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Tag Archives: 2009 Issue 4
The shadow of cultural criticism
In an article published in Athenäum in the year 1800, the German poet and critic Friedrich Schlegel agreed with Immanuel Kant’s famous dictum that the times were such that they could meaningfully be termed a “critical age”. But, in an ironic response to answer Kant’s positive tone, he added: “so that soon everything will be [...]
Critical thinking across contexts
1. Introduction “commitment, energy, self-motivation, self-management, reliability, co-operation, flexibility and adaptability, analytic ability, logical argument and ability to summarize key issues” (Harvey and Green, 1994 cited in Holmes, 2002: 137) The above list of soft, core, generic or transferable skills are the kinds of attributes that over the last 25 years have been identified as [...]
"Going down to South Park gonna learn something today". On popular culture as critical pleasure and pedagogical discourse
1. Popular culture as critical pleasure … Approaching popular culture from a cultural studies’ perspective always implies critical access because the notion of critique of ideology is a crucial one since the emergence of cultural studies in the UK in the 1950s. This is because culture is both a place of criticism as well as [...]
The critical and its anchorage into the social. An introduction to the 2009 winter issue of Politics and Culture
The critical usually finds itself in a difficult relationship with the social. Its strong investment into social change renders it both necessary and uncomfortable. Its necessity originates from the impossibility to ultimately stabilise and saturate the social, which generates spaces for difference and diversity, which in turn are the conditions of possibility for dissensus. Although [...]
The 'chain of equivalence'. Cultural studies and Laclau & Mouffe's discourse theory