This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive.

"Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect provides crucial suggestions for creating a 'new' public. The creatively and innovatively surprising argument generatively builds on Marxist theory and practice, and will be indispensable for adequately approaching the contemporary situation and redressing the problems generated by the contemporary capitalistic knowledge economy." -Ryom Munsong, Associate Professor of Faculty of Foreign Languages, Korea University (in Tokyo) and Vice Chief, Research Team on Contemporary Korean Studies at the Center for Korean Studies. "One would have to be truly stupid to enjoy this book, as it has no value whatsoever! Derek R. Ford has written a book with a surprisingly subversive thesis that demands an equally surprising endorsement. If the left is to challenge the knowledge economy, it must recognize the collective power of stupidity as a refusal to instrumentalize, measure, and thus commodify education in the name of capitalist value production. Drawing on a wide variety of sources ranging from Karl Marx to Édouard Glissant and others, Ford produces a unique genealogy of stupefying pedagogies that enable social movements to claim the opacity and incomprehensibility of stupidity as resistant to the ignorance and arrogance of educators on the right and the left." -Tyson E. Lewis, Professor of Art Education, University of North Texas, USA. This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left's embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital's circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive. Derek R. Ford is Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University, USA. He's published five monographs and six edited volumes. Among other projects, Ford is also the editor of LiberationSchool.org.

In the second edition of this groundbreaking work, Derek R. Ford contends that radical politics needs educational theory, posing a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and contingency? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, Ford develops a dynamic pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. In charting this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Lenin, Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Althusser, and Butler. Demonstrating how learning underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic that, perhaps paradoxically, demands the revolutionary reclamation of testing. Poetic, performative, and provocative, Communist Study is oriented toward what Ford calls “the sublime feeling of being-in-common,” which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.

"Critiques academic leadership through the concept of mass intellectuality and analyses the crisis of higher education"--

The book presents a cross-disciplinary overview of critical issues at the intersections of biology, information, and society. Based on theories of bioinformationalism, viral modernity, the postdigital condition, and others, this book explores two inter-related questions: Which new knowledge ecologies are emerging? Which philosophies and research approaches do they require? The book argues that the 20th century focus on machinery needs to be replaced, at least partially, by a focus on a better understanding of living systems and their interactions with technology at all scales – from viruses, through to human beings, to the Earth’s ecosystem. This change of direction cannot be made by a simple relocation of focus and/or funding from one discipline to another. In our age of the Anthropocene, (human and planetary) biology cannot be thought of without (digital) technology and society. Today’s curious bioinformational mix of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism defines the postdigital condition and creates new knowledge ecologies. The book presents scholarly research defining new knowledge ecologies built upon emerging forms of scientific communication, big data deluge, and opacity of algorithmic operations. Many of these developments can be approached using the concept of viral modernity, which applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education, and emerging knowledge (journal) systems. It is within these overlapping theories and contexts, that this book explores new bioinformational philosophies and postdigital knowledge ecologies.

This Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education showcases the explanatory power of Marxist educational theory and practice.

This book conceptualizes ecopedagogies as forms of educational innovation and critique that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems of humans, machines, nonhuman animals, objects, stuff, and other forms of matter. Contemporary postdigital ecosystems are determined by a range of new bioinformational reconfigurations in areas including capitalism, imperialism, settler-colonialism, and ontological hierarchies more generally. Postdigital ecopedagogies name a condition, a question, and a call for experimentation to link pedagogical research and practice to challenges of our moment. They pose living, breathing, expanding, contracting, fluid, and spatial conditions and questions of our non-chronological present. This book presents analyses of that present from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to education studies, philosophy, politics, sociology, arts, and architecture.

The fifth edition of the market-leading Education, Equality and Human Rights has been fully updated to reflect economic, political and cultural changes in the UK, including the impacts of Brexit and Covid-19. It considers the great changes we are witnessing in recent years, such as climate change emergency, pandemics, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and their interrelationships. Written by world experts in their respective fields, each of the five equality issues of gender, race, sexuality, disability and social class is covered in their own right as well as in relation to education. Key issues explored include: human rights, equality and education women and equality—historically and now gender, education and social change race and racism through history and today racism and education from Empire to Johnson sexualities, identities and equality challenges in teaching and learning about sexuality and homo- and trans-phobia in schools disability equality as the last Civil Right? developing inclusive education and governments’ resistance social class, neoliberal capitalism and the Marxist alternative selective schooling, mystifying social class, neoliberalism and alternatives With an uncompromising and rigorous analysis of equality issues and a foreword from Peter McLaren addressing challenges to democracy in the US, this new edition of Education, Equality and Human Rights is an essential and contemporary resource across a wide range of disciplines and for all those interested in education, social policy and human rights.

This book offers an uncompromising and rigorous analysis of education and human rights by examining issues related to gender, race, sexuality, disability, and social class. Written as a companion to the very successful U.K. version, this volume reflects the economic, political, social, and cultural changes in educational and political policy and practice in the United States. Offering a comprehensive look at these areas, this book is an essential resource across a wide range of disciplines and for all those interested in education, social policy, and equality.