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Universities serve several important functions in society today through research, education, and community engagement, not least helping people to live meaningfully in society and create a world worth living in. A kind of practice that seems particularly important in fulfilling such responsibilities is critical educational praxis, a social-justice oriented, educational practice/praxis, with a focus on asking critical questions and creating conditions for positive change. Yet, the contemporary university is not exactly a niche for critical educational praxis. There are practices and arrangements within higher education that make the enactment of critical educational praxis challenging. This paper explores this concern by explicating the notion of critical educational praxis and examining enablers and constraints for critical educational praxis drawing on an empirical study conducted in one university setting. Our aim is to prompt consideration of the kind of university ecosystems currently being created, and the implications for academic communities and society.

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Critical adult education is inspired by Paulo Freire’s educational writings. For him, the aim of the pedagogy of the oppressed is to emancipate people from social and economic repression. Critical adult education is intellectual work that aims to make the world more just. One might ask what exactly justice and injustice mean here, however. Is the work against social injustice mainly concerned with the redistribution of material goods or recognition and respect? This is the issue debated by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Honneth claims that in the context of social justice, recognition is a fundamental, overarching moral category and redistribution is derivative. Fraser denies that distribution could be subsumed under recognition and introduces a “perspectival dualist” analysis of social justice that considers the two categories (redistribution and recognition) as equally fundamental, mutually irreducible dimensions of justice. In this essay, Rauno Huttunen reflects on the relation between maldistribution and misrecognition, in order to think through critical adult education’s task in fighting against social injustice.