Sites Of Pedagogy Research Articles

A Calle decolonial hack: Afro-Latin theorizing of Philadelphia's spaces of learning and resistance

ABSTRACT Rarely are Latinx and African-American spatial narratives read alongside each other, let alone as sites of pedagogy and learning. In the City of Philadelphia, we interpreted this racial grammar as spatial dimensions of our classroom learning through decolonial praxis. During the spring of 2020, a professor of education and 14 of her students explored three sites of resistance across Philadelphia: The MOVE Bombing site (1985), Girard College (racially desegregated in 1968), and El Centro de Oro (founded 1970s). The course, Urban Geography and Critical Higher Education framed the university and broadly modernity and its impact on our consciousness and imagination, as part of both domination and resistance, and we as scyborgs.

On the Exportation of Soft Power in Globalization with the Exemplification of the Film <i>Wolf warrior</i> (II)

In globalization culture is capitalized and invested as a commodity. But the commodified culture not only makes money for an exporter but also disseminates its cultural values with another culture. Both the success of the film Wolf Warrior (II) at home and its failure to be a hit abroad lend weight to the argument. The pros and cons about it evidence the on-going status quo of cultural exchange in One Way One Belt (“The Belt and Road Initiative”) the Chinese global project. Therefore this research makes endeavors to prove the power that story telling particularly the narrative trinity: event, plot and story make money on the one hand and on the other works as site of pedagogy where people learn and experience. This way people find the power as such congenial and innocuous. Thereupon the film director Jing Wu chooses the events as can be seen in the film and “strings” them in such a way that the Chinese viewers are mad about it whereas the viewers abroad especially those in the West sort of turn it down. The striking contrast in box office suggests the fact that cinematic experience is a process of negotiation between director and film goer, which Director Wu has to take into good consideration if he expects to make a hit with his film next time abroad.

Reconstructing the future: Du Bois, racial pedagogy and the post-civil rights era

This essay addresses the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, as both scholar and activist, at a time when the university's civic mission is imperiled by corporatisation and racial backlash, access to its resources are increasingly predicated on whiteness and wealth, and the greater public good is financially and spiritually starved with every advance of American empire abroad. Focusing on Black Reconstruction, it elaborates in particular on the pedagogical implications of Du Bois's reading of the post-Reconstruction era for progressives caught in the contradictions of the current post-Civil Rights era. Drawing on Du Bois's insistence that education (both formal and informal) is central to the functioning of a nonrepressive and inclusive polity, the essay reflects on the current crisis of black educational access to quality schooling at all levels, as well as the relentless attacks on more public sites of pedagogy, within the context of neoliberal social and economic policies as well as the racist backlash against the civil rights gains of the 1960s. It addresses the degree to which engaged dialogue about the history and politics of racialised exclusion in the US and globally in the university have been derailed by the dictates of a particularly limp version of liberal multiculturalism and its allegiance to the privatised discourses of identity and difference. In so doing, it explores the role that educators might play in linking rigorous scholarship and critical pedagogy to progressive struggles for securing the very conditions for racial justice and political democracy.

Dystopian Nightmares and Educated Hopes: The Return of the Pedagogical and the Promise of Democracy

This article examines how the political, economic, and ideological policies under neoliberalism in the United States are being used to wage a war against almost every facet of American life not directly governed by the logic and values of the market. War has become the central motif of the dystopian vision of neoliberalism and the effects of such an assault on the domestic front have been overshadowed by the war in Iraq. The article further argues that it is crucial that educators reclaim a revitalized notion of politics that gets beyond the discourse of critique, one which all too often in reductionistic fashion emphasizes either the crushing effects of domination or views people largely as victims. A more radical politics must consider embracing a notion of hope rooted in pedagogical work that both extends the sites of pedagogy and recognizes the importance of cultural politics as a preconditions for both creating revitalized democratic public spaces, social movements, and the possibility of social action. Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.[1] My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. (Dreyfus, 2001)