The Public Intellectual

Increasingly, the unthinkable emerges in American life as austerity measures are transformed into a specifically deadly way of exercising modes of sovereignty and government power.

Counterpublic spheres and modes of resistance that we once did not think young people could mount have erupted in a rush of emotional and political expressions.

In his work, Howard Zinn embodied a notion of agency that exhibited a fierce moral courage and a deep propensity for engaged social action.

Rather than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life has become both visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant and popular culture.

It is a possibility – nay, a likelihood - that the link between public agenda and private worries, the very hub of the democratic process, has been broken.

Memories of the university as a citadel of democratic learning have been replaced by a university eager to define itself largely in economic terms.

We no longer live in an age in which history's “winged messengers” bear witness to the suffering of millions.

Politicians, anti-public intellectuals and conservative-leaning media pundits no longer ask what kind of education is needed in a democratic society.

Freire is one of the most important educators of the 20th century and is considered one of the most important theorists of “critical pedagogy.”

We live in an age in which punitive justice and a theater of cruelty have become the defining elements of a mainstream cultural apparatus that trades in historical and …