Chapter 2: A Place-Based Critical Pedagogy in Turbulent Times: Restoring Hope for Alternative Futures

For the past 30 years, critical pedagogy has been at the center of efforts to construct social alternatives that are both credible and compelling. This has included creating new social contexts and encounters that value alternative meanings, knowledges and actions. After an initially enthusiastic reception in the 1970s and 1980s, the writings of scholars in the field of critical pedagogy now tend to languish on bookshelves in academic libraries—despite provocative titles and eye-catching cover art. Linked to the rip tide of globalization and the postmodern turn, the changing fortunes of critical pedagogy have divided its political and intellectual forces into numerous sides, factions, and camps. Under the tutelage of the state, critical pedagogy has also become co-opted, domesticated, and fragmented, and thus, a weak force, divided (socially and ideologically) in disciplinary situatedness, discourse and lines of specialization. Certainly, critical pedagogy, as an object of academic study has been unable to chart an independent and unified course of action by turning out and swimming with currents to the left of traditional structures, organizations, and parties.