Keynote Address

The keynote speaker at Intersections 2007 will be Henry A. Giroux , the Global Television Network Chair of Communication Studies at McMaster University (Hamilton , ON ). 

Dr. Giroux has authored several important publications covering critical pedagogy, political theory and cultural studies. Prominent examples include Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope (1997), The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (1999), Public Spaces / Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (2003), The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (2004), and most recently Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (2006).

See http://www.henryagiroux.com for more information.

Title: Disabling the Future: Youth, Education, and the Politics of Disposability

Abstract:

Under an emerging authoritarianism, the corporatization of higher
education, the dismantling of the welfare state, the militarizing of
public space, and the increasing privatization of the public sphere, it
has become more difficult for the public to address not only the complex
nature of social agency and the importance of democratic public spheres,
but the emergence of a society in which youth are now rendered as both a
generation of suspects and a disposable population. No longer seen as a
social investment, young people are viewed increasingly as a problem
rather than a source of hope. Focusing on the issue of what is happening
to youth  in America, I address  the growing authoritarianism in
American society and what happens to higher education when children no
longer appear to be a viable referent for a democratic future. Beneath
these concerns is the assumption that youth are in crisis, especially in
the United States, and that the crisis of youth not only signals a
dangerous state of affairs for the future, it also portends a crisis in
the very idea of the political and ethical constitution of the social
and the possibility of articulating the relevance of democracy itself.
As the vast majority of citizens become detached from public forums that
nourish social critique, political agency not only becomes a mockery of
itself, it is replaced by market-based driven form of cultural politics
in which private satisfactions become a substitute for systemic change.
This paper argues that in the face of a virulent neoliberalism that
spawns a vast educational propaganda machine, educators, cultural
workers, and others need to rethink the entire project of politics
within the changed conditions of a global political/pedagogical sphere,
especially as it addresses the related crisis of youth and democracy.

Dr. Giroux will be speaking during the Intersections 2007 opening gala, Friday March 23rd in Ryerson Student Campus Centre Rm 115.

To ensure a seat, please arrive for 7:30 pm. Admission is by donation

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On the Ethics and Ethoi of Contemporary Critical Thought and Practice
Intersections 2007: What's Right / Right Now? aims to explore the ethics and ethoi of contemporary critical thought and practice, and especially that which occurs within the study of communication and culture. We plan to have a moderated faculty panel discussion featuring 3 or 4 profs that focuses on some of the issues and questions we've raised in our conference CFP and that affect our programme in general and our scholarly disciplines in particular (like what's right, right now, in the world of social scientific- and humanities- based research?; what have or haven't we learned from the project of post-modernity?; what are we in a programme like ComCult doing right, and what are we doing wrong?; what role, at the beginning of the 21 st Century, should or does objectivity play within academic work?; what role does social responsibility and activism play? etc).

This event is scheduled for 2:00 pm Sunday, March 25 th in Rogers Communication Centre, Room 204.

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