ABSTRACT
In ‘turbulent times’, the challenge for critical pedagogy is to address the changes that have taken place in politics and in society more broadly in the past 50 years, since the earliest appearance of this concept inspired by the work of activist scholars such Paolo Friere among others. Recent social analyses have disorganised and undermined standard conceptions of political divisions around Left and Right, and traditional strategies of resistance to oppression and stock critical pedagogy aspirations such as empowerment and emancipation. A particular focus of this work has been social injustice, inequality, shrinking the state, economic crises, the reshaping of social class in the 21st century, and the emergence of the ‘precariat’. This chapter takes up the challenge of a critical pedagogy for turbulent times and how such work might be undertaken for and through physical education. Physical education has been repositioned in the school curriculum in many countries, most often within larger configurations of school knowledge such as ‘health and wellbeing’. This requirement for physical educators to work with new subject matter beyond sports and games has created risk but also opened up new possibilities for critical pedagogy.
