Henry Giroux: Where is the Outrage? Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times

This public lecture by Dr. Henry A. Giroux is part of The Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University. It brings together leading thinkers to explore the development of critical pedagogies and the mobilization of teaching and learning practices towards matters of democracy, social justice, agency, politics, power, culture, and community. Henry Giroux’s lecture addresses the larger corporate and market driven forces now shaping all aspects of education, politics, culture, and everyday life in North America. In this talk, there will be a special emphasis on the role that critical pedagogy plays in defining not only traditional spheres of schooling but also a crucial form of public pedagogy that is at the heart of contemporary politics. In this sense, Giroux’s lecture explores what might be called the educative nature of culture and politics. At the same time, the lecture considers a number of related educative and pedagogical concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy including the notion of teachers as public intellectuals, pedagogy and the project of a substantive democracy, a politics of responsibility, and finally, pedagogy as a form of resistance and educated hope. Henry A. Giroux currently holds a Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He is also the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy and holds a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books include: The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine (City Lights, 2014); Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket, 2014); Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Paradigm 2015). Disposable Futures: Violence in the Age of the Spectacle [co authored with Brad Evans], (City Lights in 2015). Giroux’s web site is www.henryagiroux.com