ABSTRACT
Critical pedagogy teaches students how to critique a social order, like the Tuscon school district that banned Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and dismantled its Mexican American/Studies Program. Critical pedagogy and critical inquiry have an essential role in helping us fight back. Hope, as a form of pedagogy, confronts and interrogates cynicism, the belief that change is not possible or is too costly. Hope works from hopelessness to rage to love. A pedagogy of love frames a deep “commitment to social justice and economic democracy, a revolutionary commitment to release our humanity from the powerful death grip of crony capitalist domination”. The critical ethnographer criticizes the pedagogical structures of capitalism, using radical pedagogy to undermine the very authority of capitalism’s central ideological arguments. A commitment to performance pedagogy and critical race theory gives critical inquiry studies a valuable lever for militant, utopian cultural criticism.
