Cultural Studies and Public Pedagogy

Introduction

My own interest in cultural studies emerges out of an ongoing project that attempts to theorize the regulatory and emancipatory relationship among culture, power, and politics as expressed through the dynamics of what I call public pedagogy, particularly as the latter is played out around the construction of youth within the broader terrain of schooling and popular culture. I have also been particularly concerned with challenging conservative, liberal, and left approaches that both abstract culture from the dynamics of power and politics and dismiss educators who engage pedagogy as a moral and political practice rather than as a rigid methodology. In the latter case, the conservative script is a familiar one, but it has taken on a new urgency given the current backlash against women, urban youth, minorities of color, progressive academics, and the underlying fabric of the welfare State itself. Within this discourse, cultural politics is dismissed as a corrupting influence...