Books in the Youth Culture and Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century series

Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film examines the portrayal of youth in American cinema with Jean Baudrillards radical social theory and philosophical system. Kline uses Baudrillards corpus to analyze the troubling effects of the portrayal of youth in American teen films, namely, its contribution to discursive violence against young people which holds such a prominent place in many adult-controlled, modern institutions like schools. This kind of violence has multiple iterations, including the inability to imagine youth as meaningful political actors, the insistence on taking teenagers to be morally impoverished, and the propensity for viewing young people as thoroughly heteronomous. While there are certainly pockets of exception, violent discourses often animate institutional disregard for youth. Kline promotes Baudrillards fatal theory as a way for critical educators, philosophers, sociologists, and other concerned pedagogues to argue for an alteration in the way that youth is portrayed in American films, and to discourage the negative discourse that have colonized conceptions and treatment of young people.

Communist Study: Education for the Commons poses 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 figurality? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, educational theorist Derek R. Ford develops a pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. To chart this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary and ideological boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Butler, and Lenin. Demonstrating that learning is the educational logic that underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic. Poetic, performative, and provocative, this theory of study is oriented toward what Ford calls ';the sublime feeling of being-in-common,' which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.