Locating Critique

Abstract

In this piece, I think through some of the ways I define the “critical” and “critique” in my pedagogy and research. I argue against critique as pessimism, instead making the case that critique is about a particular kind of hope for what we want our work to do.

Keywords:

• Critique
• pedagogy
• pessimism
• ambivalence
• hope

I want to acknowledge Inna Arzumanova, Daniela Baroffio, Josh Kun and Alison Trope for their feedback on what critique means in the study of communication.

Notes

[1] I am grateful to the students in my 2013 Qualitative Methods class at the Annenberg School for Communication for prompting me to think through these issues and questions.

[2] Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” American Quarterly 65 (1), 9, italics in original.

[3] Tomlinson and Lipsitz, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” 8.

[4] I see my definition of hope in a similar way as José Esteban Muñoz, who returns to hope in his work as “both a critical affect and a methodology,” one that points the way to a reparative utopianism. For more, see José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 4.