Tom Boland – författare

Defining the principles and practices of walking as critical pedagogy, this book engages with social questions and challenges related to understandings of the Anthropocene.

Through a series of chapters that operationalize walking as a form of participatory pedagogy, it explores issues including migration and borders, sustainability and climate change, gender and feminist thought, the labour market, crime and rehabilitation, and urban life and regeneration. Showing how walking enables us to learn creatively, convivially, and critically on the move in city spaces, while thinking relationally, the authors demonstrate the importance of space, time and place: the layers of history embedded in the present, and the importance of active, embodied, participatory, collaborative and creative learning.

A pioneering approach to walking as a form of engagement and learning, Walking as Critical Pedagogy will appeal to researchers and students across the social sciences interested in new methods and research methodologies, and creative ways of teaching and learning about - and engaging with - major global issues in society.

Defining the principles and practices of walking as critical pedagogy, this book engages with social questions and challenges related to understandings of the Anthropocene.

Through a series of chapters that operationalize walking as a form of participatory pedagogy, it explores issues including migration and borders, sustainability and climate change, gender and feminist thought, the labour market, crime and rehabilitation, and urban life and regeneration. Showing how walking enables us to learn creatively, convivially, and critically on the move in city spaces, while thinking relationally, the authors demonstrate the importance of space, time and place: the layers of history embedded in the present, and the importance of active, embodied, participatory, collaborative and creative learning.

A pioneering approach to walking as a form of engagement and learning, Walking as Critical Pedagogy will appeal to researchers and students across the social sciences interested in new methods and research methodologies, and creative ways of teaching and learning about - and engaging with - major global issues in society.

Far from being the preserve of a few elite thinkers, critique increasingly dominates public life in modernity, leading to a cacophony of accusation and denunciation around all political issues. The technique of unmasking ‘power’ or ‘hegemony’ or ‘ideology’ has now been adopted across the political spectrum, where critical discourses are routinely used to suggest that anything and everything is only a ‘construct’ or even a ‘conspiracy’. This book draws on anthropological theory to provide a different perspective on this phenomenon; critique appears as a liminal predicament combining imitative polemical and schismatic urges with a haunting sense of uncertainty. It thereby addresses a central academic concern, with a special focus on political critique in the public sphere and within social media. Combining historical interrogations of the roots of critique, as well as examining contemporary political discourse in relation to populism, as seen in presidential elections, historical commemorations and welfare reform, The Spectacle of Critique uses anthropology and genealogy to offer a new sociology of critique that problematises critique and diagnoses its crisis, cultivating acritical and imaginative ways of thinking.

Far from being the preserve of a few elite thinkers, critique increasingly dominates public life in modernity, leading to a cacophony of accusation and denunciation around all political issues. The technique of unmasking ‘power’ or ‘hegemony’ or ‘ideology’ has now been adopted across the political spectrum, where critical discourses are routinely used to suggest that anything and everything is only a ‘construct’ or even a ‘conspiracy’. This book draws on anthropological theory to provide a different perspective on this phenomenon; critique appears as a liminal predicament combining imitative polemical and schismatic urges with a haunting sense of uncertainty. It thereby addresses a central academic concern, with a special focus on political critique in the public sphere and within social media. Combining historical interrogations of the roots of critique, as well as examining contemporary political discourse in relation to populism, as seen in presidential elections, historical commemorations and welfare reform, The Spectacle of Critique uses anthropology and genealogy to offer a new sociology of critique that problematises critique and diagnoses its crisis, cultivating acritical and imaginative ways of thinking.

Western culture has ‘faith’ in the labour market as a test of the worth of each individual. For those who are out of work, welfare is now less of a support than a means of purification and redemption. Continuously reformed by the left and right in politics, the contemporary welfare state attempts to transform the unemployed into active jobseekers, punishing non-compliance.

Drawing on ideas from economic theology, this provocative book uncovers deep-rooted religious concepts and shows how they continue to influence contemporary views of work and unemployment: Jobcentres resemble purgatory where the unemployed attempt to redeem themselves, jobseeking is a form of pilgrimage in hope of salvation, and the economy appears as providence, whereby trials and tribulations test each individual. This book will be essential reading for those interested in the sociology and anthropology of modern economic life.

Chapters 1 and 3 are available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.