Staging the Performances of the Privileged Social Group (PSG): Expanding the Philosophical Foundation of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

Contemporary efforts to rethink the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy are part of the ongoing project to make the field relevant to current struggles against oppression. Inherent to this project is an invitation to account for the plurality of ways and spaces in which privilege is performed in North American society and the troubling relations between privilege and oppression. The author employs Iris Young's social group concept to frame the construction of the Privileged Social Group (PSG), which, he contends, is a collectivity that has and continues to create relations to Others that systematically result in a range of social benefits for PSG members. The author defines the PSG through an analysis of its social position and the relational performances that it enacts to claim and maintain privilege. Three distinct social contexts in which the PSG is active are also examined, as well as two group control techniques through which PSG members influence one another's beliefs and behaviour for the purpose of claiming privilege as a group.Historically, critical pedagogy has been narrowly rooted in the work of Paulo Freire, who is primarily responsible for laying the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy in his classic texts on oppression and the political nature of education (Freire, 1970(Freire, , 1972(Freire, , 1976(Freire, , 1994(Freire, , 1998a. The Marxist influence is evident in Freire's accounts of oppression and in his articulations of pathways to social transformation, especially his use of the concepts of class, hegemony, domination, empowerment, and solidarity, all of which have and continue to inform the design and function of grass-roots educational and political struggles against exploitation and other forms of oppression worldwide. As a politico-educational movement with a traditionally Marxist orientation, the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy has and continues to be critiqued on the grounds that it is too thinly focused on processes related to 'class struggle'. The critiques against critical pedagogy, especially its theoretical underpinnings, are primarily motivated by the recognition that other factors such as racism, ageism, sexism, cultural imperialism, etc., also contribute to the operations of oppression, and through such recognitions work to keep the field framed by crosscutting radical discourses that promote a multi-sided, culturally plural representational and ideological base for critical pedagogy (Ellsworth, 1989;Ladson-Billings, 1995;Allen, 2002Allen, , 2004Leonardo, 2002;Rossatto et al, 2006). The ongoing project to keep the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy relevant to contemporary struggles against oppression is, at least in part, an invitation to people concerned about injustice at all levels (local to global), all contexts (personal, community, work, etc.) and across all difference (gender, age, ethnicity, etc.) to engage in nonformal and formal dialogue and debate about what critical pedagogy ought to be and what function it ough...