Understanding and interrupting hegemonic projects in education: learning from Stuart Hall

Abstract

Stuart Hall had a significant impact on critical analyses of rightist mobilizations in education. This is very visible in my own work, for example, in such volumes as Official Knowledge (2014) and Educating the ‘Right’ Way (2006). After describing an important series of lectures that Stuart Hall gave at the Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I detail the nonessentialist position that served as the grounding of Hall's own discussion of race, ideology, and conjuncture, and how it affected so much of the critical examination of neoliberal and neoconservative reconstructions of education. In the context of laying out the tasks of the ‘critical scholar/activist in education,’ I then portray what we can learn from Hall about the role of the organic intellectual.

Keywords:

• Stuart Hall
• Gramsci
• neoliberalism
• racism
• scholar/activists
• organic intellectual

Notes

1. Portions of this essay are drawn from Apple (2013) and Apple (2008).

2. Hall was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Havens Center in recognition of his powerful influence and deep connections with counter-hegemonic understandings and movements. There are of course a large number of books devoted to Hall that have been published. To name just a few, see Morley and Chen (1996), Davis (2004), Proctor (2004), and Meeks (2007). The list gets more extensive by the year.

3. The list of Hall's writings that strongly influenced me – and continue to do so – is extensive, but among the most important were Hall (1980, 1983, 1985, 1986a, 1986b, 1988) and Hall and Jacques (1983). Among other things, his later work on neoliberalism and the creation of alternatives in the journal Soundings is also crucial and continues to influence me and many others.

4. Hall's arguments about the complexities of race and on the ways in which such rearticulation work in contradictory and at times partly progressive ways both historically and now has influenced a range of discussions in multiple disciplines and multiple nations. See, for example, the influence of his work in discussions of the history of gender, race, and slavery in the Caribbean in Green (2007) and of the lived experiences of popular culture and the politics of the body in Niaah and Hope (2007).

5. There are of course specifically Althusserian echoes here.

6. However, important parts of the tradition of thinking about the complex theories and politics of a more conjunctural analysis that Hall embodied at the Open University are kept alive and extended by many people there. This is evident, for example, in the important work on the changing nature of the state and the nature and effects of neoliberalism. See the analyses of John Clarke and Janet Newman, such as Newman and Clarke (2009), Clarke, Newman, Smith, Vidler, and Westmarland (2007), and Clarke and Newman (1997).

7. I am aware that the idea of ‘bearing witness’ has religious connotations, ones that are powerful in the west, but may be seen as a form of religious imperialism in other religious traditions. I still prefer to use it because of its powerful resonances with ethical discourses. But I welcome suggestions from, say, Muslim critical educators and researchers for alternative concepts that can call forth similar responses. I want to thank Amy Stambach for this point.

8. Here, exploitation and domination are technical not rhetorical terms. The first refers to economic relations, the structures of inequality, the control of labor, and the distribution of resources in a society. The latter refers to the processes of representation and respect and to the ways in which people have identities imposed on them. These are analytic categories, of course, and are ideal types. Most oppressive conditions are partly a combination of the two. These map on to what Fraser (1997) calls the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition.

9. I would hope that it should go without saying that these skills and values should be deeply present in one's teaching as well.