new agenda of intellectual emancipation through education, gathering together these aspects of cultural, historical and political power to shape schools as institutions of the commons.

Editorial Presentation: Critical perspectives in social innovation, social enterprise and/or the social solidarity economy

Editorial Presentation: Critical perspectives in social innovation, social enterprise and/or the social solidarity economy

The Master’s Fall: The Fall of the Bourgeoisie Through the Fall of Patriarchy

The Master’s Fall: The Fall of the Bourgeoisie Through the Fall of Patriarchy

“We don't need no education”: Lessons from the (Un)making of Lahore's Proletarian Vanguard (ca. 1920–2000)

AbstractThis article marks an experiment in narrating a longue durée intellectual history ‘from below’ of West Punjab’s organised labour movement (c.1920–2000). This movement bridges the late colonial and post-colonial periods and links the histories of working-class movements across the Indian and Pakistani States. Punjab’s revolutionary heritage of the twentieth century has been, over the last decade, at the heart of broader theoretical arguments on the relationship of the internationalist Left with localised articulations of radical politics across South Asia. This resurgent scholarship, I argue in my paper, overstates and presents in a somewhat uncomplicated and teleological frame the role of left ideologies and institutions in the formation of the revolutionary subjectivities of Punjab’s working classes and poor. It crafts in a deeply hagiographic mode a narrative of the working classes’ intellectual emancipation through contact with what are generally taken to be the enlightened and progressive elements amongst the bourgeoisie of those times. This is made possible only by glossing over tensions haunting the potentially transgressive relationship between the worker and the intellectual and which this paper brings to the fore. By focusing on the upheavals attending the fraught relationship between Lahore’s worker militants and its renegade bourgeois intellectuals of the political and academic left over three generations, I question these narratives and their underlying assumptions. It is argued that instead of emancipating the worker, an education in the theory of socialism and the practical experience of left activism alongside bourgeois comrades ultimately reinforced the social and intellectual hierarchies separating the two. The processes through which this inequality was further enshrined are partly revealed by looking at the discursive formation of these workers as a proletarian vanguard, both by the State and the Communist party. Sources used for this purpose include colonial and post-colonial State records, official inquiry reports and their evidence volumes, the internal documents (in Urdu) of the Lahore district branch of the Communist party and newspapers in English and Urdu published from Lahore for the colonial and post-colonial periods. For this proletarian vanguard’s perspective on its own making and unmaking the article draws upon oral interviews (in Punjabi and Urdu) of worker leaders in the archives of local NGOs, published memoirs, as well as formal interviews and informal conversations with trade-unionists and leftist intellectuals directly involved in the workers’ movement, especially through study circles and other ‘educational’ projects, up till the late 1990s.

Natural Knowledge at the Threshold of the Enlightenment

Italian contributions to the Enlightenment are most often discussed in terms of the slow acceptance of Newtonian science (Ferrone) or the obstacles to change within a quaint museum of antiquated states (Venturi). This case study of an important naturalist attempts to identify the paths to change between tradition and revolt, in fields of natural knowledge that are sometimes less regarded in the context of an international movement of intellectual emancipation. In spite of an early attachment to some form of physico‑theology, Antonio Vallisneri, professor of medicine at the University of Padua from 1700 to his death in 1730, made a number of innovative contributions to biological description and natural history which placed him among the forerunners of Georges Buffon. Heir to the empirical approach enshrined in the work of Marcello Malpighi, for the most part he attempted to avoid much of the philosophical and theological speculation raging between deists and atheists. However, the implications of his work, including activity as a science communicator to wider audiences, pointed to a reassessment of the importance of accurate natural knowledge in the ongoing reform of public instruction and cultural institutions then occurring in the major cities of Italy and abroad, an important plank in the Enlightenment program in the years leading up to the French Encyclopédie.

Jacques Rancière and Care Ethics: Four Lessons in (Feminist) Emancipation

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms.

“The Intellectual Emancipation of the Negro”: Madeline Morgan and the Mandatory Black History Curriculum in Chicago during World War II

AbstractThis paper examines the first mandatory Black history curriculum in a US public school system, implemented in Chicago Public Schools between 1942 and 1945. Researched and designed by Madeline Morgan, the curriculum supplemented existing social studies lesson plans with Black people's contributions to US society. How did she win approval for the curriculum in this highly segregated and inequitable city? The commitment of Morgan and her network of Black women educators to “intellectual emancipation” during the 1940s aligned with white schoolteachers and administrators’ interest in promoting interracial tolerance in the US during World War II.

In pursuit of ignorant university teachers and intellectually emancipated students

ABSTRACT The current neo-liberalization of academia threatens the historical role of the university as a safe haven where critical thinking and intellectual emancipation can take place. Instead of educating questioning and independent knowledge seekers, much teaching centres on producing employable, efficient and uncritical workers who instrumentally solve problems within the given system. This essay considers the possibilities and limitations of contesting the neo-liberalization of academia through the teaching practice of not-knowing. This is done by drawing upon the work of Jacques Ranciére and by exploring how ignorant university teaching practices might lead to intellectually emancipated students. To push our imagination and understanding, the film Dead Poets Society is used as an empirical illustration.It is shown that ignorant (university) teachers can intellectually emancipated students through the practice of not-knowing by: (1) practising our own equality; (2) announcing the students’ inevitable equality; and (3) creating spaces for intellectual emancipation for our students.

Służba ideologii i ideologia służby w pamiętnikach działaczy polskiego ruchu narodowego na Śląsku Cieszyńskim sprzed końca I wojny światowej

In her article, Katarzyna Szkaradnik analyses the memoirs of the pioneers of the Polish national movement in the area of Cieszyn Silesia, and also the memoirs of subsequent social, cultural, and educational activists written before the end of World War I. Szkaradnik examines these texts by focusing on the representations of the idea which the authors were spokesmen for, i.e., Polishness as a cultural legacy as well as Poland as a promised land where the people of Cieszyn Silesiawill gain due rights. The metaphors “awakening” and “rebirth” naturalized the bond between these people and Polishness, which was supposed to last thanks to, among other things, Polish religious publications, despite Silesia’s separation from so-called Motherland. In this respect, the memoirs have persuasive-didactic functions in that they help to build and strengthen the national identity. Szkaradnik examines the rhetorical strategies used by the activists (and scholars) of the said movement as well as the system of values which they propagate. The fact of the national activists’ being servants of an ideology is accompanied by their ideology of service, akin to the positivist idea of educational and economic work. Importantly, most of the authors descended from local people of humble origin and they gave up on the chance of social advancement in order to help their countrymates to attain social, political, and intellectual emancipation.

Feminism and Gynecocracy in Classical Autors Dona María de Zayas Sotomayor and Tirso de Molain

This study based on María de Zayas Sotomayor and Tirso de Molina, especially on their classical Golden Age books Prudence in Woman and Amorous and Exemplary Novels, has for purposes to raise the question of women empowerment again and analyze their handling approaches of the feminist subject matter, to identify and suggest solutions to the hindrances of the solvency of that social phenomenon of women discrimination now a days. We carried it out by socio-critical approach and with objective, comparative, esthetical and analytic heuristic methods. It turns out of our work that both of María de Zayas Sotomayor and Tirso de Molina are feminist writers, but there are some subtle differences between them: Tirso de Molina put special emphasis on women political skills, whereas María de Zayas develops femininity, condemns their objectification by men and advocates their intellectual and social emancipation. Apart from that, our analyzes revealed that social and cultural obstacles continue to maintain the phenomenon. We proposed a cleaning up of the habits and the lifting of old fashioned taboo, mainly in African cultural areas where such habits are still unchanging.

Inventing Militant Scholarship for Political and Intellectual Emancipation: A Response to Mirka Koro’s Speculative Experimentation in (Methodological) Pluriverse

In this response to Mirka Koro’s article “Speculative Experimentation in (Methodological) Pluriverse,” I emphasize the need for militant scholarship as a methodological counterforce for the far-right populist and Manichean rhetorics and the ruthless economic order against the oppressed. We should not accept these provocations face value, but as militant scholars learn to conceptualize them as ideologies. As militants, we aim to overcome neoliberalism’s dominant discourse and resist predatory forms of capitalism by imagining the unimaginable. A militant wants to create discourse and action “that troubles the world.”

A Pedagogy for Black People: Why Naming Race Matters

ABSTRACT This article suggests pedagogical naming matters to the education of Black people. It refuses the idea of a universalist pedagogy for all, and thereby unmasks that which has been rendered invisible in teaching and learning, i.e., the Black self—so as to recover it so that it might be nurtured. In doing so, the article illuminates an important set of elements that a pedagogy for Black people must possess—such as a rootedness in a freedom that goes beyond justice; the development of critical consciousness, or “wokeness”; and a value for Black life and Black lives—answering Dumas“s(2010) question, what is ‘Black” in Black education? It concludes by suggesting that Black education must hold in placethe possibility for Black futures without clinging to ”an organic Black conservativism” that mythologizes and tragically over–romanticizes a fictive Black past. Thus, even when looking back, a pedagogy for Black people must always peer forward while simultaneously resisting the impulse for erasure, where race gets lost in the muddling stew of pluralism, or what is considered here to be false collectivism. By this, a pedagogy for Black people is about Black people, useful for the social, emotional, intellectual, physical, and political emancipation of not only the bruised Black body but also thetethered Black souls.

"What Am I To Do?" Review of Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action by Bernard E. Harcourt

"What Am I To Do?" Review of Critique & Praxis:A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action by Bernard E. Harcourt Joan Cocks (bio) Bernard E. Harcourt. Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 684 pp. $40.00 (hc). ISBN: 9780231195720. Bernard E. Harcourt's aim in this hefty work is to recover the emphasis on praxis that he argues once animated critical philosophy but was occluded over time. He intends to "imagine a new critical praxis theory for the twenty-first century" (15) that is oriented to "intellectual emancipation and social change" (19). While he recuperates Karl Marx to urge critical theorists to "move on to praxis," (279), the author jettisons Marx's progressive trajectory of history, division of capitalist society into two opposed classes, and call for a workers' revolution. Recognizing the more fractured landscape of power and resistance across the globe today, he takes his analytical lead instead from Michel Foucault and newer strands of critical philosophy. Unlike Foucault, however, Harcourt identifies "compassion, equality, solidarity, autonomy, and social justice" as the constitutive core of all critical philosophy, and he charges critics with acting to "infuse the world" with these values (1). At the same time, he insists that the proper praxis question is not the objectivist, "What is to be done?" but the subjectivist, "What am I to do?" The author details the split between a critical sensibility that endorses scientific knowledge and rationality, the surface/depth distinction, historical necessity, dialectical materialism, and/or universal norms of democratic [End Page 877] discourse; and a sensibility that purports truth is produced in the service of power and emphasizes historical contingency, social constructivism, and the idea that interpretations go all the way down instead of hitting a bedrock reality. In charting the debates both within and between these opposed sensibilities, Harcourt contends that neo-Marxists and left neo-Hegelians on the one side, and poststructuralists and anti-foundationalists on the other, succumbed to an "epistemological detour" that left them "disarmed" before the crises of our times (157). Just when the author appears to have succumbed to that detour as well, he takes a left turn to the heart of his project. He paints, first of all, an unvarnished portrait of the human condition as "a relentless contest over resources, possessions, ideals and identity, and existence itself" (269), with no universal recipe for victory and "no "utopian landing strip" (322). This constant battle is unavoidably violent, as its participants either already impose or seek to impose values on their adversaries; radical critics can only try to inhibit the use of physical force and ensure that the painful weight of social change falls on everyone equitably. It is also a battle fought and won on the basis of emotionally potent illusions. Puncturing illusions that "can satisfy wishes or desires without benefiting people materially" (211) is critical theory's intellectual task, which never ends, as "all efforts to unveil illusions will ultimately create new illusions that will have to be unveiled later in a relentless logic" (45). Critical theory's practical task—to push "existing social and political arrangements in an egalitarian and socially just direction" (321)—is also unending. No neutral rule of law or set of rights or procedural mechanisms for deliberation can protect us from this action imperative; no historical telos or abstract revolutionary guidebook can guarantee liberation and justice once and for all. Harcourt surveys the repertoires of praxis favored by the two theoretical sensibilities described above. The first champions—or rather championed—a centralized revolutionary party, intellectual vanguardism, and the emancipation of labor through a workers' revolution that begins on the factory floor. The second, with which Harcourt aligns himself, celebrates eclectic forms and sites of resistance against a multiplicity of ills, including legal and electoral fights to dismantle racial, sexual, and colonial hierarchies; leaderless insurrections, occupations, and riots; whistle-blowing and hacking to expose the pernicious power of the state, the creation of autonomous zones outside the reach of the state, and subversion "to shatter the institutions that reproduce privilege" (424); prefigurative democratic assemblages in public spaces; and even the weaponization of life by suicide bombers, hunger...

« L’Étoile de Giadinh: » Le football à Saigon dans les années 1920, entre loisir des élites et instrument d’émancipation nationale

Early in the twentieth century, keen modernist Vietnamese elites copied the western model to reposition their country among the dominant nations. Some discovered football and used it to shape a new generation of patriots. The Étoile de Giadinh played a crucial role in this transformational process among the Vietnamese, both intellectually and physically; the political engagement shown by its guiding personalities, its innovative training methods, an array of sporting triumphs and the management of promotional tours throughout Indochina turned the club into a vector of sporting acculturation. In a much greater advance, in the 1920s this Saigon football club became a fully Indochinese model for compatriots seeking to break away from colonial tutelage. This article analyses the founders’ strategies for the football association to initiate the reversal of colonial hierarchy. A combination of activists and promoters of combined physical and intellectual emancipation, they incarnated the third phase of acculturation which we know as dominant otherness: the colonial hierarchy was overturned in favour of new Vietnamese elites in the footballing world. Through their victories the team members of L’Etoile de Giadinh showed that innate Vietnamese assets could help the nation to regain its independence. This football club thus became the matrix of a veritable cultural revolution, a universal and timely blend of well-being, sport and nationalism.

Remoto, mas não distante: a reinvenção do ensino na Educação Superior em tempos de COVID-19

O presente artigo tem como principal objetivo investigar quais foram os desafios e as soluções para se reinventar o ensino na Educação Superior frente ao cenário avassalador de contaminação pelo COVID-19, usando as Tecnologias Digitais da Informação e Comunicação (TDICs). Os dados foram coletados por meio de questionário eletrônico e entrevistas. A pesquisa contou com a participação de 41 estudantes. As informações foram sistematizadas e analisadas por meio da técnica de análise de conteúdo, proposta por Bardin (2010), possibilitando a identificação de três categorias: 1) Utilização das TDICs nos processos de ensino e aprendizagem, 2) Mediações pedagógicas necessárias ao desenvolvimento do estudante e 3) Autonomia discente. Os resultados revelaram que muitos estudantes subutilizavam as tecnologias digitais e que a pandemia oportunizou mudanças atitudinais. Aos docentes foi necessária a reinvenção das estratégias didáticas para o ensino remoto bem como a utilização das TDICs em espaços colaborativos que fomentaram nos discentes o protagonismo, o exercício da autonomia e a emancipação intelectual.

Intellectual emancipation as minimal humanism – The relevance of Jacques Rancière in business school teaching

How might emancipatory teaching practices look like in the context of the business school, when the meaning of the subject of emancipation, the human being, has become unsettled? Our philosophical essay addresses this question by excavating Jacques Rancière’s conception of intellectual emancipation and showing its practical relevance for experiments with emancipatory teaching in a business school environment. Speaking from within a tradition where the meaning of human is irrevocably unsettled, Rancière, remarkably, still insists on an essential link between emancipation and humanism – although in a minimal version. First, we show why and how Rancière’s analyses of emancipation are united by the common concern to affirm such a minimal humanism. Thereafter, we describe how three features sets intellectual emancipation apart from social and aesthetic emancipation and makes it pertinent to take intellectual emancipation to school: The possibility and intention to emancipate others, the acknowledgement of the constructive role of reason herein, and the significance of teacher authority in doing so. Lastly, we move beyond and problematize Rancière’s clear conceptual account of intellectual emancipation by extracting three heuristic pedagogical devices from it and by recounting their confrontation with the messy details of our teaching practice at the business school.

KAKO SU KANT I HEGEL UKLONILI ZAKON O ZDRAVSTVENOJ ZAŠTITI

Pored eksplikacije Kantove i Hegelove interpretacije prvorodnog grijeha, prema kojoj taj problem ima ulogu kulturološkog, intelektualnog, emancipacijskog i progresivnog događaja, u ovom radu je izloženo i potpuno drugačije značenje tog problema. Koristeći pravo na naučno-istraživački metodski tretman primarnog izvora i na širu kontekstualnu komparativnu analizu istog, autorka u ovom radu dolazi do zaključka da je prvorodni grijeh devijacija polnog odnosa (muškarca i žene) i primarni uzrok teških bolesti, prenosivih na razne načine. S obzirom na to, onda bi biblijski opisano Božije protivljenje tom čovjekovom prestupu bio zakon o zdravstvenoj zaštiti, a ne uskraćivanje čovjekove slobode, sazrijevanja, samostalnosti i razvoja kulture, intelekta, subjektivnosti i samosvijesti, kako su mislili Kant i Hegel. Njihove interpretacije prvorodnog grijeha se iz tog aspekta uviđaju kao nehumani projekti uklanjanja takvog zakona. Nasuprot tome, cilj ovog rada je mogući humani doprinos, koji se ukazuje iz konkretnog označavanja primarnog uzroka teških bolesti, a odatle i u mogućnosti njegove eliminacije, s kojom mogu nestati i posledice.