Marc Pruyn – författare

Thirteen contributions from academics representing a variety of disciplines confront issues relating to social justice in a post-9/11 world. Sample topics include the politics of coalition building among progressive educators and the role of participatory democracy in the critical praxis of social justice.

As the title of this book suggests, how we understand, perceive and experience democracy may have a significant effect on how we actually engage in, and with, democracy. Within the educational context, this is a key concern, and forms the basis of the research presented in this volume within a critical, comparative analysis. The Global Doing Democracy Research Project (GDDRP), which currently has some 70 scholars in over 20 countries examining how educators do democracy, provides the framework in which diverse scholars explore a host of concerns related to democracy and democratic education, including the impact of neoliberalism, political literacy, critical engagement, teaching and learning for and about democracy, social justice, and the meaning of power/power relations within the educational context.

Ultimately, the contributors of this book collectively ask: can there be democracy without a critically engaged education, and, importantly, what role do educators play in this context and process? Why many educators in diverse contexts believe that they are unable, dissuaded and/or prevented from doing thick democratic education is problematized in this book but the authors also seek to illustrate that, despite the challenges, barriers and concerns about doing democracy in education, something can, and should, be done to develop, cultivate and ingratiate schools and society with more meaningful democratic practices and processes.

This book breaks new ground by using a similar empirical methodology within a number of international contexts to gage the democratic sentiments and actions of educators, which raises a host of questions about epistemology, teacher education, policy development, pedagogy, institutional cultures, conscientization, and the potential for transformational change in education.

Whereas This Fist Called My Heart, the first Peter McLaren reader (2016), offers a window into the development and reorientation of McLaren’s work over time, Tracks to Infinity emphasizes the significance of orientation in his contemporary work. McLaren’s earlier work was oriented toward the idea of a contradictory postmodern subjectivity located outside the increasingly fragmented, indeterminate late capitalist society. If the concept of the critical subject or change agent is perceived to be simultaneously located both inside and outside of the world that exists, however mundane, it begins to appear as a utopian or idealist construction.

While discourse is indeed important, locating the revolutionary potential exclusively within the abstract realm of language or the sign can lead to a disconnected relationship with the concreteness of everyday struggle. As the fog of the disembodied, postmodern subject began to lift, McLaren reoriented his engagement with and gaze toward the concrete value-creating laborer as the active agent of revolutionary educations’ process of becoming—collectively becoming something other than abstract labor. This volume is filled with deep engagements with the concreteness of lived experience juxtaposed next to the bourgeois propaganda of the capitalist class political establishment as manifested in the Trump era.

This Fist Called My Heart: The Peter McLaren Reader, Volume I. Through these gathered and sequentially presented essays, readers will be able to ‘see’ McLaren in the process of his theory construction, over time, without missing his essence of struggling for a just society that promotes the full humanity and liberation of all people. [Here,] we have curated some of the most exemplary essays along the trajectory of Peter McLaren’s long and impactful career. These pieces track and document Peter’s intellectual grow as one of North America’s most important intellectuals and advocates for critical pedagogy; his theorizing of the discursive and the everyday through postmodernist and poststructural lenses; his contributions to the literature and practice of critical multiculturalism; his stirring work on capitalist empire, and valiant struggles to resist it; through to his foundational, long held connection and cutting edge contribution to the field of humanist Marxism