By Henry A. Giroux Edward Snowden, Russ Tice, Thomas Drake, Jeremy Scahill, and Julian Assange, among others, have recently made clear what it means to embody respect for a public intellectual debate, moral witnessing and intellectual culture. They are not … Continue reading
Watch Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts, speak on how artists are redefining their role in the 21st century.
Revolutions need their theorists, but such upheavals are impossible without [those] who haul theory out of books and shove it into the face of reality.
- Chris Hedges
In our post-9/11 age, the dominant media continue to dangerously desensitize citizens from the violence inherent in the brutal conflicts of this wartime, thus discouraging them from calling for an end to violence. Acting as an alternative form of widely accessible media, the Histories of Violence website created by Brad Evans (University of Leeds) emerges at this time as an important space of intellectual resistance to violence and to its seeming inevitability. Continue reading
Gated Intellectuals and Ignorance in Political Life: Toward a Borderless Pedagogy in the Occupy Movement
In this evocative essay, Henry Giroux describes what he calls the “disappearing acts” of corporate funded anti-public intellectuals who erect walls around knowledge while simultaneously rendering invisible those disadvantaged populations who are deserving of compassion and social protections. These gated intellectuals, often abetted by the dominant media, use privilege and ideological narrowness to divorce themselves from understanding the systemic elements that contribute to social and economic injustice. Their views reduce citizenship to consumption, support corporate greed and private interests, and fuel hyper-individualized notions of equality and freedom. In opposition to these “gated intellectuals,” Giroux encourages engaged public intellectuals to adopt a “borderless pedagogy” that crosses zones of knowledge control and policing and democratizes both power and knowledge. He calls on these intellectuals to incite and support a collective cultural campaign linking the defense of public and higher education to progressive social movements and independent media sources. A sustainable democratic future will require more than democratic governance; it will require a “multitude of public and free access forums” along with “the broad mobilization of traditional and new educational sites [in which] public intellectuals can do the work of resistance, engagement, and policymaking to support a democratic politics.” Read the article…
Tony Judt (1948-2010) On August 6, 2010, renowned historian Tony Judt died from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In the two-year span between his diagnosis and tragic death, Judt, incredibly, wrote three books. The final one has just … Continue reading
Two weeks ago I posed the question, “Where are the Canadian public intellectuals?” Admittedly, this is probably the least helpful of many questions one should ask. Canadians are certainly engaged in all kinds of important work that addresses the most … Continue reading
