…hooey. Further to these posts,
Horsesh..: “human rights imperialism”
Jonathon Narvey presents a stinking gem (should that be conceivable) at The Propagandist:
Anti-Imperialist Rot In The Foundation Of The Ivory Tower
This is a description of an actual course taught at a real university by a living, breathing university professor. It’s called “Young people and the global imaginary: History, empire, and identity politics in transnational borderlands” [it's near the bottom here at the University of British Columbia]…
…students will explore a range of theoretical orientations to confront the concepts of empire and its contested social and transnational imaginaries. Some of these orientations include, but are not limited to, an examination of: critical transnational theories of post-coloniality; cultural geographies of race, migration and post-colonial spaces; micro-national theories of space; comparative and international cultural studies; a history of ideas tradition established through European Continental thought and its links to Orientalism(s) (Said [more here]); theories which reside outside the cultural lineage of the ‘global North’ (see Connell on Northern Theory); and global youth cultural studies. Each of these approaches acts as a lens and important background for discussing empirical research on the topic of youth, empire and education.
We will begin the course with a critical history and cultural sociology of imperial education and its globalizing functions. This temporalized approach will not be nation-based but will instead represent transnational account which situates imperialism and colonization in both a synchronic and diachronic temporal framework…
Update: About the prof. (via Terry Glavin):
…
Jo-Anne Dillabough is not just any old prof. She is the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, she’s been a Killam Fellow, a Spencer Fellow, a UBC Early Career Scholar with the Peter Wall institute for Advanced Studies, and a Noted Scholar with Flasco, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Social Sciences Institute.She’s the boss.
She is also associated with the University of Cambridge (extensive CV at link).
Mark
Ottawa
There is no way I can take that course. I can’t even understand the description.
Thats awesome!! They must also teach you how to roll a 4 paper fattie in that course. And, upon graduating a free Green Party membership is included. And my daughter picked York!!
I can see this course preparing someone to take an executive position with a multinational corporation.
Oh wait, the UN could probably use someone who’s studied “Young people and the global imaginary: History, empire, and identity politics in transnational borderlands”.
And the left wonders why acedemics have earned the deserved reputation as a bunch of eggheaded geeks and that universities are, more and more, seen as a harvest ground for useless knowledge. I think you’d come out of that course actually stupider than when you started because of the 200 man-hours of lost time/life experience. You’d learn more about life begging for money on a street corner.
I think the time has come to put a stop to formal education. It’s apparent that it drives people crazy and makes them stupid.
I think there is a President somewhere that might want to teach the course when he gets freed up in about 2 years. It is where he should be.
Her Personal Statement on Scholarship:
Interdisciplinary research has been of fundamental importance to me, both at the substantive level and in terms of theory and methodology. From my initial training as a sociologist, therefore, I have gone on to draw extensively upon theoretical, conceptual and methodological insights deriving from, in particular, Continental philosophy, political science, cultural geography and history. I would therefore now best describe my intellectual position as that of an interdisciplinary cultural sociologist specialising in micro-cultural sociological and qualitative approaches in the study of social inequality. A unifying objective across all of my substantive research work has been to develop a broad but coherent interdisciplinary research agenda which confronts larger questions of social and cultural exclusions cross-nationally and particularly in cities. I have also been concerned with more general theoretical questions of social, cultural and political identity in the state and its diverse formations across social, geographical and political contexts.
I’ll bet she’s a fun date.
it is very easy to understand why those coming out of university are total morons if that is a description of what is being taught.
This is another example of an academic whose sole expertise is the ability to conduct a complex analysis of her own self fulfilling theory.
Just another nail in the coffin of Canadian educational credibility.
“Now, you might think the job of intellectuals is to think, but I don’t think that is the case in a sense. What they want to do is to feel virtuous and generous spirited and so on, and it’s very easy, if you apply moral judgement ot these phenomena, to sound censurious and Pecksniffian” (Theodore Dalrymple)
You know, I think he was on to something…
The scary bit is the salaries that university academics pull in: about 4 to 6 times the national average, with fabulous benefits and ironclad security – not unlike any other civil servant, only better.
What was it George Bernard Shaw wrote: those who can do: those who cannot teach. Except the buggers have done an end run on us taxpayers and are now, like many others on the public pipe, beyond control.
Universities and their airy-fairy courses are one thing — if they’re kind of evenly spread out, left loopy academics, right religious zealots, whatever.
But, if all of a sudden we realize that’s 95% left loopies…. what can we say? And they’re draining the coffers of public money…..In Education courses where they’re supposed to train teachers to be able to teach reading, riting, etc. they’re doing research into how to mangle the language in linguistics courses, Level I, II, III, upping the PC chill. It’s called critical discourse analysis CDA. Dillabough is well into it. W-a-y beyond Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed …
All in the name of socialist, Marxist ideology — social justice, equality, must learn to work in teams …
See this article: Progressives are running the universities Ricardo Duchesne Dec 20/10 http://www.universityaffairs.ca/a-response-to-racism-in-the-academy.aspx
A shorter version by Ricardo in National Post Jan 04, 2011, Campus lefties never tire of crying racism http://www.financialpost.com/todays-paper/Campus+lefties+never+tire+crying+racism/4054848/story.html
The question is, do we sit back and gripe, bemoan that to be a conservative (ie, believe in values of entrepreneurship, work ethic, etc) we have to be secretive….. stay on small blogs and sneer at this weirdness disguised as intellectual pursuit and research……or ?
Push back? How?