Suchergebnisse

I precede the 'provocation' —a word I first heard used by my colleagues Gordon Asher and Leigh French—below with the following caveats. First, I produced this provocation as part of a workshop on Critical Pedagogy that Gordon Asher, Leigh French and I co-organised preceding a day conference on Critical Pedagogies. Second, the provocation that follows, like those of Asher and French, sought to spark off debate; it used David Graeber's rhetorical argument about paid work today, with its explicit use of the 'b' word, to encourage academics at the event to re-contextualise regimes of accountability in the university that they are experiencing and to consider how critical pedagogy could help them do so. Finally, I have been lucky enough to leave full time employment when voluntary redundancy was on offer (being already off work on stress-related sick leave, for the first and last time in my full-time, paid working life). This allowed me to stop being a wage slave and become, instead, as one of my colleagues put it, like Tony Benn who left Parliament to take up politics; I was leaving the university to take up education.

Articles written to date in Sociological Research Online as part of the rapid response to the events of 11 September and their aftermath have considered how sociology understands the contemporary world, as Larry Ray (2001) suggested. These articles have suggested that sociology can helpfully consider a number of issues that are emerging as a consequence of these events and that there is an urgency for sociologists to address these questions in the present context. This paper adds to the current debate by considering some implications of September 11th and its aftermath for the teaching of sociology. It does so by first exploring the current marketising context in which we teach and our students learn. It then considers my response to these events as a lecturer teaching Contemporary Social Theory and Globalisation in autumn 2001 and suggests that lecturers need to demonstrate to students now more than ever the usefulness of sociology to developing a fuller understanding of the contemporary world.

In recent years there have been expressions of anger and frustration against the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government and the predecessor New Labour government's neoliberalising policies. The momentum against government policies that immiserate a larger proportion of the population (whilst the income of the super rich globally grows at a staggering rate of 14% per year (Bower, 2013)), may seem to have diminished at present (summer 2013) but it is likely to rise, especially as direct action and local and national demonstrations continue, and as new webs and political formations of and strategies for resistance are created. As Gramsci (1971) observed, hegemony is never won outright, and the continuation of such struggles is important in building class consciousness. Whilst we recognise the powerful and growing penetration of the idea that there is no alternative (TINA) to austerity neoliberalisation, and the concomitant imposition of increasing severe sentences on those who revolt against (and not merely evade) the status quo, we believe that resistance must strengthen at the levels of ideas and activism. This belief impels this chapter. The chapter has four sections. First we outline the current political landscape that has been moulded by the ruling capitalist class embarking on an aggressive policy agenda to expand, accelerate and deepen the reality and ideology of neoliberalisation. We examine expressions and demonstrations of public anger that are resisting the neoliberal and neoconservative status quo. We then, in section two, focus on the accumulation of anger/resistance and government/media responses to this. The third section focuses specifically on anger, activism, protest and resistance in education, at school, further/vocational college level and at university level.2. A brief fourth section reports on and analyses the current state of organisation and development of resistance to immiseration capitalism in England.

Abstract: This article is a response to Piché and Walby's (2010) criticism of 'carceral tours'. It uses 40 reflective accounts, completed by final year students at Birmingham City University, of their visit to HMP Grendon – an annual visit which has been ongoing for ten years – to argue that this 'carceral tour' has pedagogical value to the students and is also important to the prisoners and prison staff.