This article provides an introduction to critical ethnographic work. Critical ethnography is understood as a form of knowledge production which supports transformative as well as interpretive concerns. Three fundamental conditions for ethnographic work are discussed: (1) a particular “problematic” that defines data and analytic procedures in a way consistent with one's pedagogicall political project: (2) the engagement of such work within a public sphere that allows it to become a starting point for social critique and transformation; and (3) the inclusion of a reflexive inquiry which would identify the limits of its own knowledge claims.
In this paper, the authors analyze the importance of critical pedagogy by examining its potentially transformative relations with the sphere of popular culture. Popular culture is viewed not only as a site of contradiction and struggle but also as a significant pedagogical terrain that raises important questions regarding such issues as the relevance of everyday life, the importance of student voice, the significance of both meaning and pleasure in the learning process, and the relationship between knowledge and power in the curriculum. In the end of the piece, the authors raise a number of questions that suggest important inquiries that need to be analyzed regarding how teachers and others can further develop the notion of critical pedagogy as a form of cultural politics.
Many institutions of social memory have moved away from a singular emphasis on affirming presentations of patriotism, triumph and great deeds toward an appreciation of the potential for aggression inherent in human relationships. The result has been a proliferation of practices of remembrance related to violence, loss and death, topics often characterized as ‘difficult knowledge’. This is amply illustrated within contemporary museum practices. Exhibitions commonly understood as offering ‘difficult knowledge’ have concerned not only histories of violent conflict and traumatic loss, but the aftermath of such. Despite this commonplace understanding, it remains important to consider what it is about such exhibitions that render them ‘difficult’ and what might be achieved by making these painful histories public. These questions are explored through a series of comparative studies of varying museum exhibitions that, while drawing from the same archive of images and documents, have presented them in different ways.
The overwhelming experience of women in a society dominated by men is that of being silenced. Feminist writers have shown that women are often silenced everywhere they turn,including in the classroom. Magda Lewis and Roger I. Simon, one as female student and the other as male teacher, describe and analyze the process of silencing as it occurred in their graduate seminar designed to explore the relationship between language and power.
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