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Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator/Artist as a Public Intellectual

Henry Giroux

By: Dr. Henry Giroux

Introduction By: Jaroslav Anděl

This first roundtable in the series What Education Do We Need? comprises two parts. Part one features a lead essay by Henry A. Giroux titled “Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator/Artist as a Public Intellectual”; the second part includes four responses by thinkers from different backgrounds: Nicolas Buchoud and Lan-Phuong Phan (France and Vietnam), Yaacov Hecht (Israel), Thomas Krüger (Germany), and Helena Singer (Brazil).

Education impacts everything else and makes us who we are as individuals, communities, and society. Exclusion in education impoverishes the human mind and diminishes humanity. To quote Comenius, the father of modern education: “The school is the manufactory of humanity… the whole is not the whole if any part is lacking… whoever then does not wish to appear a half-wit or evil-minded, must wish good to all men, and not only to himself, or only to his own near ones, or only to his own nation.”

While we have deemed those tenets self-evident, various leaders and movements have recently emerged who wish good firstly to themselves, or only to their near ones, or only to their own nation. The first roundtable on Democracy and Education opens with Henry Giroux’s essay, in which he addresses this particular challenge personified by the presidency of Donald Trump.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology.

Giroux situates Trump’s presidency in a broader socio-political context of neoliberal ideology that has instrumentalized education and art by turning them into commodity. He emphasizes the necessity of reclaiming the primary mission of pedagogy as a political and moral practice, as educated hope that provides a counterweight and resistance to a growing authoritarianism.

Pedagogy is not a method but a moral and political practice, one that recognizes the relationship between knowledge and power, and at the same time realizes that central to all pedagogical practices is a struggle over agency, power, politics, and the formative cultures that make a radical democracy possible. This view of pedagogy does not mold, but inspires, and at the same time it is directive, capable of imagining a better world, the unfinished nature of agency, and the need to consistently reimagine a democracy that is never finished.

In its closing section, Giroux is challenging artists and educators to engage in a practice that addresses the possibility of interpretation as intervention in the world. He demands to reposition “pedagogy as a central category of politics itself,” and hence defines the artist and educator as a public intellectual who understands pedagogy as central to politics. He points out that when progressive artists and activists present “what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression,” they fail to address the crises of imagination and agency. In the last paragraph, Giroux outlines a series of tasks that educators and artists as public intellectuals face today:

Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on critical pedagogy, public pedagogy, and the public spheres in which they take place. For instance, public and higher education are being defunded, turned into accountability factories, and now largely serve as adjuncts of an instrumental logic that mimics the values of the market. But, of course, this is not only true for spaces in which formal schooling takes place, it is also true for those public spheres and cultural apparatuses actively engaged in producing knowledge, values, subjectivities, and identities through a range of media and sites. This applies to a range of creative spaces including art galleries, museums, diverse sites that make up screen culture, and various elements of mainstream media.[1] What the apostles of neoliberalism have learned is that artistic production and its modes of public pedagogy can change how people view the world, and that pedagogy can be dangerous because it holds the potential for not only creating critically engaged students, intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the capacity of the imagination to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, hold power accountable, and imagine the unimaginable.

Pedagogies of repression…further a modern-day pandemic of loneliness and alienation.

Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.

Pedagogies of repression do more than impose punishing forms of discipline on students and deaden their ability to think critically, they also further a modern-day pandemic of loneliness and alienation. Such pedagogies emphasize aggressive competition, unchecked individualism, and cancel out empathy for an exaggerated notion of self-interest. Solidarity and sharing are the enemy of these pedagogical practices, which are driven by a withdrawal from sustaining public values, trust, and goods and serve largely to cancel out a democratic future for young people. This poses a particular challenge for educators and other cultural workers who want to take up the role of engaged public intellectuals because it speaks less to the role of the intellectual as a celebrity than it does to the kind of pedagogical work in which they engage.

At stake here is the need for artists, educators, and others to create pedagogical practices that create militant dreamers, people capable of envisioning a more just and democratic world and are willing to struggle for it. In this instance, pedagogy becomes not only central to politics but also a practice dedicated to creating a sense of belonging, community, empathy, and practices that address changing the way people think and navigate conflicts emotionally—practices that awaken passion and energize forms of identification that speak to the conditions in which people find themselves. In the shark-like world of neoliberal-driven values, excessive competition, uncertainty, and deep-seated fears of the other, there is no room for empathetic conversations that focus on the common good, democratic values, or the pedagogical conditions that would further critical dialogue and the potential for students to learn how to hold power accountable.

Critical pedagogy…should be cosmopolitan and imaginative…

Domination is at its most powerful when its mechanisms of control and subjugation hide in the discourses of common sense, and its elements of power are made to appear invisible. Public intellectuals can take up the challenge of not only relating their specialties and modes of cultural production to the intricacies of everyday life but also to rethinking how politics works, and how power is central to such a task. Bruce Robbins articulates the challenge well in both his defense of the intellectual and his reference to how other theorists such as Michel Foucault provide a model for such work. He writes:

But I also thought that intellectuals should be trying, like Foucault, to relate our specialized knowledge to things in general. We could not just become activists focused on particular struggles or editors striving to help little magazines make ends meet. We also had a different kind of role to play: thinking hard, as Foucault did, about how best to understand the ways power worked in our time. Foucault, like Sartre and Sontag and Said, was an intellectual, even at some points despite himself. He helped us understand the world in newly critical and imaginative ways. He offered us new lines of reasoning while also engaging in activism and political position-taking. Why, then, is there so much discomfort with using the term “intellectual” as an honorific?[3]

But power is not just a theoretical abstraction, it shapes the spaces in which everyday life takes place and touches peoples’ lives at multiple registers, all of which represent in part a struggle over their identities, values, and views of others and the larger world. Critical pedagogy must be meaningful in order to be critical and transformative. That is, it should be cosmopolitan and imaginative—a public affirming pedagogy that demands a critical and engaged interaction with the world we live in, mediated by a responsibility for challenging structures of domination and for alleviating human suffering. This is a pedagogy that addresses the needs of multiple publics. As an ethical and political practice, a public pedagogy of wakefulness rejects modes of education removed from political or social concerns, divorced from history and matters of injury and injustice. This is a pedagogy that includes “lifting complex ideas into the public space,” recognizing human injury inside and outside of the academy and using theory as a form of criticism to change things.[4] This is a pedagogy in which artists, educators, and other cultural workers are neither afraid of controversy nor a willingness to make connections between private issues and broader elements of society’s problems that are otherwise hidden. Nor are they afraid of using their work to address the challenges of the day.

As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that artists, educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire, and energize a vast array of individuals and publics. Critical pedagogy comes with the responsibility to view intellectual and artistic work as public, assuming a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness, making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view, and reminding “the audience of the moral questions that may be hidden in the clamor and din of the public debate.”[5]

…our responsibilities as cultural workers cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer…

Pedagogy is not a method but a moral and political practice, one that recognizes the relationship between knowledge and power, and at the same time realizes that central to all pedagogical practices is a struggle over agency, power, politics, and the formative cultures that make a radical democracy possible. This view of pedagogy does not mould, but inspires, and at the same time it is directive, capable of imagining a better world, the unfinished nature of agency, and the need to consistently reimagine a democracy that is never finished. In this sense, critical pedagogy is a form of educated hope committed to producing young people capable and willing to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think the “world” critically, “to imagine something other than their own well-being,” to serve the public good, take risks, and struggle for a substantive democracy that is now in a state of acute crisis as the dark clouds of totalitarianism are increasingly threatening to destroy democracy itself on a global scale.[6]

Pedagogy is always the outcome of struggles, especially in terms of how pedagogical practices produce particular notions of citizenship and an inclusive democracy. Pedagogy looms large in this instance not as a technique or a prioriset of methods but as a political and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy illuminates the relationship among power, knowledge, and ideology, while self-consciously, if not self-critically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral practice, pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it means to invest in public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse.

The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibilities as cultural workers cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, that teaching in classrooms or in any other public sphere should not only simply honor the experiences people bring to such sites, including the classroom, but should also connect their experiences to specific problems that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday life. Pedagogy in this sense becomes performative in that it is not merely about deconstructing texts but about situating politics itself within a broader set of relations that addresses what it might mean to create modes of individual and social agency that enables rather than shuts down democratic values, practices, and social relations. Such a project recognizes not only the political nature of pedagogy, but also situates it within a call for artists, intellectuals, and others to assume responsibility for their actions, to link their teachings to those moral principles that allow us to do something about human suffering, as Susan Sontag once suggested.[7] Part of this task necessitates that cultural workers anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing and radically incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theory can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. Yet, any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of good society. I think Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that “If there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves.”[8]

“left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.”

Artists and other cultural workers should consider being more forceful, if not committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just enough, and such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating and shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. At stake here is the task, as Jacques Derrida insists, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise, a possibility rooted in an ongoing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[9] Democracy in this instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends. Such a project is based on the realization that a democracy that is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches the limits of justice.

Theorists such as Raymond Williams and Cornelius Castoriadis recognized that the crisis of democracy was not only about the crisis of culture but also the crisis of pedagogy and education. Cultural workers would do well to take account of the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central category of politics itself. Pierre Bourdieu was right when he stated that cultural workers have too often “underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”[10] He goes on to say in a later conversation with Gunter Grass that “left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. Important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination.”[11] These are important pedagogical interventions and imply rightly that critical pedagogy in the broadest sense is not just about understanding, however critical, but also provides the conditions, ideals, and practices necessary for assuming the responsibilities we have as citizens to expose human misery and to eliminate the conditions that produce it. Matters of responsibility, social action, and political intervention do not simply develop out of social critique but also forms of self-critique. The relationship between knowledge and power, on the one hand, and creativity and politics, on the other, should always be self-reflexive about its effects, how it relates to the larger world, whether or not it is open to new understandings, and what it might mean pedagogically to take seriously matters of individual and social responsibility. In short, this project points to the need for cultural workers to address critical pedagogy not only as a mode of educated hope and a crucial element of an insurrectional educational project, but also as a practice that addresses the possibility of interpretation as intervention in the world.

Graziela Kunsch, Escolas [Schools], 2016. Video, 3:45, 1920 x 1080, 16:9, NTSC, color, no sound. Courtesy of the artist and featured in the exhibition, Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy at the Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA.

Critical pedagogy can neither be reduced to a method nor is it non-directive in the manner of a spontaneous conversation with friends over coffee. As public intellectuals, authority must be reconfigured not as a way to stifle the curiosity and deaden the imagination, but as a platform that provided the conditions for students to learn the knowledge, skills, values, and social relationships that enhance their capacities to assume authority over the forces that shape their lives both in and out of schools. Power and authority are always related, but such a relationship must never operate in the service of domination or the stifling of autonomy but in the service of what I have called the practice of freedom. The notion that authority is always on the side of repression and that pedagogy should never be directive is for all practical purposes a political and theoretical flight from the educator assuming a sense of moral and political responsibility. For artists and educators to be voiceless, renounce the knowledge that gives them a sense of authority, and to assume that a wider public does not need to be exposed to modes of knowledge, histories, and values outside of their immediate experience is to forget that pedagogy is always about the struggle over knowledge, desire, identity, values, agency, and a vision of the future. Critical pedagogy for public intellectuals must always be attentive to addressing the democratic potential of engaging how experience, knowledge, and power are shaped in the classroom in different and often unequal contexts, and how teacher authority might be mobilized against dominant pedagogical practices as part of the practice of freedom, particularly those practices that erase any trace of subaltern histories, historical legacies of class struggles, and the ever persistent historical traces and current structures of racial and gender inequalities and injustices. In this sense, teacher authority must be linked both to a never-ending sense of historical memory, existing inequities, and a “hopeful version of democracy where the outcome is a more just, equitable society that works toward the end of oppression and suffering of all.”[12] As I have said elsewhere:

Authority in this perspective is not simply on the side of oppression, but is used to intervene and shape the space of teaching and learning to provide students with a range of possibilities for challenging a society’s commonsense assumptions, and for analyzing the interface between their own everyday lives and those broader social formations that bear down on them. Authority, at best, becomes both a referent for legitimating a commitment to a particular vision of pedagogy and a critical referent for a kind of autocritique.[13]

Any viable understanding of the artist and educator as a public intellectual must begin with the recognition that democracy begins to fail and civic life becomes impoverished when pedagogy is no longer viewed as central to politics. This is clearly the case as made visible in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s claim that he loves the uneducated appears to have paid off for him just as his victory makes clear that ignorance rather than reason, emotion rather than informed judgment, and the threat of violence rather than critical exchange appear to have more currency in the age of Trump. In part, this political tragedy signifies the failure of the American public to recognize the educative nature of how agency is constructed, to address the necessity for moral witnessing, and the need to create a formative culture that produces critically engaged and socially responsible citizens. Such a failure empties democracy of any meaning. Such actions represent more than a flight from political and social responsibility; they also represent a surrender to the dark forces of authoritarianism. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education in a variety of spheres and practices, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of the public good.[14] The question regarding what role education and pedagogy should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march all over the globe. Public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of education are under siege. As such, the discourses of hate, humiliation, rabid self-interest, and greed are exercising a poisonous influence in many Western societies. This is most evident at the present moment in the discourse of the right-wing extremists vying to consolidate their authority within a Trump presidency, all of whom sanction a war on immigrants, women, young people, poor Black youth, and so it goes. Under such circumstances, democracy is on life support. Yet rather than being a rationale for cynicism, radical democracy as both a pedagogical project and unfinished ideal should create an individual and collective sense of moral and political outrage, a new understanding of politics, and the pedagogical projects needed to allow democracy to breathe once again.

If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of colour, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency. What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a longstanding series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial. This is a challenge that artists, educators, and others must address. While mass civil demonstrations have and continue to erupt over Trump’s election, what is more crucial to understand is that something more serious needs to be addressed. We have to acknowledge that at this particular moment in American history the real issue is not simply about resisting Donald Trump’s insidious values and anti-democratic policies but whether a political system can be reclaimed in which democracy is not on trial but is deepened, strengthened and sustained. This will not happen unless new modes of representation challenge the aesthetics, culture, and discourse of neo-fascism. Yet, under a Trump presidency, it will be more difficult to sustain, construct, and nurture those public spheres that sustain critique, informed dialogue, and a work to expand the radical imagination. If democracy is to prevail in and through the threat of “dark times,” it is crucial that the avenues of critique and possibility become central to any new understanding of politics. If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance. That is, on the one hand, it must move towards developing analyses that address the existing state of authoritarianism through a totalizing lens that brings together the diverse registers of oppression and how they are both connected and mutually reinforce each other. On the other hand, such a politics must, as Robin D.G. Kelley has noted, “move beyond stopgap alliances”[15] and work to unite single issue movements into a more comprehensive and broad-based social movement that can make a viable claim to a resistance that is as integrated as it is powerful. For too long progressive cultural workers and activists have adhered to a narrative about domination that relies mostly on remaking economic structures and presenting to the public what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression. What they have ignored is that people also internalize oppression and that domination is about not only the crisis of economics, images that deaden the imagination, and the misrepresentation of reality, but also about the crisis of agency, identification, meaning, and desire.

The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society in that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom, limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics in which the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth and its discourse of plundering the earth’s resources, coupled with a rabid individualism marked largely by its pathological disdain for community and public values, has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency. This collapse of democratic politics points to an absence in progressive movements and among various types of public intellectuals about how to address the importance of emotional connections among the masses, take seriously how to connect with others through pedagogical tools that demand respect, empathy, a willingness to listen to other stories, and to think seriously about how to change consciousness as an educative task. The latter is particularly important because it speaks to the necessity politically address the challenge of awakening modes of identification coupled with the use of language not merely to demystify but to persuade people that the issues that matter have something to do with their lived realities and daily lives. Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

[1] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

[2] On this issue, see Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education(Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2014); Susan Searls Giroux, “On the Civic Function of Intellectuals Today,” in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds. Education as Civic Engagement: Toward a More Democratic Society (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), pp. ix-xvii.

[3] Bruce Robbins, “A Starting Point for Politics,” The Nation, (October 22, 2016). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-radical-life-of-stuart-hall

[4] Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000) p. 7.

[5] Edward Said, “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Reflections On Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 504.

[6] See, especially, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

[7] Susan Sontag, “Courage and Resistance,” The Nation (May 5, 2003), pp. 11-14.

[8] Zygmunt Bauman, Society under Siege (Malden, MA: Blackwell: 2002), p. 170.

[9] Jacques Derrida, “Intellectual Courage: An Interview,” trans. Peter Krapp, Culture Machine, Volume 2 (2000), pp. 1-15.

[10] Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 11.

[11] Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (March-April, 2002), P. 2

[12] Richard Voelz, “Reconsidering the Image of Preacher-Teacher: Intersections between Henry Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy and Homiletics,” Practical Matters (Spring 2014), p. 79.

[13] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011) p.81.

[14] Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism(New York: Routledge, 2015).

[15] Robin D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” Boston Review (November 15, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back

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Miles de niños en el mundo siguen sin educación ni agua potable

Noticias

América del Norte/Estados Unidos/17.07.18/Fuente: news.un.org.

Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible

Con el hambre en aumento, las bolsas de pobreza estancadas en algunas regiones del mundo y el progreso en las energías renovables avanzando a ritmo lento, dos altos funcionarios de la ONU instaron este lunes a los Estados a redoblar sus esfuerzos para alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible previstos en la Agenda 2030.

A 12 años de que se venza el plazo para la Agenda 2030, la vicesecretaria general de la ONU y el presidente de la Asamblea General aseguraron que los esfuerzos son lentos y que persisten muchos desafíos.

“Entre 2015 y 2016, el número de personas desnutridas aumentó de 777 millones a 815 millones” advirtió Amina Mohamed ante los ministros que participan en el Foro Político de Alto Nivel sobre el Desarrollo Sostenible, destacando que la pobreza se ha vuelto urbana y los jóvenes tienen tres veces más probabilidades de estar desempleados que los adultos.

Para Miroslav Lajčák, los avances logrados contra la pobreza extrema no beneficiaron a todos. «En algunas partes del mundo, especialmente en el África subsahariana, la gente sigue viviendo en condiciones que la mayoría de nosotros ni siquiera podíamos imaginar», dijo ante ese mismo Foro, cuyas reuniones comenzaron la semana pasada y se prolongarán a lo largo de esta.

Entre 2015 y 2016, el número de personas desnutridas aumentó de 777 millones a 815 millones.

El presidente de la Asamblea General recordó que muchos siguen muriendo de enfermedades que pueden curarse o prevenirse, que los niños aún no reciben educación de calidad y que muchas mujeres y niñas siguen siendo excluidas u oprimidas.

“El acceso al saneamiento aún está fuera del alcance de millones de personas”, expresó Mohammed. En 2018, una de cada seis personas todavía no tiene acceso al agua potable. «Esto significa que cada minuto muere un niño a causa de agua contaminada o falta de saneamiento«, aseguró Lajčák haciéndose eco a las palabras de la vicesecretaria.

Además, el avance en el acceso a la energía renovable no es lo suficientemente rápida. En África, más de 250 millones de personas no tienen acceso a energía limpia para cocinar. «Y, es casi difícil de creer que hoy, en la era digital, todavía haya personas (casi mil millones) sin electricidad en sus hogares», comentó el presidente de la Asamblea General.

ONU/Loey Felipe
El presidente de la Asamblea General, Miroslav Lajčák, durante la apertura del segmento de alto nivel del Foro de Desarrollo Sostenible.

El cambio climático, otro gran desafío

Tanto Lajčák como Mohammed resaltaron que la emergencia climática es otro gran desafío. «El planeta se está derritiendo, literalmente», afirmó el presidente de la Asamblea, que deploró la disminución de los esfuerzos para combatir el cambio climático recordando que 2017 fue uno de los tres años más cálidos de la historia.

El planeta se está derritiendo, literalmente.

“La Tierra todavía está experimentando una disminución alarmante en la biodiversidad, un aumento del nivel del mar y de la erosión costera, unas condiciones climáticas extremas y un incremento de las concentraciones de gases de efecto invernadero”, recalcó la vicesecretaria.

Lajčák llamó a los Estados a desarrollar un enfoque intersectorial e inclusivo al involucrar a más mujeres y jóvenes, así como al sector privado, la sociedad civil y los actores regionales para luchar contra este flagelo y lograr los demás Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible.

Falta de recursos

Durante la reunión, los líderes de la ONU lamentaron una vez más la falta de recursos destinados a alcanzar a esos Objetivos.

«No tenemos suficiente dinero para lograr nuestras metas«, advirtió Miroslav Lajčák, señalando que la participación del Estado «no es suficiente». «Debemos invertir para lograr resultados tangibles”, remachó Amina Mohammed.

Ambos instaron una vez más a los gobiernos a ser más creativos y proactivos en el financiamiento del desarrollo sostenible. «Tenemos que ver resultados sobre el terreno. No tenemos tiempo para perder», expresaron.

 

Fuente de la Noticia: https://news.un.org/es/story/2018/07/1437952

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A better way foward for transnational higher education

Peter De Costa

By Peter Da Costa

As I pen this commentary from my office at the National University of Singapore or NUS – my alma mater and summer academic home – I have been notified that NUS has emerged 11th in the Quacquarelli Symonds or QS World University Rankings and reclaimed its position as Asia’s number one university.

Tellingly, however, the top 10 universities are based in the West: five are in the United States, and the other five are European institutions. And while NUS has much to celebrate, having climbed steadily in the rankings over the past decade, it is also engaged in joint ventures with Duke University and Yale University to enhance its medical and liberal arts education programme, respectively.

Such a joint arrangement, which is representative of transnational education (TNE), is the focus of Professor Phan Le-Ha’s recent book, Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’.

Top-ranked universities like NUS and other middling Asian institutions, according to Phan, appear to have a fascination with Western universities, resulting in the latter exporting versions of their educational model abroad by establishing overseas campuses in China, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Vietnam.

TNE has, however, also drawn its fair share of criticisms as sceptics have been quick to point out that the practice of exporting Western models of higher education to Asian countries constitutes a form of neocolonialism; more often than not, host countries are coerced into granting concessions and providing resources such as land to create these satellite campuses.

Another unfavourable outcome is the ostensible exploitation of its students who, as Phan notes, may receive a mediocre education. Equally disturbing is how some TNE students are individuals who are merely biding their time as they await degree completion and future employment at the home countries of these degree-granting universities.

In other words, both the host institution and host country become stepping stones as these students aspire to eventually move on to the West.

Neoliberalism and TNE

As a critical applied linguist who studies issues of power, and inequality associated language-related issues to better understand their roles in the lives of individuals and conditions in society, I am particularly disturbed by the neoliberal turn that characterises TNE.

For one, students are generally viewed as customers in this financially lucrative enterprise where English is often the medium of instruction. As a consequence, English becomes a commodity, a means toward realising an end that can potentially have negative social implications.

One major implication is the reification of the (white) Western native English instructor whose variety of English and race are valued over the local variety of English used by local instructors. Put simply, a negative outcome of TNE is that it can promote institutional racism through the adoption of ‘rent-a-foreigner’ hiring practices. More often than not, these foreign instructors are also paid more than their local counterparts to do the same job.

Best of both worlds

As real as these ill effects of TNE may be, Phan reminds us that we should not to be too quick to subscribe to an Asian-as-victim trope. After all, some Asian universities are themselves complicit in perpetuating an asymmetrical relationship by electing, for example, to hire token white foreign instructors who might not be formally trained to deliver instruction.

Other Asian-based institutions might not hesitate to use the West-Asia paradox to their advantage by advertising that TNE allows students to enjoy a Western education while being ensconced in Asian values. TNE is thus promoted as a way of preserving one’s Asian values against the insidious cultural influence of the demonised West, an opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Understandably, Asian universities have much to be proud of. In the latest QS rankings mentioned earlier, four other institutions made the top 25 list: Nanyang Technological University (12), Tsinghua University (17), the University of Tokyo (23) and the University of Hong Kong (25).

The strong performances of Asian universities will probably improve in the future, buoyed by the brain circulation that Asia is experiencing. Many Western-trained academics are returning home, drawn by the attractive remuneration offered by improved local universities. In the long term, the internal ‘Westernisation’ of local universities fuelled by faculty returnees may erode the allure of TNE.

Cooperation rather than competition

Rather than being bound by the West-Asia binary, Phan recommends that TNE institutions adopt a less antagonistic stance and instead “engag[e] with a multidimensional, pro-West and practical-minded Asia”.

This is a valid point because competition can co-exist with cooperation, and cooperation will be essential if TNE is to survive and thrive. However, Western universities need to see the value of such cooperation because some are wary of ceding their rights to overseas campuses and diluting their brand name.

I think that any reservations these institutions might have need to be actively assuaged, with deliberate attempts made to preserve intellectual property rights and maintain academic standards. Intellectual espionage is without a doubt a contemporary reality, and institutions are right to be cautious about leaked content.

However, the solution is not to curtail TNE or, relatedly, restrict graduate student admission of Asian students to Western institutions on the grounds of national security. Instead, stricter measures need to be put in place to safeguard an equitable two-way exchange of knowledge and ideas.

Steps also need to be taken to tackle institutional racism and to value the expertise local talent can bring to TNE institutions. Rather than populating these institutions with ‘foreign’ talent, joint venture campuses should hire capable multilingual local faculty who are well versed with English as an international lingua franca, and thus do their part in facilitating global brain circulation.

At a time when multilateralism appears to be in jeopardy, TNE can take a leadership role in connecting institutions and people.

Unfortunately, university rankings do matter, and it is increasingly difficult to escape the audit culture that pervades higher education. What TNE needs to do is to design measures that will foster genuine cross-institutional collaboration and cooperation. If designed well, this could become a valuable template for other educational crossings, not just between the West and Asia.

 

Source of the article: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20180626103409378

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Estados Unidos: Carolina del Sur obliga a las universidades a violar los derechos de libertad de expresión

Noticias

Redacción: Nora Barrows–Friedman/Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por J. M.

Carolina del Sur aprobó una ley esta semana que codifica una definición desacreditada de antisemitismo que combina la crítica a Israel y al sionismo con el antisemitismo.

«La ley violará inevitablemente los derechos de la Primera Enmienda de los estudiantes si se aplica para restringir o castigar el discurso del campus crítico de Israel», dijo a The Electronic Intifada Dima Khalidi, directora del grupo de derechos civiles Palestine Legal.

Los estudiantes se enfrentan ahora a mayores escrutinios, investigaciones, censura y posible castigo por sus actividades de defensa de los derechos de los palestinos en los campus de Carolina del Sur, advirtió Palestine Legal.

La definición de antisemitismo, que ha sido impulsada por los grupos de presión de Israel en los EE.UU. y Europa, a veces se califica como «Definición del Departamento de Estado» porque el Departamento de Estado de EE.UU. adoptó una versión de la misma.

La medida se agregó como cláusula adicional en el proyecto de presupuesto de 2018-2019 de Carolina del Sur, que hace que la ley sea válida por solo un año.

Se requieren instituciones financiadas por el Estado para utilizar la definición en la investigación de supuestos incidentes por antisemitismo en los campus.

En particular, el autor principal de la definición original de antisemitismo, el exejecutivo del Comité Judío Estadounidense Kenneth Stern, se ha opuesto firmemente a los esfuerzos para consagrarlo en la legislación, argumentando que podría llevar a una censura de inconstitucionalidad.

El claro propósito de la ley de Carolina del Sur «es apuntar a un discurso político crítico hacia Israel», dijo Khalidi. Agregó que Palestine Legal estará «monitoreando de cerca su implementación durante el próximo año y explorando posibles desafíos legales».

El mes pasado los legisladores del Congreso de los EE.UU. volvieron a presentar un proyecto de ley, la Ley de Concientización sobre antisemitismo, que utilizaría la misma definición de antisemitismo para evaluar el discurso crítico de Israel.

Si se aprueba el proyecto de ley, se instruirá a Kenneth Marcus, defensor de Israel desde hace mucho tiempo y designado por Trump para dirigir la Oficina de Derechos Civiles en el Departamento de Educación, a usar la definición para juzgar si el antisemitismo está o no ocurriendo en los campus de EE.UU.

El Brandeis Center, un grupo de manipuladores jurídicos proisraelí encabezado anteriormente por Marcus, respaldó la legislación de Carolina del Sur.

Carolina del Sur es uno de los 25 estados que han aprobado medidas, impulsadas por grupos de presión de Israel, que apuntan a sofocar la defensa de los derechos de Palestina y aplastar la campaña de boicot, desinversión y sanciones (BDS). La legislación está pendiente en otros 12 estados.

El Congreso de Estados Unidos también está considerando la Ley de Antiboicot a Israel, que podría imponer prisión y fuertes multas a las empresas o a su personal acusado de cumplir con los boicots a Israel convocados por organizaciones internacionales.

Louisiana castiga y amenaza a las empresas que participan en el boicot

En mayo, el gobernador demócrata de Luisiana, John Bel Edwards, emitió una orden ejecutiva que prohíbe al Gobierno estatal hacer negocios con empresas acusadas de boicotear a Israel.

La orden ordena a los funcionarios del Estado «acabar con los contratos estatales existentes con las compañías si actualmente están boicoteando a Israel o apoyando a quienes lo hacen», informa The Times-Picayune. Se exigirá a las empresas que certifiquen que no están boicoteando actualmente a Israel antes de que se les adjudique un contrato estatal.

La orden se aplica a las empresas que ganan más de 100000 dólares en un contrato estatal o que tienen más de cinco empleados.

Edwards emitió la orden «en la misma noche que estaba celebrando el 70 aniversario de Israel en la mansión del gobernador», según The Times-Picayune.

En enero, el consejo de la ciudad de Nueva Orleans aprobó una resolución para comenzar a seleccionar inversiones y contratos y desprenderse de corporaciones que se benefician de abusos contra los derechos humanos, convirtiéndose en la primera ciudad importante del sur de Estados Unidos en aprobar tal medida.

Pero después de la fuerte presión de las organizaciones comunitarias judías proisraelíes y los legisladores de derecha, el consejo votó unánimemente dos semanas después para rescindir la resolución.

Victoria en Missouri

Mientras tanto, los activistas de derechos humanos celebran el fracaso de una medida que habría castigado a los partidarios de la campaña de BDS en Missouri.

El proyecto de ley, que se introdujo en ambas cámaras de la legislatura estatal, habría negado contratos estatales por valor de 10.000 dólares o más a empresas y organizaciones que apoyan el boicot de Israel.

Los activistas dicen que el fracaso de la legislación fue el resultado directo de meses de organización de base, presión sobre los legisladores y testimonios durante las audiencias de los comités, de acuerdo con la campaña de Missouri sobre el derecho al boicot.

En un memorando a los legisladores estatales, 15 grupos de derechos llamaron a la legislación «constitucionalmente indefendible» y «una prueba de fuego político macartista en cualquier empresa u organización sin fines de lucro que quiera firmar un contrato con el Estado».

«Los ataques de Israel a los manifestantes en Gaza ilustran precisamente por qué las personas de conciencia en Missouri y en todo el mundo están prestando atención al llamado palestino de participar en campañas de BDS que esta legislación habría penalizado», dijo Neveen Ayesh, del Comité de Solidaridad Palestina de St. Louis y Musulmanes estadounidenses por Palestina.

Ley de Kansas modificada

La Unión Estadounidense por las Libertades Civiles (ACLU, por sus siglas en inglés) dice que ha retirado su demanda contra una ley del estado de Kansasde 2017 que exige que los contratistas certifiquen que no van a boicotear a Israel.

El Estado ha modificado su legislación para que no se aplique a los individuos, pero sigue siendo ejecutable para las empresas y los contratos que superan los 100.000 dólares, de acuerdo con The Topeka Capital-Journal.

La ACLU sostiene que la ley todavía viola la Primera Enmienda.

Un juez federal bloqueó la aplicación de la ley en enero, citando violaciones de la libertad de expresión.

La ACLU presentó la demanda en nombre de Esther Koontz, una profesora de matemáticas a quien se le denegó un contrato de capacitación educativa estatal porque apoya el movimiento BDS y no pudo firmar la declaración requerida con buena conciencia.

«Si bien los cambios reducen el número de personas requeridas para firmar la certificación antiboicot, el propósito fundamental de la ley -reprimir los boicots políticos a Israel y enfriar la expresión protegida- sigue siendo inconstitucional», dijo el abogado de la ACLU, Brian Hauss, quien argumentó el asunto en un tribunal de Kansas.

El tribunal ordenó que el estado pague a Koontz más de 41.000 dólares por sus honorarios legales.

La ACLU y el Consejo de Relaciones Islámicas Estadounidenses han presentado demandas contra el Estado de Arizona por su ley de 2016 que crea una lista negra de compañías, organizaciones y otras entidades acusadas de boicotear a Israel.

Un tribunal federal escuchó los argumentos sobre la ley a finales de mayo.

Fuente: https://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=244124

 

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Estados Unidos le abre la puerta a una nueva era de las armas impresas 3D

Noticias

Redacción: Yúbal FM/Xataka

Bienvenido a una nueva era de las armas de fuego. El Departamento de Justicia de Estados Unidos ha perdido un importante juicio en un intento de detener la difusión de planos digitales de armas. Esto le abre la puerta a que cualquiera en ese país pueda compartir los diseños de sus armas online, lo que a la vez también permitirá que otras personas puedan imprimirlas en su casa con una impresora 3D.

Tal y como ha contado Wired, esto pone fin a una batalla de judicial de varios años contra Cody Wilson, un estudiante de Texas que ha conseguido defender que compartir los planos de las armas forma parte de la libertad de expresión. Con este acuerdo, el Departamento de Justicia se rinde a este argumento, y promete cambiar las normas de control de exportación de armas de fuego para sea legal difundir los planos de armas 3D debajo del calibre .50, excepto las automáticas.

De Wilson hablamos por primera vez en 2012, cuando puso en marcha su iniciativa Defense Distributed para crear armas que cualquiera pueda imprimirse. Sólo un año después lanzó ‘Liberator’, la que se convirtió en la primera pistola fabricada con una impresora 3D. Wilson subió los planos a la web de su iniciativa, Defcad.com, de donde fueron descargados más de 100.000 veces.

Pero entonces entró en juego la justicia, y Wilson fue acusado de exportar armas sin licencia bajo el Reglamento sobre el Comercio Internacional de Armas (ITAR) estadounidense. Eliminó su web de Internet, pero ante el temor de ser multado con millones de dólares inició la contraofensiva legal que ha acabado ganando.

Su defensa se centró en la libertad de expresión. Defendió que si los datos se consideran una forma de expresión, no sólo se le estaba privando de su libertad para llevar armas, sino también la libertad de expresión que supone compartir estos datos. Vamos, que ha conseguido que este tipo de armas que pueden fabricarse con impresoras 3D sean consideradas un archivo digital, por lo que finalmente la justicia estadounidense acabó cediendo.

Tras esta victoria judicial Wilson está relanzando de nuevo su web, un repositorio de planos de armas imprimibles que van desde la primera que creó en 2013 a fusiles AR-15 y varios otros tipos de armas semiautomáticas. En la página no sólo subirá los planos que ha ido recopilando en los últimos tiempos, sino que también planea abrirla para que otras personas puedan subir también sus propios planos.

El inicio de una peligrosa nueva era

Por lo tanto, la comunidad maker amante del DIY (hazlo tú mismo) tiene un nuevo y oscuro vecino, ya que de la misma manera que nos descargamos planos para hacer todo tipo de invenciones, a partir de ahora también habrá una comunidad en la que descargarse armas. Sin que esta página existiera de forma abierta ya se han confiscado armas impresas en 3D, por lo que esta nueva situación legal puede darle un peligroso impulso a este tipo de armamento.

Estados Unidos tiene más de 32.000 muertos y más de 67.000 heridos cada año a causa de tiroteos a pesar de sus leyes de control de armas, mientras que países como Australia han demostrado que quitándole las armas a los ciudadanos se pueden evitar estos tiroteos. Sin embargo, con esta derrota judicial en Estados Unidos, ahora empezamos a caminar en el sentido contrario, y se abre la puerta a que cualquiera pueda fabricarse un arma en casa.

En los últimos años se han imprimido numerosas armas 3D funcionales y países como Reino Unido o Australia han legislado para prohibir su fabricación, compra y venta. Sin embargo, si en países como en Estados Unidos ahora ya no se puede evitar la libre difusión de planos para crear estas armas, su control se convierte en una tarea cada vez más difícil.

Y es que eso es lo que supone la rendición del Departamento de Justicia de EE.UU. Hasta ahora, si creabas allí una web en la que compartir este tipo de planos podrías tener problemas por violar el Reglamento sobre el Comercio Internacional de Armas. Pero ahora el Departamento de Justicia ha dicho que cambiará estas normas, lo que le abrirá las puertas a que otras personas como Wilson empiecen a difundir sus planos con total libertad.

Fuente: https://www.xataka.com/legislacion-y-derechos/estados-unidos-le-abre-puerta-nueva-era-armas-impresas-3d

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La importancia de las distintas tonalidades del feminismo

Vicenç Navarro

Autor: Vicenç Navarro

Uno de los movimientos sociales que, junto con la protesta de los pensionistas, ha tenido mayor influencia en la vida política del país este año es el movimiento feminista, que está adquiriendo mayor intensidad como consecuencia, entre otros factores, de la creciente conciencia sobre el sesgo profundamente conservador y machista de sectores de la judicatura española, claramente expresado en su tolerancia hacia la violación masiva en el caso de “La Manada”, que ha indignado a la mayoría de la población española.

Aunque este movimiento ha alcanzado una visibilidad mediática y una movilización muy notoria en los pasados meses, es un movimiento de larga historia que lleva mucho tiempo luchando por intentar conseguir la igualdad entre el hombre y la mujer, exigiendo el fin de la explotación de la mujer por parte del hombre. Desde la protesta frente a la violencia machista hasta la demanda de eliminar la brecha salarial, este movimiento está hoy adquiriendo una gran extensión cubriendo una amplia gama de demandas. Es un movimiento enormemente positivo que está mejorando la sociedad, rompiendo con el conservadurismo tan extendido en este país.

Su impacto es considerable. No hay duda de que sin la marcha del 8 de Marzo hoy no habría un gobierno en España en el que la mayoría son mujeres, las cuales ocupan ministerios de gran poder y capacidad de influencia. Y es importante también resaltar que tal movimiento está influenciando a todas las sensibilidades políticas en el país, como lo demuestra que en las primarias a la presidencia del partido más conservador que existe en España, dos de las personas que tienen más posibilidades de ganar son mujeres.

Las tonalidades del movimiento feminista

El feminismo se está expandiendo y penetrando en todos los sectores de la sociedad española, adquiriendo distintas tonalidades y exigiendo diferentes propuestas dependiendo del sector y fuerza política que lo promueva. Lo cual nos lleva a hacer una observación que, aun siendo una obviedad, raramente se menciona. Y es que de la misma manera que entre los hombres hay clases sociales, las mujeres también están divididas por clases sociales. Una mujer burguesa tiene elementos en común con la mujer trabajadora derivados del hecho de que, al ser mujer, ambas están sujetas a la discriminación consecuencia del machismo existente en la sociedad. Ahora bien, tal experiencia y la manera como se expresa, así como las consecuencias que de ello se derivan y las propuestas que se realizan (incluyendo las políticas necesarias para proteger a la mujer y eliminar dicha discriminación) es probable que sean distintas. Y esta realidad es de una enorme importancia.

Las demandas de políticas públicas feministas dependen de quién las haga

Pude ver esta realidad en los años ochenta en EEUU, cuando tuve el gran honor de asesorar al dirigente del movimiento de izquierdas estadounidense –The Rainbow Coalition- Jesse Jackson senior, y también de ser elegido para la dirección de tal movimiento, que incluye los mayores movimientos sociales en aquel país, desde los sindicatos y el movimiento de derechos civiles –The Civil Rights Movement- hasta el mayor movimiento feminista de EEUU, NOW. Pude entonces ver que las peticiones realizadas por la dirección de este movimiento –mujeres de clase media profesional-, muy necesarias, eran medidas muy relevantes para mujeres de clase media/media-alta pero no tan relevantes para mujeres de raza negra pertenecientes al sector de clase trabajadora no cualificada, de renta muy baja. Las leyes del divorcio, para prevenir el cambio sustancial del nivel de renta de un ama de casa (pasando de clase media y media alta de renta alta a pobreza, cuando se divorcia), son de una enorme importancia. Pero para la mujer cuyo esposo está en paro, con un nivel de renta bajísimo, viviendo en gran pobreza, la pensión que el marido tiene que pagar a la mujer en un divorcio tiene un impacto mucho menor y es de menor relevancia para impedir la pobreza en la que la mujer está ya sumergida.

Este comportamiento diferenciado por clase social es una constante en el análisis de propuestas de políticas públicas. Lo es para los hombres y lo es también para las mujeres. Las propuestas feministas que afectan el bienestar de las mujeres pueden tener orientaciones muy distintas en función de quién las diseñe y las proponga. Las escuelas de infancia para niños de 0 a 3 años (que en España se llama “guarderías”) son muy importantes, por ejemplo, para las familias españolas (y decir familia en España quiere decir mujer), pero para las mujeres de clase trabajadora lo son mucho más que no para las mujeres de renta alta, que pueden contratar ayudas en personal de atención que cuiden a los infantes que no tiene la mayoría de mujeres, que pertenecen a las clases populares. Y lo mismo con un largo listado de propuestas.

De ahí que haya distintos feminismos

De ahí que el impacto que las políticas públicas que se propongan dependa mucho no solo de género sino también de la composición por clase social de la fuerza política que la proponga. Y, no me estoy refiriendo a la clase social del político específico que las promueve (aun cuando este factor tampoco puede olvidarse), sino de la clase social de las mujeres que representa. De ahí que las propuestas feministas derivadas de los partidos conservadores (próximos a las clases sociales de mayor renta) o de los movimientos feministas dirigidos o representantes de las mujeres de mayor renta es probable que sean distintas a las propuestas de los movimientos feministas dirigidos o representantes de las mujeres de las clases populares. En España, la gran fortuna del movimiento feminista es que las mujeres que lo han establecido y liderado, como se vio en la marcha del 8 de Marzo, eran personas claramente de izquierdas que, en la convocatoria de la manifestación definieron bien las causas de la explotación de la mujer: el patriarcado y el capitalismo depredador que tiene como objetivo la acumulación del capital a costa del bienestar de la mayoría de la población, que son mujeres. Esta percepción es una de sus fortalezas del feminismo español pues permite, favorece y estimula toda una serie de alianzas y colaboraciones con fuerzas políticas y movimientos sociales dedicados al fin de toda forma de explotación.

El contraste con el mayor movimiento feminista de EEUU

Una de las características del movimiento feminista de EEUU (dirigido por personas de clase media profesional, de educación superior) fue, en los años noventa y principios del siglo XXI, dar prioridad a las políticas de integración de las mujeres en la sociedad, a través de las medidas antidiscriminación del gobierno federal. Estas políticas eran muy necesarias en un país en el que la discriminación por raza, grupo étnico y género es muy acentuada. De ahí que el gobierno federal, presionado por el movimiento feminista y por el movimiento de defensa de los derechos civiles de la población negra, haya aprobado políticas públicas antidiscriminatorias que han tenido un impacto muy positivo y destacable. Como consecuencia de ello, ha habido un aumento muy notable de mujeres en los espacios de decisión de las instituciones públicas (y en menor medida en las privadas). Tras la elección de Obama, una persona negra como presidente de EEUU, faltaba ahora elegir a la candidata Hilary Clinton, para ser la primera mujer presidenta de EEUU. Hilary Clinton era la candidata feminista y presentó su campaña como feminista. Su orientación económica, sin ambargo, era profundamente favorable a continuar y expandir el neoliberalismo. Fue, por ejemplo, como Ministra de Asuntos Exteriores, una gran influencia en la expansión de la globalización económica que estaba debilitando a las clases trabajadoras estadounidenses. Como consecuencia, la gran mayoría de las mujeres de clase trabajadora blanca no se sintieron representadas por ella y votaron a Trump, que canalizó el enfado de la clase trabajadora blanca (hombres y mujeres) hacia el establishment político-mediático neoliberal, representado por la Sra. Clinton. El voto por Trump fue predominantemente un voto en contra del establishment neoliberal. Los intereses de clase de las mujeres trabajadoras blancas (que erróneamente asumieron que defendería el candidato Trump) prevalecieron sobre sus intereses como mujer, tal como lo presentaba la Sra. Clinton. No existe en EEUU un partido de izquierdas con vocación transformadora del capitalismo darwinista existente en aquel país, muy limitado en la protección social que el estado ofrece a la ciudadanía, la mayoría de la cual son mujeres. El permiso de maternidad en aquel país es de dos semanas, comparado con un año en Suecia.

Es importante que se establezca una prioridad en las políticas públicas feministas

En España, tal como está evolucionando la situación política, nos podríamos encontrar en una realidad paradójica en la que las mujeres sean mayoría en el gobierno central (como ya ocurre) y, sin embargo, el nivel de vida de las mujeres, la mayoría pertenecientes a las clases populares no cambie o incluso empeore, a no ser que cambien las políticas neoliberales llevadas a cabo por los gobiernos anteriores. La atención al tema de la brecha salarial es necesario y urgente para mejorar el nivel de vida de las mujeres trabajadoras. Ahora bien, es muy insuficiente (ver: “La necesaria corrección de  la brecha salarial es insuficiente”, Público, 28 de febrero de 2018). En realidad, la brecha salarial, aun cuando importante, no es de las peores de la UE. Las mujeres trabajadoras reciben salarios menores que los hombres. Pero lo que es importante subrayar –y que no se subraya en los medios- es que los salarios de las mujeres trabajadoras (y de los hombres trabajadores) son de los más bajos de la UE. De ahí que luchar por cerrar la brecha salarial es necesario pero insuficiente. Lo que se necesita es complementar la reivindicación de conseguir igualdad, de género, con la demanda de terminar con la explotación laboral, pues la mayoría de las mujeres son trabajadoras con salarios muy bajos.

Tener mujeres en la estructura de poder es necesario pero no suficiente para mejorar su bienestar

La experiencia estadounidense muestra las consecuencias de seguir la estrategia del movimiento feminista liderado por NOW y por la Sra. Clinton, y podría ocurrir en España. El hecho de que la nueva ministra de Economía (una economista de conocida predicación neoliberal) en España sea mujer tiene importancia desde el punto de vista simbólico, lo cual es importante. Pero la mujer de clase trabajadora no se beneficiará mucho de ello. La Ministra Nadia Calviño es de una gran ortodoxia neoliberal y la aplicación de dichas políticas neoliberales dañará a las clases populares, en las cuales las mujeres son mayoría. Lo más relevante para el bienestar de las mujeres de las clases populares es que las políticas públicas no sean de carácter neoliberal. Repito que el hecho de ser mujer tiene una importancia simbólica importante y entiendo el gran impacto que ha tenido. Lo aplaudo. Pero, siendo conocedor de las consecuencias tan dañinas del neoliberalismo, tengo mis reservas que no solo para la mayoría de mujeres, sino también para la causa feminista, sea bueno que el principal personaje para llevar a cabo tales políticas nefastas sea esta economista. Seguro que hay otras mujeres de diferente sensibilidad económica que serían más sensibles a las necesidades de la mujer perteneciente a las clases populares.

Lo dicho hasta ahora tiene también relevancia para entender por qué, en general, la experiencia internacional muestra que los derechos de las mujeres y su integración en las instituciones representativas son mayores en los países gobernados históricamente por partidos progresistas cuya base electoral es predominantemente de clases populares en general y la clase trabajadora en particular, como por ejemplo los países escandinavos, tales como Suecia y Noruega. Son precisamente los países como EEUU, donde los partidos progresistas de izquierda son más débiles y donde la mayoría de las clases populares no vota (la abstención en las elecciones federales alcanza casi la mitad del electorado, habiendo una relación inversa entre participación electoral y nivel de renta del país), donde las mujeres (así como los hombres) tienen menos derechos civiles, y ello a pesar de tener movimientos feministas grandes y de visibilidad mediática mayor. En las últimas elecciones, NOW apoyó mucho más a Hilary Clinton que a Bernie Sanders, el candidato socialista, que fue claramente marginado por el aparato del partido Demócrata, controlado por Hilary Clinton.

Estos datos prueban que la articulación de las demandas y de los movimientos feministas que las generan con las demandas de cambio profundo en la sociedad son más eficaces para conseguir la igualdad entre el hombre y la mujer que no la completa independencia del movimiento feminista, no relacionado y sin formar parte del cambio profundo de la sociedad, como ocurre en EEUU. El movimiento feminista estadounidense es un movimiento muy grande, y sin embargo, los derechos civiles de las mujeres (y de los hombres) son muy limitados. Y continuará siendo muy limitado a no ser que los distintos movimientos reivindicativos existentes en aquel país, incluyendo el feminista, se coordinen y/o sean parte de un movimiento más amplio de transformación, como ha ocurrido en los países escandinavos, donde las izquierdas han gobernado durante la mayor parte del periodo post II Guerra Mundial. Hay todavía mucho por hacer en estos países para alcanzar la igualdad entre el hombre y la mujer. Pero, en una cultura que favorece la igualdad, la desigualdad entre las mujeres es mucho menor que no en EEUU. Esta realidad es importante que se conozca pues su relevancia para el bienestar de las mujeres españolas es enorme. Es importante y urgente que todos los movimientos reivindicativos (incluyendo el de la mujer) se alíen y colaboren en la transformación profunda de nuestra sociedad para eliminar la explotación de la mujer junto con otras explotaciones, como la explotación de clase que también afecta a la mayoría de las mujeres que pertenecen a las clases populares. Desde este punto de vista, el movimiento feminista actual en España representa un punto de referencia internacional pues su horizonte es claro –cambiar profundamente la sociedad- en alianza y no en contraposición a otras fuerzas y movimientos sociales y políticos reivindicativos que comparten tal objetivo.

Una última observación: la importancia del tema social en las propuestas feministas españolas

Una de las grandes aportaciones del movimiento feminista en España ha sido el poner el tema social en el centro del debate político y económico. Y ello es consecuencia de la identificación de la causa feminista con los deseos y aspiraciones de la mujer de clase popular, y que beneficia a todas las mujeres (y a todos los hombres). Hoy el énfasis por ejemplo en la economía de los cuidados es fundamental para mejorar la calidad de vida de la población así como mejorar la eficiencia económica. Si en España hubiera una persona de cada cuatro (como ocurre en Suecia) que trabajara en los servicios públicos del Estado del bienestar (sanidad, educación, servicios comunitarios, escuelas de infancia, servicios domiciliarios, servicios sociales, vivienda social, programas de integración del inmigrante y prevención de la pobreza, entre otros) en lugar de uno de cada diez, habrían en España 3 millones y medio más de puestos de trabajo, eliminando el desempleo en España. Esto no lo harán las feministas neoliberales o conservadores sino las feministas progresistas movilizada para presionar a las estructuras del poder masculino para que cambien, y se transformen en instituciones al servicio y al cuidado de la mayoría de la población, que son mujeres. Así de claro.

Fuente: http://blogs.publico.es/vicenc-navarro/2018/07/06/la-importancia-de-las-distintas-tonalidades-del-feminismo/

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The Slow and Fast Assault on Public Education

Henry Giroux

By: HENRY A. GIROUX

Since Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, there have been few occasions to feel hopeful about politics. But now we are witnessing a proliferation of causes for hope, as brave students from Parkland, Florida, and equally courageous teachers throughout the United States lead movements of mass demonstrations, walkouts, and strikes.

The United States is in the midst of a crisis of values, ethics, and politics. It has been decades in the making, produced largely by a neoliberal system that has subordinated all aspects of social life to the dictates of the market while stripping assets from public goods and producing untenable levels of inequality. What we are now living through is the emergence of a new political formation in which neoliberalism has put on the mantle of fascism.

The assault on public education, the slow violence of teacher disenfranchisement, and the fast violence of guns can only be understood as part of a larger war on liberal democracy.

Amidst this cataclysm, public schools have been identified as a major threat to the conservative ruling elite because public education has long been integral to U.S. democracy’s dependence on an informed, engaged citizenry. Democracy is predicated on faith in the capacity of all humans for intelligent judgment, deliberation, and action, but this innate capacity must be nurtured. The recognition of this need explains why the United States has, since its earliest days, emphasized the value of public education at least as an ideal. An education that teaches one to think critically and mediate charged appeals to one’s emotions is key to making power accountable and embracing a mature sense of the social contract.

Now, as our public schools are stretched to their breaking, their students and teachers are leading the call for a moral awakening. Both argue that the crisis of public schooling and the war on youth are related, and that the assaults on public schooling can only be understood as part of a larger war on liberal democracy.

No one movement or group can defeat the powerful and connected forces of neoliberal fascism, but energized young people and teachers are helping to open a space in which change looks more possible than at any time in the recent past. The Parkland students have embraced a grassroots approach and teachers are following their lead. Both are primed for action and are ready to challenge those eager to dismantle the public education system. They recognize that education is a winning issue because most Americans still view it as a path through which their children can gain access to decent jobs and a good life. The usual neoliberal bromides advocating privatization, charter schools, vouchers, and teaching for the test have lost all legitimacy at a moment when the ruling elite act with blatant disregard for the democratizing ethos that has long been a keystone of our society.

All of the states in which teachers have engaged in wildcat strikes, demonstrations, and protests have been subject to the toxic austerity measures that have come to characterize the neoliberal economy. In these states, teachers have faced low and stagnant wages, crumbling and overfilled classrooms, lengthening work days, and slashed budgets that have left them without classroom essentials such as books and even toilet paper—necessities that, in many cases, teachers have purchased themselves with their paltry salaries. It is significant that teachers have refused to confine their protests to the immediate needs of their profession or the understandable demand for higher wages. Rather, they have couched these demands within a broader critique of the war on public goods, calling repeatedly for more funding for schools in order to provide students with decent conditions for learning.

Likewise, students protesting gun violence have contextualized their demands for gun control by addressing the roots of gun violence in state violence and political and economic disenfranchisement. Refusing to be silenced by politicians bought and sold by the NRA, these students have called for a vision of social justice rooted in the belief that they can not only challenge systemic oppression, but can change the fundamental nature of an oppressive social order. They recognize that they have not only been treated as disposable populations written out of the script of democracy, they also are capable of using the new tools of social media to surmount the deadening political horizons preached by conventional media outlets and established politicians.

The attack on public education is one side of the neoliberal ledger. The other side is the explosion of the punishing state with its accelerated apparatuses of incarceration and militarization.

What is so promising about the student-led movement is that not only is it exposing the politicians and gun lobbies that argue against gun control and reframe the gun debate while endangering the lives of young people, they have also energized millions of youth by encouraging a sense of individual and collective agency. They are asking their peers to mobilize against gun violence, vote in the midterm November elections, and be prepared for a long struggle against the underlying ideologies, structures, and institutions that promote death-dealing violence in the United States. As Charlotte Alter pointed out in TIME:

They envision a youth political movement that will address many of the other issues affecting the youngest Americans. [Parkland student leader David] Hogg says he would like to have a youth demonstration every year on March 24, harnessing the power of teenage anger to demand action on everything from campaign-finance reform to net neutrality to climate change.

This statement makes clear that these young people recognize that the threat they face goes far beyond the gun debate and that what they need to address is a wider culture of cruelty, silence, and indifference. Violence comes in many forms, some hidden, many more spectacularized, cultivated, valued, eroticized, and normalized. Some are fast, and others are slow, and thus harder to perceive. The key is to address the underlying structures and relations of power that give rise to this landscape of both spectacular gun violence and the everyday violence experienced by the poor, people of color, the undocumented, and other “disposable” people. The attack on public education and the rights and working conditions of teachers is one side of the neoliberal ledger. The other side is the explosion of the punishing state with its accelerated apparatuses of containment, militarized police, borders, walls, mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the creation of an armed society. These issues need to be connected as part of a wider refusal to equate rapacious, neoliberal capitalism with democracy.

The Parkland student movement and the teacher walkouts have already advanced the possibilities of mass resistance by connecting the dots between the crises that each group is experiencing. The “slow violence” (to borrow Rob Nixon’s term) of teacher disenfranchisement needs to be understood in relation to the fast violence that has afflicted students, both of which arise from a state that has imported the language of perpetual war into its relationship with its citizens. As Judith Levine points out, every public sphere has been transformed into a virtual war zone, “a zone of permanent vigilance, enforcement, and violence.”

In the face of this, the need is for disruptive social movements that call for nothing less than the restructuring of U.S. society. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., this means a revolution in values, a shift in public consciousness, and a change in power relations and public policies. The Parkland students and the teachers protesting across the nation are not only challenging the current attacks on public education, they also share an effort in constructing a new narrative about the United States—one that reengages the public’s ethical imagination toward developing an equitable, just, and inclusive democracy. Their protests point to the possibility of a new public imagination that moves beyond the narrow realm of specific interest to a more comprehensive understanding of politics that is rooted in a practice of open defiance to corporate tyranny. This is a politics that refuses “leftist” centrism, the extremism of the right, and a deeply unequal society modeled on the iniquitous precarity and toxic structures of savage capitalism. This new political horizon foreshadows the need to organize new political formations, massive social movements, and a third political party that can make itself present in a variety of institutional, educational, social, and cultural spheres.

The teacher and student protests have made clear that real change can be made through mass collective movements inspired by hope in the service of a radical democracy.

What the teacher and student protests have made clear is that change and coalition-building are possible, and that real change can be made through mass collective movements inspired by hope in the service of a radical democracy. This is a movement that must make education central to its politics and be willing to develop educational spheres which listen to and speak to the concrete problems that educators, students, minorities of color and class, and others face in a world moving into the abyss of tyranny.

The long-term success of the movements begun by the teachers and students will likely hinge on whether they connect with wider struggles for minority rights, economic justice, and social equality. If they open to a vision of shared struggle, they may find their way to a radical democratic recuperation that benefits all people whose needs are being sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal fascism. What we have learned from the student and teacher demonstrations is that politics depends “on the possibility of making the public exist in the first place” and that what we share in common is more important than what separates us. At a time when tyranny is on the rise and the world seems deprived of radical imagination, such courageous acts of mass resistance are a welcome relief and hopeful indicator of an energetic struggle to secure a democratic future.

Source:

https://bostonreview.net/education-opportunity/henry-giroux-slow-and-fast-assault-public-education

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