Language, pedagogy, and discourses of criticality in late capitalism

Abstract

Drawing on a 5-year ethnographic and discourse-based project with minoritized youth in Hong Kong, we reflect on how critical pedagogy may get constituted as a form of subjectification which opens possibilities for new practices while also contributing to inequality. We conclude by sharing insights for rethinking critical praxis. At a time when neoliberalism is said to be increasingly entrenched within everyday educational processes, critical pedagogy has come under intensified scrutiny and critique. In this light, we turn to this field and re-conceptualize it as a “discursive space” in which normative ideas about teaching and learning are considered as historically anchored processes of production, circulation and consumption of professional forms of expertise that cannot be detached from situated networks, institutions and social actors who profit from them. Through revisiting our previous work on networked trajectories of identification in relation to self-reflexivity, community, and commodification of pedagogy within conditions of late capitalism, we describe how critical pedagogy may get constituted as a form of subjectification, or “technology of the self” (Foucault, 1982) which, while allowing actors to engage in self-capitalization, contributes to reinforcing wide structures of inequality as institutionalized in contemporary labour markets. Against this background, we argue for the need of critical work with youth driven by: (a) use of transnational popular culture as a tool to generate dialogue; (b) an interest in providing nuanced portrayals of the dynamics and dilemmas involved in critical dialogue; and (c) an understanding of critical consciousness as a reflexive process of identification.