Keywords

Cultural Studies and Education are entwined in extremely broad and expanding transdisciplinary fields. The epistemological divide between their theory and practice is bridged by examining the ground of contested and multiple spaces of praxis to resist and rupture the status quo and challenge hegemonic and normalizing systems of power. Cultural Studies and Education have a complimentary set of interests, concerns, teaching, and research agendas that coalesce around the analysis of ideas, artifacts, or practices that are actively being formed, acted upon, exchanged, and reproduced:

  • A particular cultural practice

  • A particular group of cultural producers or consumers (e.g., Aboriginal artists, youth subcultures, an aspect of national or ethnic cultural maintenance, specific community groups, individuals)

  • The analysis of cultural “texts” (news, films, advertisements, etc.) to show underlying structures, patterns, and contents and the way subjects are positioned, portrayed, defined, and persuaded

  • Representations of a particular subject in contemporary media or art (e.g., female bodies and eating disorders, sexuality and gender, war and terrorism, the articulation of identities, or stereotypes, of specific groups or identity formations) or questions of culture and morality or entitlement (e.g., depictions of “good” and “evil” desire in advertising, images of youth, and rebellion)

  • Cultural categories that underlie differentiations between particular social groups

  • A particular style of cultural practice, such as everyday consumption, cultural rituals, or commemorations (e.g., cooking or eating, sport, practices surrounding death, cultural festivals)

  • An analysis of a specific cultural audiences or “subcultures” based around particular tastes (e.g., sexual subcultures, art gallery users, street fashions)

  • An analysis of cultural institutions or policies

  • A comparison of differing cultural order that privilege differences

  • Intercultural relations and practices of cultural exchange or “translation,” including appropriation, reappropriation, and exappropriation

  • A theoretical or ethical question considered in terms of its cultural circulation

  • Culture and technologies (e.g., communication devices, digital media, or games, virtual communities, etc.)

This handbook brings together a multiplicity of voices in a collective and converging manner that asks critical questions from a heterogeneity of vantage points around Cultural Studies and Education. Its practical role and theoretical impact are to challenge dominant socioeconomic and politico-ideological structures that reproduce the ethical and material relations for injustice and inequity. Some themes and topics that will be in the sections of the book are Education and Pedagogy (elementary, secondary, postsecondary institutions, curricula, literacy, testing); Religion and Spirituality (ethnicity, identity, conflict, representation); Digital Technology and Public Media (Facebook, cell phones, digital games); Urbanization and Arts (the city, graffiti, street art, poetry); Fashion, Music, and Identity (hip hop, metal, punk, commercialization); Advertising and Manufacturing Desire, Film and Television, Sports, and Media (masculinity, women in sports, violence, steroids); Environmental Sustainability and Capitalism, Cultural Politics and Representation, and Politics and Participation (democracy, citizenship, institutions); Youth and Childhood; Gender and Identity; Sexuality and Human Rights; and Race and Representation. A focus on the relevance of ongoing production and reproduction of cultural and historical differences of educational practices.

This includes what it means not only to develop forms of pedagogical address that are responsive to such differences but also to examine the challenges of coming to know a world beyond one’s own perspective through reading, hearing, or viewing texts, stories, and images, focusing on the possibilities and limitations of practices through which identities/subjectivities are informed with subject-centric discourses and histories (e.g., feminist, class-based, and ethnocultural), as well as regional, nation/nation-state, or global efforts to define collective subjectivities. Examining the relation of the pedagogical, the ethical, and political in education and culture. This implies developing practices and frameworks that help to clarify one’s basic commitments as an educator, researcher, or cultural worker and how those commitments might be worked through in practices. Interests here include how local and state education and cultural policies influence the possibilities of various forms of pedagogical practice and cultural activism and what new alternatives might be proposed that would support a more just and equitable society. Culture must therefore be considered as a distinct, if overlapping, sphere of heterogeneous, techno-pragmatic modes of meaning production. This means taking culture seriously as referencing a variety of pedagogical forms. Thus, there is concern, for example, with the institution of practices such as music, museums, television, literature, photography, art, religious worship, architecture, and urban topographies and how these forms of expression articulate their own dynamics of subjectification, meaning, embodiment, and reproducibility. For education, this means, on the one hand, teaching about popular, commercial, mass, folk, and local culture while, on the other hand, learning how one learns from such cultural forms, attending to and critiquing what and how they teach. The purpose of such a critical position is to understand the differentiated and often unequal processes of social exchange that result in local and global cultural production in a world system being reordered and re-specialized through changes in economic policies and practices, for example, the role of new technologies, and emergent, and at times, the influence of counter-hegemonic cultures on mainstream ideas, objects, and practices. This handbook analyzes the genealogies of different conditions of knowledge and their appearance as particular subjects and disciplines in light of advances in cultural theory and critique, including the important contributions that knowledge historically marginal to the Western traditions of thought can make to contemporary notions of knowing, teaching, and learning.

In Chap. 2, “Social Movement Knowledge Production,” Aziz Choudry examines social movements and social, political, and environmental justice activism as important sites of knowledge production. This includes ideas, insights, and visions produced by people collectively working for social, economic, and political change and reflecting on their experiences and what has preceded them. This is often knowledge about systems of power and exploitation developed as people find themselves in confrontation with states and capital. However, the forms and significance of this knowledge production are often overlooked by social movement scholars and even activists themselves. Focusing on the intellectual work that takes place in struggles for social and political justice, and drawing from engaged scholarship and a range of movements and activist contexts, this chapter discusses the processes, possibilities, and tensions of social movement knowledge production for providing tools for organizing and critical analysis. This chapter discusses the relationship between learning, action, and knowledge production; research in social movements and political activism; the production and use of historical knowledge as a tool for organizing; and popular cultural/artistic work that takes place within activism.

Alana Butler, Cathryn Teasley, and Concepción Sánchez-Blanco present a critique of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a contested site of cultural transmission and social reproduction in Western nation-states, but also as one that can become a potentially powerful space of resistance and change. Chap. 3, “A Decolonial, Intersectional Approach to Disrupting Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Patriarchy in Western Early Childhood Education and Care” examines how language and other symbolic systems shape social hierarchies of power within and beyond ECEC contexts and how children from infancy to the early years of schooling are exposed to various forms of oppression caused by racist, ethnocentric, neoliberal, patriarchal, heteronormative, and neocolonial dynamics. How these persistent cultural forces converge on malleable young minds, perpetuating not only White privilege but other injustices sustained by predatory capitalist cultural strategies, which emphasize conformity, competition, and consumerism over other ontological and axiological orientations, are encoded through cultures of play, pedagogical practice, and interpersonal/intergroup relations in ECEC. They focus more specifically on how color-blind racism within ECEC is undergirded by a Western-centric, capitalist, and patriarchal world system, while color blindness that situates ECEC as a neutral space is rejected. The discussion is further framed through intersectional, decolonial, counter-hegemonic, and cross-cultural inquiry into culturally sustainable child-centered pedagogy. To understand how racial and other sociocultural hierarchies colonize children’s spatialities, temporalities, potentialities, and overall well-being, we conclude by proposing strategies to foster resistance and rupture the systems of hegemonic power and dominator culture within ECEC.

Now, more than ever, there is an obligation to recognize the presence of the infinite possibilities and multiple horizons of alterity, which destabilize the grounding of subjectivity and our knowledge about what it means to be human. This responsibility highlights the problem of exposing or creating locations for otherness within communitarian-based institutions such as the university, which still occupy the colonized space of traditional knowledge archives and are at the same time alterior to the logic of the status quo simply by producing new forms of knowledge and blazing trails of discovery that change the disciplines. If so, Chap. 4, “Ourselves as Another” by Peter Pericles Trifonas asks, How and where are gestures toward the spaces of these new locations enacted within the human sciences by which we define the difference of ourselves as another?

Chap. 5, “Between Cultural Literacy and Cultural Relevance: A Culturally Pragmatic Approach to Reducing the Black-White Achievement Gap” introduces a culturally pragmatic approach to reducing the Black-White achievement gap, which marries Hirsch Jr.’s cultural literacy with Ladson-Billings’s culturally relevant pedagogy. Mohamed Dahir’s approach offers African American students the taken-for-granted knowledge required to succeed academically and navigate mainstream society while simultaneously utilizing and validating African American culture in the classroom. In addition, it seeks to encourage students to view the world with a critical consciousness, which questions and challenges the sociopolitical order. The chapter starts by examining the strengths and weaknesses of Hirsch’s approach through a comparative analysis with the ideas of Bourdieu and Freire. Next, the need for a pragmatic approach to the education of African American students, that is free of dogmatic and political constraints, is discussed. The chapter then turns its attention to examining how the culturally pragmatic model, by combining cultural literacy with culturally relevant pedagogy, is able to create synergy between the two approaches and also have each make up for the educational blind spots of the other. The chapter ends by exploring an alternative explanation for the motivating factors that engender oppositional culture among Black American students. Rather than an adaptation to pessimism about African Americans prospects on the job market, oppositional culture is presented as a strategy to protect the self-concept in response to an uneven playing field, for which culturally pragmatic education is presented as a possible remedy.

In Chap. 6, “Politics of Identity and Difference in Cultural Studies: Decolonizing Strategies,” Ruthann Lee asks, How do modern Western concepts of identity, subjectivity, and difference enable and constrain how Cultural Studies scholars engage in the work of social justice and political transformation? Despite a sophisticated understanding and theoretical establishment of identities as intersectional, students and faculty continue to make strategically essentialist claims as they navigate the contradictory dynamics of power and privilege in the university. This chapter examines some of the strategies and expectations of performing diversity that coincide with ongoing dilemmas of the “burden of representation.” Cultural Studies’ continued reliance on liberal humanist frameworks limits how it can imagine and enact practices of anti-capitalist decolonization. Lee uses an example of local grassroots organizing to protect water to suggest that by engaging with Indigenous feminist theories of relationality, Cultural Studies can more purposefully resist and challenge colonial and corporate powers within and beyond the institution.

Jan Jagodzinski questions the broad understanding of “diversity as difference” in relation to one strand of Cultural Studies where issues of representation are constantly forwarded in what has become the political practice of identity politics: diversity within “democratic societies” ruled by representational politics. In “Explorations of Post-Identity in Relation to Resistance: Why Difference Is Not Diversity” refers to the usual primary signifiers such as skin color, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and so on that have grounded Cultural Studies in general. The result has been an unexpected “resistance” by populist movements to multiculturalism, supported by any number of authoritarian personalities around the world, from Trump in the United States to Erdoğan in Turkey, from Duterte in the Philippines to Orban in Hungary, from Putin in Russia to Zuma in South Africa, and from Israel’s Netanyahu to China’s Xi Jinping – now installed as president for life. The globe is crisscrossed by these “authoritarian men.” And, the list seems to have proliferated to now include Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and Michel Temer’s sweeping corruption of Brazil. Drawing on the nonrepresentational theories of Deleuze and Guattari where “difference” is process based, I dwell on the case of Paul Gauguin to confuse identity politics, not as hybrid-hyphenated identities but by queering identity, a “post-identity” position which heads in the direction of a planetary consciousness that requires an understanding of difference as singularity and new political formations of the “common.” Otherwise, our future is closed.

In Chap. 8, “Beyond Domination: Enrique Dussel, Decoloniality, and Education,” Noah De Lissovoy and Raúl Olmo Fregoso Bailón interrogate the colonial epistemology underlying familiar progressive approaches to education and propose a decolonial approach building from non-Western standpoints. They start from an analysis of coloniality in Western culture and knowledge systems, grounding our account in the work of influential philosopher Enrique Dussel, considering in particular Dussel’s accounts of the methodology of analectics (which he contrasts with Western dialectics), the ethics of exteriority, and the epistemology of liberation. They describe how both mainstream progressive and critical accounts of curriculum and pedagogy are interrogated by the challenge proposed within Dussel’s work, specifically, how his decolonial theses (a) suggest a confrontation with Eurocentrism at the level of knowing and being (not merely content or ideology); (b) challenge easy notions of reconciliation and solidarity in teaching spaces in favor of a dialogical ethics that systematically privileges the voices of the oppressed and marginalized; and (c) ask us to recognize the source of pedagogy and politics in the power and agency of the community (including communities of students), a source that teachers should remember and to which they should remain accountable. And it concludes with a summative statement of the ways in which a decolonial approach to education based on the work of Dussel rearticulates, at the level of orientation, epistemology, and ethics, the meaning of an emancipatory commitment in education.

The rise of neoliberal ideology has had significant implications for education. Scholars from various fields have argued that neoliberal processes have commodified both educational outcomes and the knowledge they yield. The internalization of neoliberal processes by student subjects reflects a similar commodification of the “self” to be marketed to future employers. Educational and other investments in oneself hold the promise of upward social mobility and success in an increasingly competitive workforce. Neoliberal success narratives that underlie curricula transmit this promise and are coincident with a neoliberal demand for normativity. In Chap. 9, “Other Possible Worlds: Queerness as an Intervention into Neoliberal Success Narratives in Education,” Nadine Violette troubles neoliberal success narratives in education that necessitate a normative subject position. The analysis explores what messages about identity and success are present in New Brunswick’s (NB) Personal Development and Career Planning (PDCP) curriculum document, a text that addresses wide-ranging topics including sexual health, self-concept, suicide prevention, and labor market preparation. Nonnormative subject positions such as queerness, disability, and race can be used as entry points and interventions into neoliberal success narratives that necessarily demand normative subject positions. This analysis speaks to the consequences and contradictions of neoliberal education in Canada while pursuing the reclamation of “failure” and “failed subjectivities” as means of combating totalizing neoliberal success narratives. This project is undertaken to redirect blame from nonnormative subjects and their perceived “failures” to the constraints of neoliberal capitalism. Ultimately, failure can be employed to imagine other possible worlds, other possible curricula, and other possible trajectories for education. In Chap. 10, “Vitality of Heritage Languages and Education: The Case of Modern Greek in Canada,” Themistoklis Aravossitas states that one of the concerns of minority/immigrant communities and their members is to maintain their heritage through the intergenerational transmission of their language and culture. Such a process involves not both family language planning and heritage language education (HLE). This chapter examines the vitality of community languages using the Greek language in Canada as a case study. The role of the community in promoting and sustaining heritage language education is the main focus of this study which includes a theoretical and an empirical part. In the first part, Aravossitas explores the phenomena of language shift and language maintenance and examines parameters that affect the ethnolinguistic vitality of minority groups, such as institutional support through education. In the empirical part, he analyzes research findings related to educational needs and challenges of HL learners and teachers. The study shows that in order to overcome social and educational barriers in promoting the teaching and learning of Greek as well as all community languages in Canada, there has to be a systematic attempt by community and other stakeholders to improve the motivation of teachers and learners and modernize the curricula of heritage language programs.

The modus operandi of many pedagogies indexed under the rubric “critical” and “transformative” is to acknowledge and overcome oppressive structures ingrained in dominant societal ideologies. Yet in practice, some of such pedagogies may be susceptible to what Gert Biesta has called the “logic of emancipation.” This means that those who are to be emancipated ultimately remain dependent on the “truth” provided by the critical educator. In Chap. 11, “Transference, Desire, and the Logic of Emancipation: Psychoanalytic Lessons from the ‘Third Wave,” Antti Saari provides a critical discussion of the possibility of overcoming the logic of emancipation from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Transformative learning process is analyzed as a formation and a subsequent unraveling of transferential fantasies and desires invested in the critical educator as a “subject supposed to know.” As a case example, the chapter analyzes an (in)famous pedagogical experiment conducted in a Palo Alto High School in 1967. In a World History class, a teacher taught his students about the perils of fascism by using unorthodox teaching methods. While lecturing them about the history of the Third Reich, the teacher allured his students to adopt decidedly fascist discipline and forms of mutual persecution. The aim was to help students learn how easily almost anyone can willingly succumb to authoritarianism. This provocative case is used to illustrate the power of transferential fantasies in education and the difficult process of trying to unravel them for the purposes of a transformative experience. Moreover, the case raises questions about the ethics of such pedagogic practices.

In Chap. 12, “Exploring the Future Form of Pedagogy: Education and Eros,” Inna Semetsky addresses the future form of pedagogy and explores a related educational theory. The chapter, first, reflects on exopedagogy as a form of post-humanist education. Second, the chapter positions exopedagogy in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thought and his pedagogy of the concept. Education as informed by Deleuze-Guattari’s transformational pragmatics is “located” in experience, in culture, and in life. As grounded in praxis, education necessarily includes an ethical dimension. Such cultural pedagogy is oriented to the “becomings” of human subjects and has an affective, erotic aspect. The feminine qualities of care and love associated with the concept of Eros should not only form the basis of education for the future but can make this rather utopian future our present ethos in accord with the educational policy agenda of the twenty-first century. Future educational leaders as “people to come” are themselves produced via the creative forms of experiential becomings, including “becoming-woman.” In conclusion, the chapter asserts that people-to-come in education should be able to use imagination to cross the limits of the present and tap into the future.

Since 2015, the Aegean Islands have been receiving an influx of refugees, which has by far exceeded the existing capabilities of the islands in terms of reception and hospitality. Refugees/migrants from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries on route to Europe have found themselves “trapped” in Greece, due to the tightening of the EU border controls. Due to this, a considerable number of refugees/migrants are increasingly coming to terms with the potential of staying in the Greece. Since 2016, Greek language lessons have been offered to adult, adolescent, and child refugees at the Linguistics Laboratory of the Department of Primary Education, University of the Aegean, in Rhodes, Greece. The lessons are provided by volunteer members of the teaching staff and students. The language and cultural diversity of the group, the mobility of the learners, as well as their unstable present and future have led to the adoption of communities of language learning, empowerment, and agency, as well as the implementation of new pedagogical approaches, which reflect the dynamic character of the learners’ identities and their multiple needs. In Chap. 13, “The Creation of a Community of Language Learning, Empowerment, and Agency for Refugees in Rhodes, Greece,” Vasilia Kourtis-Kazoullis, Dionysios Gouvias, Marianthi Oikonomakou, and Eleni Skourtou present the case study of the Greek language lessons, focusing on the multicultural, multilingual community of learning that has been created and specifically on the volunteer teachers in this community and the ways they feel that they have been affected by teaching refugees.

While forest schools are increasingly popular in Canada and their work of connecting children to nature and enacting a new pedagogy for learning outdoors is important, how do forest schools, as places of learning in nature and on the land, connect with Indigenous ways of knowing, learning, and teaching? This question is significant in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as Canada is in the midst of recognizing the injustice of its treatment of Indigenous Peoples and working toward reconciliation. In Chap. 14, “Forest School Pedagogy and Indigenous Educational Perspectives: Where They Meet, Where They Are Far Apart, and Where They May Come Together,” Lisa Johnston examines the ways that Forest School Pedagogy and Indigenous Educational Perspectives may meet, may be far apart, and may come together. How do notions of nature and land, risk, and resilience differ from Western understandings? What does decolonization mean? How does place-based education connect with Indigenous understandings of land as first teacher? As a settler and early childhood educator, the author is situated in this learning journey as “coming to know.” Drawing on Indigenous and settler scholars offers insight into the complex differences between Forest School Pedagogy and Indigenous Educational Perspectives and offers guidance on how (re)positioning forest schools in the context of settler colonialism reframes the premise of how forest school may incorporate, embed, and be reshaped by Indigenous Educational Perspectives.

Chap. 15, “Integrating Community-Based Values with a Rights-Integrative Approach to Early Learning Through Early Childhood Curricula” presents an application of the conceptual model of social justice that integrates community-based values with Di Santo and Kenneally’s “rights-integrative approach to early learning.” The conceptual model emerged from an analysis of the British Columbia Early Learning Framework. The aim of this chapter by Rachel Caplan, Aurelia Di Santo, and Colleen Loomis is to discuss how the learning framework exemplifies the integration of children’s rights with community-based values. Examples of how professionals working in early learning settings may integrate conceptualizations of children’s rights of a “community of children” in addition to more conventional conceptualizations of child rights as individuals are provided.

Humans have long been recognized as having layers of being conscious, unconscious, and subconscious – Id, Ego, and Superego, to name a few. These focus on the individual. But humans do not exist only as individuals. We are inherently members of systems: social, cultural, linguistic, political, and so on. We are also inextricably nested within ecological systems of home, influencing and influenced by all of the human and more than human beings that we share our environment with. This relationship with all of our relations can be captured within the Self. As we move from a focus on self to an embrace of our connected Self, there are infinite considerations to be explored. In a collection of textual and reflective snapshots in Chap. 16, “Posting #Selfies: Autogeographies and the Teaching of Me,” Susan Jagger navigates the wonderings about and wanderings from self to Self.

In Chap. 17, “Closing the Achievement Gap via Reducing the Opportunity Gap: YAAACE’s Social Inclusion Framework Within the Jane and Finch Community,” Ardavan Eizadirad uses comparative spatial analysis and critical race theory to outline an overview of systemic and institutional barriers impeding academic achievement of racialized students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds living in under-resourced racialized communities in Toronto, Canada. Youth Association for Academics, Athletics, and Character Education (YAAACE), a nonprofit community organization in the Jane and Finch neighborhood, is examined as a case study in closing the achievement gap in the community by investing in minimizing the inequality of opportunity impacting young children, youth, and families in the area. The collaborative synergic model of YAAACE from a Social Inclusion Strategy framework that takes into consideration participants’ identities and developmental needs and the community’s spatial dynamics and demographics exemplifies an effective approach to mitigating systemic and structural barriers impeding academic achievement of racialized students for upward social mobility. YAAACE’s unique model for teaching and learning and offering holistic services can be used as a tool and a spark for further discussion in how we can use alternative approaches to close the achievement gap and expand the limited hegemonic definition of success that is normalized and perpetuated in schools focusing exclusively on academics which marginalizes and oppresses racialized identities and their needs.

For Carlo Ricci, in Chap. 18, “Democracy Under Attack: Learning, Schooling, and the Media,” whether we are “acting” as teachers or parents or friends, our being impacts other beings, as the citation above suggests. If the space is full of fear, stress, and anxiety, it will harm those within. Knowing that you do not need bells, whistles, tests, assignments, grades, coercion, fear, anxiety, and so on, in order to have learning, what can we do to help create more peaceful and deep learning spaces? This is a question that each and everyone of us can ask ourselves and we each then have to decide what we can do to benefit rather than diminish learning. Ricci tries to make clear what we mean when we use so many familiar words, because words are not neutral, and they are contentious, and they are political. Words that seem so simple are filled with complexity. For example, consider the word learning, the meaning of which might seem so obvious, but in reality it is not. What does learning actually mean? Of course, it depends on your philosophy and your worldview. Does it mean curriculum, and what happens in mainstream schools?

In Chap. 19, “Resistance, Action, and Transformation in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) Project with Homeless Youth,” Dacid Goldberg examines data from a 1-year participatory action research (PAR) project with 35 homeless youth reveals many flee to the streets to resist dangerous, volatile, or dysfunctional homes. The chapter details how participatory action research (PAR), the methodology used in the study, contests “expert” research into social ills and oppression from those who are detached from the communities they study. Many of the young people connected to the PAR project they helped lead, and in so doing, a number of youth transformed their sense of self. During the research, the youth reflected on their experiences and lifeworlds as they defined them. They examined homelessness from their standpoints of parenting, self, education, and shelter. The youth prioritized stereotyping and stigmatization, as critical themes to address. Some noted that at a time in their lives when they hoped to expand their social networks and opportunities, stereotypes and stigmatization shamed them into “hiding” and “retreating.” Some added that society’s shunning of them for supposed faults and shortcomings felt similar to their experiences in their households. The youth conceived a number of solutions to change people’s perceptions of them. They poured their energies into individual artworks to represent their findings. Of these, they selected “The Other Side of the Door,” a searing theatre play written by a peer in the project. The play depicts the dysfunctional dynamics between a volatile mother and her 16-year-old son, who flees into homelessness. The youth argued passionately for the play to be presented in a number of places and institutions, ranging from schools of psychology, social work, and education to courts and juvenile corrections, places of worship, and high schools.

Western education systems typically place significance on the development of the whole child; however, the spiritual domain of development is often neglected due to the belief that religion and spirituality are synonymous notions. In Chap. 20, “Spiritual Meditations: Being in the Early Years,” Dragana Mirkovic, Barbara Pytka, and Susan Jagger explore the varying understandings and ideas of spirituality in an attempt to illustrate its significance and possibilities within the early years. This piece does not attempt to isolate a single definition of spirituality, rather recognizes spirituality as a way of being and focuses on meditating ideas of what spirituality can be in various contexts of the early years. Through the exploration of current literature and application of relevant narratives, this piece emphasizes the avoidance of spirituality within educational settings and the common characteristics or foundations of spirituality. Finally, the chapter offers practice implications that can support educators in welcoming spirituality into the classroom environment.

In Chap. 21, “Identity Construction Amidst the Forces of Domination,” Terry Louisy argues that identity is created not by biological imperatives alone but is realized in consciousness. In this ongoing process of identity construction, youth are confronted both by biological indicators apparent within themselves and by dominant prevailing societal discourses that see those biological indicators as cause to ascribe particular roles to the individual and to exclude them from others, especially in regard to gender, race, and class. This has particular consequences for those gendered as male and racialized as black. The negotiation of black masculinities, especially for those black males who are non-heteronormal, becomes a struggle against exclusion and resistance and being located at the bottom of a socioeconomic hierarchy determined by hegemonic masculinity. Caught between conceptual hegemony that streams the dominant’s discourses of hierarchical stratification through countless images, media, advertising, historical accounts, schooling, and society’s interminable dominant group messaging and the message itself of hegemonic masculinity, black masculinities are challenged with forces that threaten exclusion, dropout, trauma, and imprisonment. Whether or not this constant stream of indoctrination can be absorbed or resisted in a way that does not obliterate genuine being or necessarily require that black masculinities be relegated to the lowest levels of society is uncertain. Yet, some scholars posit that resilient self-conceptions can be scaffolded through interventions born of a critical race conceptual framework, which focuses on identity construction and which can improve self-conception, and through that, academic achievement as well.

In Chap. 22, “Never-Ending Adolescence: A Psychoanalytic Study of Resistance,” Farah Virani-Murji and Lisa Farley speculate about a psychic quality of resistance manifesting in a fantasy formation that we are calling “never-ending adolescence.” Also known as the Peter Pan syndrome, they argue that never-ending adolescence is made from a fantasy of not growing up that takes shape in a longing to dwell forever in what is imagine as a past time. Virani-Murji and Farley propose that the technologically driven quality of today’s adolescence amplifies this archaic fantasy structure, setting into motion the creation of nostalgic objects that have come to be known as “throwback” phenomena signifying fantasied portals into an idealized time of the childhood past. Such phenomena, Virani-Murji and Farley suggest, freeze time into “immobile sections” that secure a certainty of experience and resist what Julia Kristeva calls, the “mobility of duration.” Against a backdrop of throwback phenomena, we theorize never-ending adolescence as marked by a halting resistance of time that defends against entry into a future plugged into an avalanche of both information and uncertainty. Through our discussion, we pose a challenge to developmental constructions positing adolescence as simply a forerunner to adulthood and rather suggest how we are all adolescents when we engage idealized objects and attachments that stall the mobility of time. The challenge for both teachers and students is to imagine ways of being and becoming that can make tolerable, and even enjoyable, the imperfections and frustrations of living a life that is less filtered and fuller for it.

In the United States, Canada, and much of Europe, white nationalism has emerged as a significant part of dominant political, cultural, and social discourse. While this renaissance of white supremacy is significant, with concrete impacts for women, people of color, LGBTQ2, and Indigenous folks, it can be read as a mark of the success of identity politics – specifically the activism, resistance, work, organizing, and scholarship – by these very groups. Conservative white nationalist discourse in mainstream social and other media offers a barometer of a broad and significant epistemic change and indeed heralds the end of certain forms of acceptable whiteness. This is a new white racial formation and requires a new conversation about whiteness and being. The chapter begins by identifying the political, theoretical, and academic project of this work and situates the arguments herein within anti-colonial and critical race theory. In Chap. 23, “Contemporary Whiteness Interrupted: Leaning into Contradiction in the University Classroom,” Arlo Kempf offers a description of and reflection on the author’s teaching and classroom experiences in a large Canadian teacher education program. He discusses the ways in which white right voices are seeking and finding agency in university classroom spaces, while simultaneously, the experiences and perspectives of people of color, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ2 folks, and women are increasingly validated and central to mainstream teacher education. The chapter then sketches the broader political context in which these emerging classroom dynamics are situated, suggesting a new moment in race politics.

David Kergel takes the position that a digitally augmented part of reality emerged with the Internet. He argues that this augmentation of reality bears social implications. In Chap. 24, “The History of the Internet: Between Utopian Resistance and Neoliberal Government,” Kergel discusses the evolution of societal meaning of the web in the course of the development of the Internet since the late 1950s and the increasingly growth of the Internet since the late 1960s. The societal meaning of the Internet shifts thereby constantly between the poles of utopian resistance and neoliberal government. Using a genealogical and socio-semiotic approach, the article reconstructs the discussion of the discursive meaning of the Internet and digital technology in the course of the history of the Internet.

From Marcel Duchamp’s portrayal of Mona Lisa with facial hair to Andy Warhol’s painting of Campbell’s soup cans, artists have used creative license to appropriate and/or modify other’s work for their own interpretation. However, appropriation is not always about purely representing another’s work; it is sometimes tangled in political, economic, global, and cultural hegemony, particularly in virtual worlds where it can create a Third Culture. The Third Culture is a worldwide intercultural mix of cultures created by residents who speak different textual languages. Virtual world residents create and recreate their own and other cultures’ visual representations to promote their virtual products or ideologies. In the Third Culture, the meanings of images are built and negotiated by the Third Culture residents. In Chap. 25, “Visual Culture in Virtual Worlds: Cultural Appreciation or Cultural Appropriation? When Cultural Studies Meets Creativity,” Hsiao-Cheng (Sandrine) Han contemplates artistic creativity and whether cultural appropriation can lead to cultural appreciation in the virtual world of Second Life through a research-based conversation between Kristy, the female avatar of this art educator/researcher, and Freyja, a Taiwanese research participant, interspersed with the real-life thoughts and experiences of the author.

Science fiction films as a mass medium for public consumption have disseminated cautionary parables of technological dystopia rooted in existing social and economic conditions. Chap. 26, “Technological Dystopia in the Science Fiction Genre” by Peter Pericles Trifonas examines how the theme that ties them together is the representation of technology and its effect on human society in the future. Each film deals with the subject in different ways that ultimately relate to its cinematographic style, technical advancements, and the story line. And yet, the theme of the failed quest for utopia remains morally unresolved in the depiction of the rise of a technological dystopia and its effect on human society in a world to come, playing on the incommensurability of philosophical, religious, political, economic, and literary narratives of scientific progress.

The widespread usage, consumption, and production of social media has sparked serious debate about its role in stimulating, cultivating, and influencing the shape, depth, and impact of democracy. How does and can engagement in and with social media lead to citizen participation in seeking to address issues that significantly affect people, notably social inequalities, racism, sexism, classism, poverty, war and conflict, the environment, and other local as well as global concerns? Does (or can) open-ended social media access, beyond the tightly controlled normative, hegemonic structures and strictures of democracy that frame, to a great deal, how people live, work, and even think, lead to new, alternative, and innovative forms of (critical) engagement? In Chap. 27, “Social Media and the Quest for Democracy: Faking the Re-awakening,” Paul R. Carr, Sandra Liliana Cuervo Sanchez, Michelli Aparecida Daros, and Gina Thésée seek to make connections between the intricacies of using social media and the reconceptualization of democracy, linking the two in an attempt to underscore how participation and engagement are changing. Using social media involves multilevel configurations of not only communicating with others but also of developing content, responding, sharing, critiquing, and reimagining the “Other” as well as reinterpreting contexts, political spaces, and cultures. This chapter also examines and critiques the potential for tangible, counter-hegemonic change within and outside of the mainstream, representative, electoralist model of democracy, which is increasingly being rejected by large numbers of citizens around the world. A significant piece of this equation is the filter of education, attempting to understand its role, impact, and meaning for social media usage/engagement in relation to democracy. The backdrop of fake news is interwoven and problematized throughout the text.

In Chap. 28, “Unlocking Contested Stories and Grassroots Knowledge” Antonia Liguori argues that digital storytelling is a form of engagement that enables people to share personal stories and to produce new knowledge(s). Digital stories reveal unexpected connections across different communities of interest, places, and time periods. They reflect shared and conflicting values, feelings, and concerns surrounding a particular place. Digital storytelling as a process can guide us during a journey over time, by enabling storytellers to use their creativity to trigger memories from the past and to stimulate critical thinking around current situations and possible future scenarios. It also reconnects storytellers and story-listeners to physical and emotional journeys, while they are disconnecting themselves from places that, after dramatic transitions, cannot exist anymore as they were. Reflecting on some examples of practice-led research projects, this chapter will consider questions such as: How to connect individual stories to community narratives? How to unlock grassroots knowledge and bring unheard voices into a debate? What kinds of social impacts can personally meaningful stories – especially if they are contested – produce? Since co-design and co-production have been identified as key elements of the digital storytelling process, this chapter intends also to inquire if and how this methodology can be enriched by contaminations with other creative approaches absorbed from the visual arts and music.

Comparing digital stories and other forms of narratives may represent an additional way of uncovering conflicts and also discovering unexpected common ground in the dialogue between lay and experts’ knowledge, due to the authenticity of personal stories and the natural “mess” of storytelling.

Chap. 29, “Technology, Democracy, and Hope,” Jeremy Hunsinger is about how most of our educational and technological lives exist outside of democratic control and primarily exists in the spaces of bureaucratic authoritarianism. He argues that sometimes this authoritarianism is due to a need for authority based in specific knowledges or expertise, but other parts of our political, cultural, and educational lives could be equal and democratic. Increasingly though, they are becoming a matter of private instead of public governance. This transformation of our public institutions and privatization of our public goods is a matter of ongoing neoliberal “market solutions,” but they are also driven by the technologies themselves few of which are democratically oriented at all.

In Chap. 30, “Youth Consumption of Media and the Need for Critical Media Literacy in the Time of Liquid Modernity: Everything Is Moving So Quickly,” Danielle Ligocki analyzes the ways in which living in our current liquid modern time, according to Zygmunt Bauman, is having a direct impact on the lives of young people everywhere, specifically in regard to media consumption. Liquid modernity is a time of endless consumption and disposability, with no clear beginning or end, no solid bonds, no clear line between public and private lives, and a state of constant surveillance. These characteristics of liquid modernity intersect with media consumption in such a way that young people are unable to make sense of the ways in which media is influencing their own self-identity, as well as their views of others and the ways that they work to understand those who may be different than they are. The chapter looks at the ways in which these two major forces combine, and the need for critical media literacy in schools becomes clear.

The media and marketing machinery continually spins out an excess of products and services to increasingly ad-swamped consumers looking for social emancipation, a sense of identity, and meaning in life through the acquisition of goods and services. In Chap. 31, “The Merchandizing of Identity: The Cultural Politics of Representation in the ‘I Am Canadian’ Beer Campaign,” Peter Pericles Trifonas analyzes the links between desire, subjectivity, and advertising. Successful advertising for alcoholic beverages that does not appeal to sexuality offers consumers images and jingles that become signposts of an individual’s history by equating alcohol consumption with life’s great moments. The brand, the badge, and the label personalize a beer. The “I am Canadian” campaign proved to be a very successful campaign even though it did not opt for the usual “sex sells” marketing approach so common in the advertising of alcoholic beverages. The commercials gave an amusing take on “Canuck” patriotism and played off ethnic stereotypes to nationalize a brand and acculturate good taste using the cultural politics of identity and difference.

In Chap. 32, “Eating Culture: How What We Eat Informs Who We Are and Who We Want to Be,” Cammy Lee considers how our food and foodways impact identity. In approaching this, Lee unpacks two food narratives: the first, causing embarrassment and shame, will be analyzed using psychoanalysis and critical literacy, while the second, sparking creativity, includes a discussion on the role of disgust – the paradox of aversion, aesthetic disgust, the cognition-affect link, and finally disgust in culture. Using interdisciplinary lenses for analyses, she argue that whether good and bad, our food experiences can inform how we understand who we are and more significantly, shape who we want to become. Despite its varying effects, this chapter seeks to underscore that as an entry point to interrogate culture, identity, and otherness, food has pedagogical value.

Gabriel Huddleston and Mark Helmsing, in Chap. 33, “Pop Culture 2.0: A Political Curriculum in the Age of Trump,” posit the concept of Pop Culture 2.0 as a means to mark important changes in popular culture of which scholars and teachers should contend. They propose a revised agenda in the study of popular culture and education, sitting in a position that is within the transdisciplinary configurations, concerns, and approaches of Cultural Studies, a field that is experiencing its own changes amidst a renewed sense of urgency and relevance in recent years. One issue is the shifting landscape of popular culture itself, which Huddleston and Helmsing approach from their researcher positions in the United States, and how the very conceptualization of what constitutes culture and the popular have radically changed in the wake of President Trump’s election to the office of President of the United States in 2016. A second issue, in some ways inextricable from the first, is accumulated effects of the recent postcritical turn in the humanities and social sciences. Scholars from various fields and areas of inquiry have taken up this turn in a spectrum of differing directions we consider in this chapter. We identify Pop Culture 2.0 as a movement of post-postmodern, post-twentieth-century popular culture forms that began to emerge during the US presidency of Barack Obama in 2008 and have been given a more recognizable shape and form of its content during the US presidency of Donald Trump in 2016.

Chap. 34, “Children’s Literature: Interconnecting Children’s Rights and Constructions of Childhoods Through Stories” explores hegemonic views of children and childhoods, views which continue to marginalize children and diminish their rights within Western societies. The chapter by Bethany Robichaud, Sarah Peltier, and Aurelia Di Santo explores children’s rights, children’s social status, the social construction of childhood, and the role of literature in constructing and reinforcing or challenging these concepts. Given the presence and influence of literature in the lives and learning of young children, and the view that storybooks are well positioned to convey rights discourses to children and adults alike, this chapter provides examples of how children, childhoods, and rights are implicitly and explicitly conveyed through storybook’s pictorial and lexical narratives in both supportive and non-supportive ways. The capacity of children’s literature to serve as a salient tool for challenging problematic hegemonic notions of children, childhoods, and rights is also explored.

With humans being the architects of meaning, Nietzsche’s superman (übermensch) was representative of a system of values and a way of life of a society in need of a heroic narrative. Although this narrative is not unique to any era or culture, societal psychological and social values, beliefs, and attitudes are forged from its ever-changing needs and motivations. In Chap. 35, “Selling the Dream: The Darker Side of the ‘Superman’ Athlete,” Nikos C. Apostolopoulos expounds on how this heroic narrative, at one time symbolic of the highest aims of mankind, mirroring the ideal morals of a community, has been abducted, coerced, and exploited by media to serve its own selfish commercial needs, a dark side in guise of the preservation of a heroic tale. With the use of numerous techniques (i.e., public relations, propaganda, strategic communications), media capitalized on the enormous influence celebrated athletes and sports has in both industrial societies and developing nations. Through use of symbols and signs, the advertisements created and disseminated onto the public carried with them invisible messages with the sole intent or goal of persuading the consumer to purchase product. To achieve this, they manipulated the individual’s perception of reality, engineered to create a symbol on itself inspiring loyalty by the consumer to an athlete, a team, or a brand.

In any cultural situation, pedagogy registers how individual learns from others in recreating oneself within the consensual regime of hegemony. In Chap. 36, “Pedagogy and the Unlearning of Self: The Performance of Crisis Situation Through Popular Culture,” Stephen Ching-kiu Chan asks what a pedagogy of culture entails for the social body today facing a cultural situation edging away from trust, tolerance, and credibility. Recent experiences in civil disobedience, social antagonism, and political deadlock suggest that dissent, as the antithesis of consent, is the condition of possibility for the self-in-struggle under the unique context concerned. Pedagogy in popular culture is embedded as a process of self-learning engaged by subjects implicated in the reproduction of collective anxieties and shaping of social desires. As such it intervenes in the public sphere whereby a cultural subject learns to situate himself/herself and acquires one’s place as a social being. While this takes place under the status quo, it involves the process by which the subject struggles with the shaping of agency, identities, and differences. In the aggregate process, the resultant pedagogical act of self-recognition entails multiple refashioning of “who I am;” often, it engenders the performative process of un-learning the hegemonic act of embedded social practices.

Over a span of three decades since the city’s late colonial rule by Britain, the world-renowned filmmaker Johnnie To has created memorable cinematic scenarios of Hong Kong’s crisis situation – either at the conjunctures of the 1997 political transition or in the wake of the widespread protest and unrest invoked by the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and its aftermath. With this focus, Chan examines the play of social antagonism and politics of affect via moments of dissensus.

In Chap. 37, “Cultural Studies in the Writing Center: Writing Centers as Sites of Political Intervention,” William E. De Herder III explores how writing centers can enact counter-hegemonic work through helping writers gain deeper understandings of contexts: audiences, writing situations, genre expectations, and power relations. It maps the position of writing centers, develops Cultural Studies for writing center work, and suggests strategies for writing coaches. Drawing theoretically on Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Antonio Gramsci, this chapter shows how coaches and writers can develop understandings of complexity, contingency, and contextuality. It then shows how these understandings can help coaches and writers map meanings; identify binaries, possible third positions, affordances, and constraints; and trace political, economic, ideological, material, and social forces and structures. These techniques can help writers reflect critically on their use of genre and non-hegemonic codes, as well as recognize deeper complexities of writing situations and writing topics.

Critical work in music education has interrogated Eurocentric values and representational systems in music curricula, as well as idealized constructions of musicianship grounded in Western aesthetic practices. In Chap. 38, “Angry Noise: Recomposing Music Pedagogies in Indisciplinary Modes,” Kurt Thumlert and Jason Nolan argue, further, that inherited Eurocentric music pedagogies enact a “distribution of the sensible,” a self-evident regime of sense perception prefiguring what is hearable and doable and possible, inviting students, through the very processes of music education itself, to ultimately disqualify themselves from vibrant and vital relations to musical worlds and sound-making practices. Thumlert and Nolan argue that dominant forms of music education do not simply mobilize Eurocentric values and genres but are driven, fundamentally, by “talent regimes” – disciplinary systems freighted with aesthetic presuppositions, ableist epistemologies, and pedagogical operations that interpellate students into gendered roles and classist relations to sounds and that tacitly disqualify bodies based on “self-evident” disabilities and perceived developmental “inadequacies.” At a time when arts education is increasingly enrolled in the service of neoliberalized discourses of “creativity” and “play,” Thumlert and Nolan present counter-models that not only work to liberate music education from the constrictions of bourgeois aesthetics and commodity relations but help to situate aural/sound/music learning experiences as a fundamental and necessary mode of sensory inquiry for young people’s learning. Drawing on work in critical disability and technology studies, Thumlert and Nolan conclude with an exploration of counter-models for alternative and more equitable pedagogical orientations to materials-centric inquiry, as well as opportunities for learning through soundwork composition – models that can, we argue, maximize the creative capacities of anyone and everyone.

Early psychological studies on the link between health and writing were rooted in a theory of inhibition and disease and produced mostly quantitative results. A meta-analysis of 146 such studies on the connection between emotional disclosure and improved health concluded that the practice of expressive writing for the improvement of psychological and physical health does work, on some people, some of the time; however, the influential aspects of the mechanism remain unclear. In Chap. 39, “Toward Understanding the Transformational Writing Phenomenon,” Elizabeth Bolton suggests that further research in this field be conducted under the broader term transformational literacy practices and that methods examining them be more inclusive of various presentations of qualitative data such that these methods respect the organic development and pacing of a devout writing practice, as it is upkept by an individual who identifies as a writer. Under these suggestions, writer and researcher become one, and hermeneutical phenomenology, a highly suitable methodology for capitalizing on that union in order to generate rich and informative data on the writing-health link. When writing about the self is treated as phenomenon rather than task, we are then able to consider the cultural milieu in which that phenomenon has taken place as critical aspect of the data.

In Chap. 40, “The Truth Can Deceive as Well as a Lie: Young Adult Fantasy Novels as Political Allegory and Pedagogy,” Heba Elsherief considers Marie Rutkoski’s Winner’s Curse trilogy and Tomi Adeyemi’s #blacklivesmatter movement inspired Children of Blood and Bone as exemplars of young adult (YA) fantasy fiction works which utilize political allegory in their narratives to understand how they may impact readers’ social engagement. Besides being lauded as empathy building texts by educators and library organizations, publishing trends and social media activity indicate that these novels are widely read and enjoyed. But how much do they actually impact readers’ understanding of the real-world happenings they allegorize, and how far do they go to encourage acting upon said understanding? How are these novels conceptualized and received as cultural artifacts, and can they actually work as forms of resistance against societal injustices? Via excerpts and authors’ notes, Elsherief utilizes affect theory to understand the emotive and consumer popularity of these novels and take up Keen’s theorizing on the empathy-altruism hypothesis to problematize their effect. While my findings suggest that YA fantasy novels may not be equipped to undertake the critical work of a resistance project in themselves, this chapter is ultimately a call for slower, more deliberate readings that may inspire readers to do the work of social activism long after the last pages are turned.

The measure of art is the ability to induce modes of sensibility that create new forms of intelligibility. In Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica, Pablo Picasso enables the viewer to see what was not there before and in a different way. In Chap. 41, “The Politics of Seeing: Art and the Violence of Aesthetics,” Anthi Trifonas and Peter Pericles Trifonas examine how these paintings politicize aesthetic acts as moments of a questioning and reflection on subjectivity toward an emancipation of the image from past experience. Art no longer becomes a witness signifying the timeless truths of life but is a battleground triggering nostalgia and disillusionment mourning the loss of meaning. The politics of seeing depends on the violence of aesthetics. That is, the extent to which artistic regimes impact the production of what is knowable and what is visible are reproduced and resisted in a work of art.

In Chap. 42, “Storied Assessment of the Aesthetic Experiences of Young Learners: The Timbres of a Rainbow,” Matthew Yanko and Peter Gouzouasis develop an understanding of what a child learns through arts learning experiences, by examining integrated visual arts and music instruction through creative composition practices in soundscapes. To present a viable means of interpreting aesthetic learning experiences, they investigate the learning story as a means of assessment and expand upon this approach by using visual and aural metaphors to examine how they can provide teachers with the necessary tools and practices to compose richly detailed, meaningful storied assessments. Yanko and Gouzouasis discovered that children are capable and able to engage with descriptive, interpretive, and evaluative aesthetic criticisms, and that the sharing of learning stories promotes discussions, understandings, and a celebration of young learners’ meaning making with integrated arts. Postulating that the learning story is a viable assessment practice for the aesthetic and artistic merits that emerge as children engage with music and the arts.

Chap. 43, “Thinking Physiologies Methodologically with Post-qualitative and Posthuman Education Research” debates methodological possibilities for thinking Physiology, informed by feminist science studies conceptualizations of scientific knowledge, with post-qualitative education research practices. Offering an emergent articulation of how physiologies might become differently and productively entangled with feminist science studies, post-qualitative research, and posthuman enactments of fleshy bodies, Nicole Land proposes that education research can engage (with) physiologies with generative, non-essentialist, accountable methodological practices. She thinks three post-qualitative methodological concerns alongside insights from feminist science studies, weaving her exploration with a moment from an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project. Attending to the tensions, practices, and possibilities that emerge when post-qualitative research and physiologies converse, Land argues, might generate novel methodological practices that contribute to post-qualitative projects intent on refusing humanist habits in education research.

In his 2015 State of the Union, President Barack Obama called climate change the “greatest threat to future generations.” Conversely, President Donald Trump has cast doubt on the very existence of human-induced global climate change, thereby dismissing decades of empirically collected data by scientists around the world which, when aggregated, portray a warming world at and past the brink. Fierce global competition for dwindling resources is certain to increase as a result of the steady, irrevocable, and dramatic shifts in weather patterns which continue in causing catastrophic macro- and micro-[global] consequences, including consummately a loss of human life. While recommendations have been provided toward a mitigation of anthropogenic climate change through a re-envisioning of education standards, the United States’ panoptic, neoliberal educational behemoth has not kept pace with the necessary standards and curricular changes that might substantively and authentically address the realities of a rapidly changing global climate for those who inevitably will act as this world’s future stewards. Notable academic and recently deceased Chet Bowers has written extensively on this subject, suggesting in sum that such education is ostensibly a moral imperative requiring broad, interdisciplinary content inclusive of revised and radically upended modes of thinking, approach, and authentic feeling. An investigation into the burgeoning field of queer ecology offers an intersectional, discursive conceptual foundation toward the construction of such neo-curricula, which inherently and intentionally elides various disaggregated epistemological and ontological schools in unique, timely, and critical ways. The pessimistic epistemic postulations of queer scholars, such as Lee Edelman, provide insight catalyzing a dynamic and urgent thesis in curricular rethinking inclusive of queer eco-environmentalism as an integral, tenable tenet. In Chap. 44, “Eco-queering US K-12 Environmental Curricula: An Epistemic Conceptual Investigation into Queer Pessimisms Serving as a Pragmatics to Navigate Current Environmental Castrations,” Peter Scaramuzzo seeks to negate optimistic, heteronormative conventions onto the urgent creation of eco-curricula and pedagogical practices in K-12 schools, and the author contends that it is through a pedagogical recognition and embrace of discordant and other ontological notions informed by queerness as a blurring space that an inspired salvation is possible. In this way, environmental optimism, as it is presented in current K-12 educational contexts, is a limited portrayal of current realities and, as such, assumes the position of a destructive pathology of deniability.

Starting with an assertion that philosophy’s prerogative is to propose alternative worldviews and values, in addition to the basic interpretation of philosophy as an inquiry into the myriad dimensions of human experience, Chap. 45, “Contemplating Philosophy of Education: A Canadian West Coast Perspective” by Heesoon Bai, Muga Miyakawa, Timothy Tiryaki, and Meena Mangat proffers a view of education that centers the cultivation of a more balanced and integrated humanity in resistance to the increasing instrumental forces in modern societies that fragments, alienates, and therefore dehumanizes. Distinguishing between education – primarily concerned with the human being, from instruction – primarily concerned with the human having, this chapter proposes a contemplative mode of intersubjective relationality between the self and self-other. A variety of critical observational and interpretive notes are offered on major concepts that animate contemporary discourses in education, such as dualisms, imbalance and fragmentation, dislocation and alienation, progress and existential crisis, all refracted through the prism of the most recent contemplative turn in education. The chapter ends with a curated dialogue among the four authors of this chapter, all of whom share how they have come to situate themselves in the intersection of philosophy of education and contemplative inquiry and how they see the nature of contribution that the latter makes to the former.

We tend not to question the implications of the terms we use in environmental education and its ever-changing names, purposes, and goals. Digging deeper into well-worn and accepted meanings from the early-nineteenth-century movements integrating place-based nature study since John Dewey through conservation and outdoor education, the tensions in the historical realization of the field are traced. In Chap. 46, “An Ecology of Environmental Education,” Susan Jagger presents a critique of the social manifestations, political purposes, and philosophical grounding of environmental education is developed in relation to (1) shifts in the definition of its terms; (2) conceptual transformations of the discipline; (3) ecological issues; and (4) pedagogical imperatives. The resulting historicity takes into account initiatives from UNESCO to Agenda 21 and NAAEE to provide an ecology of environmental education.

In Chap. 47, “Citizen Science: A Path to Democratic and Sociopolitically Conscious Science,” Justine Oesterle, Bhaskar Upadhyay, Julie C. Brown, and Matthew Vernon explore the idea of citizen science in science education and its value in broadening student science participation, building greater science engagement, and expanding the usefulness of science in broader life events and actions. The focus of the chapter is to explore how citizen science provides a space and context for teachers and students to engage in science content and activities that bring greater personal and community meanings in learning and doing science. The chapter seeks to explore the following questions framed by critical pedagogy and critical theories: What is citizen science and how does it raise critical consciousness in students from underrepresented groups? How is citizen science a space for equitable science teaching and learning space for all students? In what ways does citizen help students make sense of science learning and provides a context to challenge the dominant view of learning and doing science? How does citizen science make doing science a democratic practice for sociopolitical consciousness? Answers to these questions are drawn from critical theories and pedagogies where sociocultural contexts take a central space in understanding affordances of citizen science as a sociopolitical consciousness raising framework for teaching and learning.

Nature is increasingly situated as important in early childhood education, but the various definitions and societal constructs of the term nature impact our understanding of how children relate to the more-than-human world. Navigating nature through varying perspectives, this piece considers the concept of simulation, privilege, and control in relation to children and the outdoor world. In Chap. 48, “Growing Children’s Ecological Relationships Indoors,” Leah Shoemaker questions the anthropocentric value that is engrained within these relationships and looks toward the indoor classroom as a tool for educators within urban centers. Provided is argument that blurring the line between the outdoor and the indoor classrooms may support children’s ecological understanding of the interrelated systems that run between the categories of human and nature. Personal narrative is woven throughout to queer the line between identity and theory and encourage reflection inward when interacting with the topic.

Globalization has brought many changes to people’s lives and mindsets, posing challenges to the concepts of language, culture, and identity, related to cultural hybridity and the impact of new information and communication technologies on education in general and on higher education in particular, especially in terms of the process of internationalization of higher education, with the implications of using, teaching, and learning certain languages in that process. The role of languages in the process of internationalization is at the core of discussions regarding this process. A critical view of language(s) guided by language policies which reflect the intercultural relations of the global and the local context is paramount for a sustainable and more horizontal internationalization process of higher education. The reflection on the interface between culture and identity in relation to language is important insomuch as one shapes the other. In a world of super-diversity with an increase in the flows of information, people, goods, and languages, the development of competences to deal with such diversity is essential to establish sustainable academic relations. In this scenario of mutual exchanges, languages play a key role, since they express ideologies and beliefs that represent conflict between local and global values. The conflicts afforded by languages, in turn, affect the formation of identities in modern times, replacing old identities by new ones, thus fragmenting the modern individual in a more hybrid and complex world. In Chap. 49, “Cultural Studies and the Development of Sustainable Relations for the Internationalization of Higher Education,” Felipe Furtado Guimarães, Gabriel Brito Amorim, and Kyria Rebeca Finardi reflect on the connection between Cultural Studies and the internationalization of higher education institutions (HEIs) in general and the role of languages and language policies in that process in particular. So as to achieve this goal, a review and discussion of literature is offered, critically addressing the importance of Cultural Studies and intercultural competences for dealing with the complexity of modern times, in terms of the internationalization of higher education.