Culture and Politics Series – serie

From schools advertising McDonaldOs, Nike, and Shell oil to military generals appointed as superintendents; from corporate CEOs hailed as education experts to students suspended for wearing Pepsi tee shirts on Coke day; Collateral Damage sifts through a wide range of incidents to reveal how the rising corporatization of public schools needs to be understood as a part of a broader attack on the public sector. Uniquely, Collateral Damage considers the privatization of public education in relation to both globalization and local struggles over curriculum, schools, and culture. Saltman describes the dangers to democracy posed by educational policy debates increasingly framed by the language and logic of the market. He reveals how the language of school choice, competition, monopoly, and accountability shifts the grounds of debate to naturalize education along business models rather than for the public good. The commercialization and militarization of public schools, and media images of out of control teachers reveal how political and economic struggles over privatization involve culture, citizenship, nation, identity, and even bodies.

Challenges to the conventional study of history have been raised by the recent paradigm of globalization and by new intellectual transformations linked to postmodernism and postcolonialism. In this book the noted historian Arif Dirlik argues for a new approach to the practice of historical research. Moving beyond mere critique, he synthesizes traditional historical methods with new approaches that emphasize historical memory, indigenous writing, place based history, and the dual processes of integration and fragmentation in a globalized world.

This new book reflects Derrida's latest views on the role of education and international organizations in an era of globalization. In this book, Derrida develops a notion of the global citizen that is uniquely post-Kantian. He looks especially at the changing role of UNESCO and similar organizations at a time when individual and national identities, knowledge and commerce, and human rights all are brought to world attention in new ways than they have been in the past. Following Derrida's writings on these issues, prominent scholars engage in a dialogue with him on his approach to understanding the ethics of international institutions and education today.

This book offers an analysis of Paz's political thought, arguing that it is rooted in two separate and often antagonistic traditions, Liberalism and Romanticism. Grenier shows that Paz's political thought is best approached not so much by looking at the specific positions Paz took in the issues of his day, but rather by uncovering the core values at the heart of Paz's political philosophy. From Art to Politics gives not only a better understanding of Paz's thought, but also a discussion of the political culture and democratization of Mexico. The book takes a novel look at issues such as the relations between art and politics, the role of intellectuals, and the penchant of academics for 'machination' theories in the area of art and culture. The result is an account of Paz's work that is both more focused and more ambitious than those offered in previous books on Paz's politics.

This book offers an analysis of Paz's political thought, arguing that it is rooted in two separate and often antagonistic traditions, Liberalism and Romanticism. Grenier shows that Paz's political thought is best approached not so much by looking at the specific positions Paz took in the issues of his day, but rather by uncovering the core values at the heart of Paz's political philosophy. From Art to Politics gives not only a better understanding of Paz's thought, but also a discussion of the political culture and democratization of Mexico. The book takes a novel look at issues such as the relations between art and politics, the role of intellectuals, and the penchant of academics for 'machination' theories in the area of art and culture. The result is an account of Paz's work that is both more focused and more ambitious than those offered in previous books on Paz's politics.

This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining.In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social investment, but through consumption; the freedom to consume has replaced political empowerment. But the power to consume is distributed very unevenly, and even for the affluent it never fulfills the desire produced by the advertising industry. The contributors to this volume focus on adverse social conditions that confront young people in postmodernity, such as the relentless pressure to consume, social dis-investment in education, harsh responses to youth crime, and the continuing climate of intolerance that falls heavily on the young. In essays on education, youth crime, counseling, protest movements, fiction, identity-formation and popular culture, the contributors look for moments of resistance to the subsumption of youth culture under the logic of global capitalism.