Sarah Amsler

Embracing the politics of ambiguity: towards a normative theory of 'sustainability'

One of the most interesting problems within the burgeoning literature on ecological sustainability is that the concept itself, while politically ubiquitous, is also analytically ambiguous. Many attempts to determine the diverse and contested meanings of sustainability thus also reflect deeper concerns to clarify the political and ethical implications of the term in practice. Given these ambiguities, does the concept of sustainability serve any useful analytical purpose? Can it help us frame critical questions about how we live and how we might live, particularly as the presumed cultural conditions of sustainable social life, including faith in the possibility of efficacious collective action, are no longer themselves taken for granted? In this paper I argue that it does, and that by problematizing rather than despairing about the uncertainty which is inherent in the concept of sustainability, we can gain better insight into how it is employed in efforts to motivate ecological action.

Promising Futures? Education as a Symbolic Resource of Hope in Kyrgyzstan

PROGRAMMES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN Central Asian societies—as in many other societies across the globe—are often presumed to be either reflections of dominant political and economic change or tools for achieving it. In this essay, which uses higher education reform in Kyrgyzstan as a case study for theoretical analysis, I argue for an alternative, more constructivist interpretation of the relationship between education and the political. This is that educational work is a key site for the articulation of social imaginaries and for defining the cultural and political practices through which they may legitimately be realised. My argument proceeds as follows. In the first part of the essay, I introduce some of the dominant claims made about the political meaning of higher education reform in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. I then offer a theoretical explanation of why education is an important space of cultural politics as well as an institution of socialisation, drawing on cultural theory, the sociology of knowledge and especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explicate how the idea of education may become an ide´e-force—‘an idea which has social force’—in contexts of major social change (Bourdieu 2001, p. 34). Following this I explore how the idea of education in Kyrgyzstan has been articulated within and against wider cultural discourses of Marxism–Leninism and neoliberal capitalism, and discuss how these processes of articulation have shaped the present-day imagination of the futures education might promise. I illustrate this specifically by looking at how certain pedagogical styles have become articulated as signifiers of ‘competing’ political cultures within the society. Finally, I consider the implications of this signification for the development of alternative ideas about educational reform.

‘By ones and twos and tens’: pedagogies of possibility for democratising higher education

This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside formal educational institutions. Its setting is the recent period following the 2010 Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England. Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written, I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism to contextualise the contemporary politics of higher learning in relation to diverse histories and geographies of progressive education more generally. Taking this wider view suggests that some of the forms of knowledge which have characterised the university as a progressive institution are presently being produced in more politicised educational environments. Being receptive to these other modes of learning cannot only expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy within universities, but stimulate the kind of imagination that we need for dreaming big about higher education as and for a practice of democratic life.

Pedagogy against “dis-utopia”: from conscientization to the education of desire

In August 2007, over 6,000 sociologists gathered in New York to attend the 102nd meeting of the American Sociological Association and discuss the possibility of radical social transformation in post-modern capitalist society.1 The adoption of the conference theme ‘Is another world possible?’ was theoretically significant, for it seemed to call into question one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which critical sociology depends: that despite the rarity of radical social change, it is possible, desirable and even imperative to imagine and struggle for better alternatives to existing ways of being. From phenomenological insights into the contingency of our subjective interpretations of reality to the imperative of reconciling ‘appearance’ with ‘reality’; from the long history of collective movements to defend human dignity to the ‘politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006), critical theories of society presume that human fates are not determined and futures are not reified, and that the possibility of possibility is a pre-condition for ‘normal’ human existence. This is not to say that progressive alternatives to the status quo are not often and everywhere repressed to some degree and in some form, or that they are equally distributed or attainable. But as Gustavo Gutierrez once remarked, a ‘commitment to the creation of a just society and, ultimately, to a new human being, presupposes confidence in the future’ (2003, p. 197).

Whither critical pedagogy in the neo-liberal university today? Two UK practitioners' reflections on constraints and possibilities

Abstract This paper, based on the reflections of two academic social scientists, offers a starting point for dialogue about the importance of critical pedagogy within the university today, and about the potentially transformative possibilities of higher education more generally. We first explain how the current context of HE, framed through neoliberal restructuring, is reshaping opportunities for alternative forms of education and knowledge production to emerge. We then consider how insights from both critical pedagogy and popular education inform our work in this climate. Against this backdrop, we consider the effects of our efforts to realise the ideals of critical pedagogy in our teaching to date and ask how we might build more productive links between classroom and activist practices. Finally, we suggest that doing so can help facilitate a more fully articulated reconsideration of the meanings, purposes and practices of HE in contemporary society. This paper also includes responses from two educational developers, Janet Strivens and Ranald Macdonald, with the aim of creating a dialogue on the role of critical pedagogy in higher education.

The marketised university and the politics of motherhood

ABSTRACT In this paper, we offer a critique of neoliberal power from the perspective of the gendered, sexualised, raced and classed politics of motherhood in English universities. By using dialogical auto-ethnographic methods to examine our own past experiences as full-time employed mother–academics, we demonstrate how feminist academic praxis can not only help make the gendered workings of neoliberal power more visible, but also enable us to nurture and sustain alternative ways of being and working in, against and outside the university. Far from desiring greater inclusion into a system which enshrines repressive logics of productivity and reproduces gendered subjectivities, inequalities, silences and exclusions, we aim to refuse and transgress it by bringing feminist critiques of knowledge, labour and neoliberalism to bear on how we understand our own experiences of motherhood in the academic world.

Book Review: Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide

The book functions well as a lens into a distant world outsiders may have forgotten, making the allegations seem more parochial than they were at the time because they are so historical. Three comments are worth making though. First, in locating the allegations in the anthropological literature on popular folk beliefs – with the de rigueur references to the Azande – the author gives them an attention I do not think they deserve. These allegations were ridiculous and we should not be constrained by moral relativism from saying they are just plain crazy. There are other, better ways of illuminating that localised, violent and dysfunctional world that was 1970s Belfast than through magnifying a few absurd allegations about the occult. The dirty war of British propaganda has long been exposed; so too the connections between Protestant paramilitaries, politicised Protestant churchmen, and child sex abuse in Kincora Boys’ Home that Jenkins hints at (further details about which the publisher’s lawyers may well have deleted). Second, the author spends so much effort on explaining why the allegations disseminated and were taken seriously in small corners that not enough is said about the many more who did not take them seriously and who attacked their popularisation. A thoroughgoing sociology of rumour addresses why rumours fail as much as succeed. This means that the author does not emphasise enough for me the sort of social structural context in which these rumours gained a short life. References to ‘Black Masses’, and to the ‘Celtic nature’ of some of the rituals, is code for the conservative evangelical idea that Catholicism is pre-Christian and pagan; views that had much wider provenance and popularity in Northern Ireland than any about witchcraft and wizardry. That some of the so-called ‘experts’ called upon for comment were Protestant clergy should have given this game away. Third, the analysis of why the rumours ended, which locates it in changing news agendas, does not do justice to the social structural factors in which they circulated and which gave them meaning for a time. Such a structural context endured long after the rumours ended and, in my view, anti-Catholicism just took on different forms. My ending will not be there, however. This is a very clever book – some readers may think too clever by half – but Jenkins’s skill as a writer and his sharp intellect will be sadly missed by professional sociology. This reviewer wishes him well and looks forward to reading his next in what I know will be a very prolific and productive retirement.

Learning Hope. An Epistemology of Possibility for Advanced Capitalist Society

Drawing on the critical theories of Ernst Bloch and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as well as on the knowledge and learning practices of counter-capitalist social movements, Amsler’s chapter offers a reading of political hopelessness amongst educators in England through a critical epistemology which discloses it as ‘unfinished’ and potent material within a global politics of possibility. She invokes methods from Bloch’s critical process-philosophy of ‘learning hope’ which allows for three reality-shifting operations: (1) the making of distinctions between what is ‘not’, ‘not-yet’ and ‘nothing’ in experience and historical process; (2) identifying and creating ‘fronts’ of possibility for mediating reality in concretely utopian ways; and (3) the recognition of a multiplicity of anti-hegemonic scales and modes of transformation, and explains why these matter in movements not just for social change but for the immanent creation of an other reality.

Lost in transition: redefining students and universities in the contemporary Kyrgyz Republic

Review of Alan DeYoungs Lost in Transition: Redefining Students and Universities in the Contemporary Kyrgyz Republic

Re-imagining critique in cultural sociology

In this chapter, we argue that normative practices of critique, judgment and imagination are integral aspects of cultural practice – including the production of theory about culture – and that critical theory, particularly that of the broadly defined Frankfurt School tradition, is therefore an important element of a fully articulated sociology of culture.