Chapter 5: Critical Pedagogy as Alternative Crisis Curriculum

Life is necessarily uncertain as all that we have to predict the next instant is that which preceded it. A natural response to this uncertainty is to have a measure of anxiety about what is to come. Fear of the unknown makes a receptive audience for crisis talk, typically manifest as anxiety about natural disasters, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change. Though these are materially significant and merit attention, the way in which these issues fleetingly pass through the public mind is cause for alarm in its own right, as it amounts to a social psychosis of distraction (Barnhardt, 2000).