Derek R Ford – författare

In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education.

In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education.

Those who are in shock that truth doesn’t seem to matter in politics miss the mark: politics has never corresponded with the truth. Rather, political struggle is about the formulation and materialization of new truths. The “post-truth” era thus offers an important opportunity to push forward into a different world. Embracing this opportunity, Derek R. Ford articulates a new educational philosophy and praxis that emerges from within the nexus of social theory and political struggle. Blocking together aesthetics, queer theory, urbanism, postmodern philosophy, and radical politics, Ford develops arguments and proposals on key topics ranging from debt and time, to the death drive and forms of political organization. Through forceful yet accessible prose, Ford offers contemporary left politics an imaginative and potent set of educational concepts and practices.

Offering a novel take on the history of education in the US, A History of Education for the Many examines the development of the education system from a global and internationalist perspective. Challenging the dominant narratives that such development is the product of either a flourishing democracy or a ruling-class project to reproduce structural inequalities, this book demonstrates the link between education and the struggles of working-class and oppressed peoples inside and outside the US. In a country notorious for educating its people with an inability to see beyond its own borders, this book offers a timely corrective by focusing on the primacy of the global balances of forces in shaping the history of US education. Combining Marx’s dialectic with W.E.B. Du Bois’ historiographical approach, Malott demonstrates how the mighty agency of the world’s poor and oppressed have forced the hand of the US ruling class in foreign policy and domestic educational policies. Malott offers a unique view of the dialectical development of social control by examining the role of the police and state violence, along with education or ideology over time. This situates the 2020 uprisings against racism and the movements to defund the police within a historical context dating back to eighteenth-century slave patrols.As US imperialism declines in the 21st century and social movements across the globe continue to swell and intensify, Malott’s historical analysis looks backwards as it pushes us, optimistically and realistically, forwards towards a liberated future.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com.

Louis Althusser's thinking laid the groundwork for critical educational theory, yet it is often misunderstood in critical pedagogy, sociology of education, and related fields. In this open access book, David I. Backer reexamines Althusser’s educational theory, specifically the claim that education is the most powerful ideological state apparatus in modern capitalist societies. He then presents this theory’s flawed reception in critical educational research and draws out a lost tradition of educational thinking it inspired with important applications to race, gender, ideology, and the concept of social structure in education. Correcting the record about Althusser’s thinking in the traditional narrative of critical educational research becomes an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions for thinking about school in its social context. For students and researchers of education, critical theory, sociology of education, and critical pedagogy, this book will be a resource for rethinking the social foundations of education, both as a field and as a set of theoretical frameworks for educational research.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

What is philosophical about the practice Philosophy for Children (P4C)? In this open access book, the authors offer a surprising answer to this question: a practitioner’s contemplation of the potentiality to speak, or what can be called infancy. Although essential to the experience of language, this most basic and profound capacity is often taken for granted or simply instrumentalized for the educational purposes of developing critical, caring, or creative thinking skills in the name of democratic citizenship. Against this kind of instrumentalization, the authors’ radical reconceptualization of P4C focuses on the experience of infancy that can take place through collective inquiry. The authors’ Philosophy for Infancy (P4I) emerges as a non-instrumental educational practice that does not dictate what to say or how to say it but rather turns attention to the fact of speaking. Referencing critical theorist Giorgio Agamben’s extensive work on the theme of infancy, the authors philosophically engage the core writings of Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, foundational scholars in the P4C tradition, to rediscover this latent potentiality in the original P4C program that has yet to be developed. Not only does the book provide a new theoretical basis for appreciating what is philosophical in Lipman and Sharp’s formulations of P4C, it also provides a unique elucidation of key concepts in Agamben’s work—such as infancy, demand, rules, adventure, happiness, love, and anarchy—within a collective, educational practice. Throughout, the authors offer applications of P4I that will provide anchoring points to inspire educators to return to philosophical experimentation with language as a means without end.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

In this open access book, philosopher of education Adam Greteman offers commentary on five lessons queers teach: transparency, inconvenience, others, hatred, and coming into. Intentionally idiosyncratic, each of these lessons takes seriously the work of teaching, the work of teachers, and the complex realities that unfold around LGBTQ+ issues and lives as they enter educational conversations. These conversations are conditioned by contexts and communities that make bold proclamations difficult, but also point toward possibilities rooted in specifics. Combined, these five lessons provide commentary on an educational project that forefronts queers and their practices amid complex and changing realities. Recognizing the mutual importance of theory and practices, each chapter tacks between practical concerns that are part of education as it exists day to day and theoretical insights that intertwine and intervene in those everyday practical realities. Yet, Greteman offers no prescriptions for teaching, nor an overarching theory. Rather, Greteman takes up each “this” that queers teach so to offer commentary that may provide opportunities for further engagement with ongoing needs that schools, teachers, students, and communities have in their impossible work. Queers teach. These lessons are never ending yet vital to not only queer’s surviving in schools, but encountering an education that aids in their thriving alongside others. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

The book addresses the need to reconsider the relation between university and society, a debate that has been going on from the Middle Ages to Kant, Humboldt, Newman, and beyond. Hans Schildermans builds on the philosophy and theory of higher education, drawing on the work of John Dewey, Donna Haraway, William James, Bruno Latour, Martin Savransky, Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead. In relation to the study practices of the Palestinian experimental university ‘Campus in Camps’, he develops the concept of an ecology of study to approach the relation between university and society from a new angle. The book avoids the two positions that are traditionally defended, namely the idea of the autonomous university where research and teaching are performed ‘in freedom and solitude’ on the one hand, and the capitalized university that produces useful knowledge on the other hand. Schildermans emphasizes the importance of study practices as a site of resistance against current neoliberal and capitalist reforms of the university and to envisage a different future for the university. The book will appeal to activists, critical academics and those interested in the fate of higher education today.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Those who are in shock that truth doesn’t seem to matter in politics miss the mark: politics has never corresponded with the truth. Rather, political struggle is about the formulation and materialization of new truths. The “post-truth” era thus offers an important opportunity to push forward into a different world. Embracing this opportunity, Derek R. Ford articulates a new educational philosophy and praxis that emerges from within the nexus of social theory and political struggle. Blocking together aesthetics, queer theory, urbanism, postmodern philosophy, and radical politics, Ford develops arguments and proposals on key topics ranging from debt and time, to the death drive and forms of political organization. Through forceful yet accessible prose, Ford offers contemporary left politics an imaginative and potent set of educational concepts and practices.

Winner of the American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Book AwardWhy do we have sex education? For whom does it exist, and who is it against? This open access book explores these questions, ultimately calling into question the very existence of sex education itself. The analysis is centred on the marginalised lives of sex workers. This focus allows us to see sex education and sex work in a new light and provides insights into the implications of sex education in public schools and teacher education. By considering the relationship between sex education and sex work, Caitlin Howlett reveals the way in which sex education exists as a form of state violence, and continues to maintain close ties to sexism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy, feminist history, epistemology, post-humanism, and queer of color critique, Howlett calls for an end to sex education as a federally funded project and argues for new pedagogical approaches to educating about sex, gender, and sexuality in schools.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Offering a novel take on the history of education in the US, A History of Education for the Many examines the development of the education system from a global and internationalist perspective. Challenging the dominant narratives that such development is the product of either a flourishing democracy or a ruling-class project to reproduce structural inequalities, this book demonstrates the link between education and the struggles of working-class and oppressed peoples inside and outside the US. In a country notorious for educating its people with an inability to see beyond its own borders, this book offers a timely corrective by focusing on the primacy of the global balances of forces in shaping the history of US education. Combining Marx’s dialectic with W.E.B. Du Bois’ historiographical approach, Malott demonstrates how the mighty agency of the world’s poor and oppressed have forced the hand of the US ruling class in foreign policy and domestic educational policies. Malott offers a unique view of the dialectical development of social control by examining the role of the police and state violence, along with education or ideology over time. This situates the 2020 uprisings against racism and the movements to defund the police within a historical context dating back to eighteenth-century slave patrols.As US imperialism declines in the 21st century and social movements across the globe continue to swell and intensify, Malott’s historical analysis looks backwards as it pushes us, optimistically and realistically, forwards towards a liberated future.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com.

The book addresses the need to reconsider the relation between university and society, a debate that has been going on from the Middle Ages to Kant, Humboldt, Newman, and beyond. Hans Schildermans builds on the philosophy and theory of higher education, drawing on the work of John Dewey, Donna Haraway, William James, Bruno Latour, Martin Savransky, Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead. In relation to the study practices of the Palestinian experimental university ‘Campus in Camps’, he develops the concept of an ecology of study to approach the relation between university and society from a new angle. The book avoids the two positions that are traditionally defended, namely the idea of the autonomous university where research and teaching are performed ‘in freedom and solitude’ on the one hand, and the capitalized university that produces useful knowledge on the other hand. Schildermans emphasizes the importance of study practices as a site of resistance against current neoliberal and capitalist reforms of the university and to envisage a different future for the university. The book will appeal to activists, critical academics and those interested in the fate of higher education today.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

What is philosophical about the practice Philosophy for Children (P4C)? In this open access book, the authors offer a surprising answer to this question: a practitioner’s contemplation of the potentiality to speak, or what can be called infancy. Although essential to the experience of language, this most basic and profound capacity is often taken for granted or simply instrumentalized for the educational purposes of developing critical, caring, or creative thinking skills in the name of democratic citizenship. Against this kind of instrumentalization, the authors’ radical reconceptualization of P4C focuses on the experience of infancy that can take place through collective inquiry. The authors’ Philosophy for Infancy (P4I) emerges as a non-instrumental educational practice that does not dictate what to say or how to say it but rather turns attention to the fact of speaking. Referencing critical theorist Giorgio Agamben’s extensive work on the theme of infancy, the authors philosophically engage the core writings of Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, foundational scholars in the P4C tradition, to rediscover this latent potentiality in the original P4C program that has yet to be developed. Not only does the book provide a new theoretical basis for appreciating what is philosophical in Lipman and Sharp’s formulations of P4C, it also provides a unique elucidation of key concepts in Agamben’s work—such as infancy, demand, rules, adventure, happiness, love, and anarchy—within a collective, educational practice. Throughout, the authors offer applications of P4I that will provide anchoring points to inspire educators to return to philosophical experimentation with language as a means without end.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Winner of the American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Book AwardWhy do we have sex education? For whom does it exist, and who is it against? This open access book explores these questions, ultimately calling into question the very existence of sex education itself. The analysis is centred on the marginalised lives of sex workers. This focus allows us to see sex education and sex work in a new light and provides insights into the implications of sex education in public schools and teacher education. By considering the relationship between sex education and sex work, Caitlin Howlett reveals the way in which sex education exists as a form of state violence, and continues to maintain close ties to sexism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy, feminist history, epistemology, post-humanism, and queer of color critique, Howlett calls for an end to sex education as a federally funded project and argues for new pedagogical approaches to educating about sex, gender, and sexuality in schools.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Louis Althusser's thinking laid the groundwork for critical educational theory, yet it is often misunderstood in critical pedagogy, sociology of education, and related fields. In this open access book, David I. Backer reexamines Althusser’s educational theory, specifically the claim that education is the most powerful ideological state apparatus in modern capitalist societies. He then presents this theory’s flawed reception in critical educational research and draws out a lost tradition of educational thinking it inspired with important applications to race, gender, ideology, and the concept of social structure in education. Correcting the record about Althusser’s thinking in the traditional narrative of critical educational research becomes an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions for thinking about school in its social context. For students and researchers of education, critical theory, sociology of education, and critical pedagogy, this book will be a resource for rethinking the social foundations of education, both as a field and as a set of theoretical frameworks for educational research.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

In this open access book, philosopher of education Adam Greteman offers commentary on five lessons queers teach: transparency, inconvenience, others, hatred, and coming into. Intentionally idiosyncratic, each of these lessons takes seriously the work of teaching, the work of teachers, and the complex realities that unfold around LGBTQ+ issues and lives as they enter educational conversations. These conversations are conditioned by contexts and communities that make bold proclamations difficult, but also point toward possibilities rooted in specifics. Combined, these five lessons provide commentary on an educational project that forefronts queers and their practices amid complex and changing realities. Recognizing the mutual importance of theory and practices, each chapter tacks between practical concerns that are part of education as it exists day to day and theoretical insights that intertwine and intervene in those everyday practical realities. Yet, Greteman offers no prescriptions for teaching, nor an overarching theory. Rather, Greteman takes up each “this” that queers teach so to offer commentary that may provide opportunities for further engagement with ongoing needs that schools, teachers, students, and communities have in their impossible work. Queers teach. These lessons are never ending yet vital to not only queer’s surviving in schools, but encountering an education that aids in their thriving alongside others. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book, originally published in Portuguese in 1988 and now available in English for the first time, describes the Brazilian educator, Antonio Leal's, experiences teaching so-called “unteachable” children in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. A Voice for Maria Favela tells the story of how Leal considers what the children bring to the class, gradually engaging them in developing a narrative about Maria Favela, a single mother and housemaid. Leal uses the sounds within the story to draw out the students’ abilities to see enunciation and articulation as a process of becoming literatized.A contemporary and admirer of Paulo Freire, Leal nevertheless recognised that his students’ needs could not be theorized along Freirean lines of oppressor/oppressed. He devised an emancipatory approach that is more focussed on the individual child and their capacity for self-expression than those often found in critical pedagogy. The book puts forward a unique type of radical pedagogy and philosophy of education, developed through direct classroom observation. The book includes a substantial introduction written by the translator Alexis Gibbs (University of Winchester, UK) and preface by Inny Accioly (Fluminense Federal University, Brazil).The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book, originally published in Portuguese in 1988 and now available in English for the first time, describes the Brazilian educator, Antonio Leal's, experiences teaching so-called “unteachable” children in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. A Voice for Maria Favela tells the story of how Leal considers what the children bring to the class, gradually engaging them in developing a narrative about Maria Favela, a single mother and housemaid. Leal uses the sounds within the story to draw out the students’ abilities to see enunciation and articulation as a process of becoming literatized.A contemporary and admirer of Paulo Freire, Leal nevertheless recognised that his students’ needs could not be theorized along Freirean lines of oppressor/oppressed. He devised an emancipatory approach that is more focussed on the individual child and their capacity for self-expression than those often found in critical pedagogy. The book puts forward a unique type of radical pedagogy and philosophy of education, developed through direct classroom observation. The book includes a substantial introduction written by the translator Alexis Gibbs (University of Winchester, UK) and preface by Inny Accioly (Fluminense Federal University, Brazil).The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Drawing on the thoughts of Jacques Rancière, this open access book seeks to understand the politics of childhood art by attending to the relational matters in children’s artistic practices rather than the linear age-based developmental theories which often limit children’s creativity. Weaving Rancière’s ideas on pedagogy, politics, and aesthetics, with a research study at a Kindergarten classroom in the USA and the author’s own art experiences in South Korea as a child, Hayon Park discusses the politics and ethics of teacher-led art projects, children’s popular culture, and adult-child drawing companionship. The author argues that childhood art and in education is inherently political and relational as, from an early age, children are acutely aware of monitoring, categorisation, and the potential oppression of their art making and learning. Offering a post-structural, reconceptualist approach to art education, Park argues for new emancipatory practices and pedagogies, which encourage children's creativity and activate curiosity.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Drawing on the thoughts of Jacques Rancière, this open access book seeks to understand the politics of childhood art by attending to the relational matters in children’s artistic practices rather than the linear age-based developmental theories which often limit children’s creativity. Weaving Rancière’s ideas on pedagogy, politics, and aesthetics, with a research study at a Kindergarten classroom in the USA and the author’s own art experiences in South Korea as a child, Hayon Park discusses the politics and ethics of teacher-led art projects, children’s popular culture, and adult-child drawing companionship. The author argues that childhood art and in education is inherently political and relational as, from an early age, children are acutely aware of monitoring, categorisation, and the potential oppression of their art making and learning. Offering a post-structural, reconceptualist approach to art education, Park argues for new emancipatory practices and pedagogies, which encourage children's creativity and activate curiosity.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book develops a theory of “vital curiosity” as a transdisciplinary force that activates ecological flows of connection across pedagogical spaces, disciplinary bodies, curricular structures, and institutional ontologies. Educational approaches and values are currently being rethought in light of global economic and environmental crises, posing fundamental questions about desire, access, responsibility, ethics, and relationality in teaching and learning. Cala Coats explores curiosity’s vital force as a critical learning disposition and creative process that activates movement and attraction through aesthetic disruptions and embodied connections, propelled through affective ruptures and durational commitments toward affirmative complexity. The chapters follow questions and connections that emerge from embodied encounters in schools, homes, public spaces, and the natural environment, illuminating residual patterns of colonization and commodification across bodies, territories, and knowledge. While this book is rooted in questions of schooling and education, it serves as a proposition to realize curiosity’s vital energy as an affirmative ethico-aesthetic force in any context. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman theories, the book puts forward an image of educational life, as it extends from curiosity, as a radical pedagogical practice.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book develops a theory of “vital curiosity” as a transdisciplinary force that activates ecological flows of connection across pedagogical spaces, disciplinary bodies, curricular structures, and institutional ontologies. Educational approaches and values are currently being rethought in light of global economic and environmental crises, posing fundamental questions about desire, access, responsibility, ethics, and relationality in teaching and learning. Cala Coats explores curiosity’s vital force as a critical learning disposition and creative process that activates movement and attraction through aesthetic disruptions and embodied connections, propelled through affective ruptures and durational commitments toward affirmative complexity. The chapters follow questions and connections that emerge from embodied encounters in schools, homes, public spaces, and the natural environment, illuminating residual patterns of colonization and commodification across bodies, territories, and knowledge. While this book is rooted in questions of schooling and education, it serves as a proposition to realize curiosity’s vital energy as an affirmative ethico-aesthetic force in any context. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman theories, the book puts forward an image of educational life, as it extends from curiosity, as a radical pedagogical practice.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book sets out from Paulo Freire’s claim that the problem-posing model of education works as a “kind of psychoanalysis,” and deploys a Lacanian perspective to rearticulate the theoretical and practical principles of critical pedagogy. Attending to the latent psychoanalytic sensibility of Freire’s project, Armonda brings this dimension to the surface, while clearly addressing its consequences for pedagogical experience. Armonda challenges long-standing assumptions on Freire and the nature of his problem-posing intervention, as the unconscious comes to the fore as the persistent, traumatic, and uncanny site of Freirean teaching. Drawing primarily on the work of Jacques Lacan as well as Frantz Fanon, Alenka Zupancic, and Slavoj Žižek, this book offers a critical introduction to psychoanalysis in the social, political, and philosophical foundations of education. The book extends an invitation to those in the tradition of critical pedagogy to grapple with this neglected dimension in Freire’s thought, and stands as an unapologetic call to return to his most subversive propositions on teaching.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book sets out from Paulo Freire’s claim that the problem-posing model of education works as a “kind of psychoanalysis,” and deploys a Lacanian perspective to rearticulate the theoretical and practical principles of critical pedagogy. Attending to the latent psychoanalytic sensibility of Freire’s project, Armonda brings this dimension to the surface, while clearly addressing its consequences for pedagogical experience. Armonda challenges long-standing assumptions on Freire and the nature of his problem-posing intervention, as the unconscious comes to the fore as the persistent, traumatic, and uncanny site of Freirean teaching. Drawing primarily on the work of Jacques Lacan as well as Frantz Fanon, Alenka Zupancic, and Slavoj Žižek, this book offers a critical introduction to psychoanalysis in the social, political, and philosophical foundations of education. The book extends an invitation to those in the tradition of critical pedagogy to grapple with this neglected dimension in Freire’s thought, and stands as an unapologetic call to return to his most subversive propositions on teaching.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

With the contradictions of capitalism heightening and intensifying, and with new social movements spreading across the globe, revolutionary transformation is once again on the agenda. For radicals, the most pressing question is: How can we transform ourselves and our world into something else, something just? In Marx, Capital, and Education, Curry Stephenson Malott and Derek R. Ford develop a «critical pedagogy of becoming» that is concerned with precisely this question. The authors boldly investigate the movement toward communism and the essential role that critical pedagogy can play in this transition. Performing a novel and educational reading of Karl Marx and radical theorists and activists, Malott and Ford present a critical understanding of the past and present, of the underlying logics and (often opaque) forces that determine the world-historical moment. Yet Malott and Ford are equally concerned with examining the specific ways in which we can teach, learn, study, and struggle ourselves beyond capitalism; how we can ultimately overthrow the existing order and institute a new mode of production and set of social relations. This incisive and timely book, penned by two militant teachers, organizers, and academics, reconfigures pedagogy and politics. Educators and organizers alike will find that it provides new ammunition in the struggle for the world that we deserve.

Contending that radical politics needs educational theory, Communist Study: Education for the Commons poses a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and figurality? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, educational theorist Derek R. Ford develops a pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. To chart this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary and ideological boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Butler, and Lenin. Demonstrating that learning is the educational logic that underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic. Poetic, performative, and provocative, this theory of study is oriented toward what Ford calls “the sublime feeling of being-in-common,” which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.