Present nightmares and realizable futures

Abstract

The article reflects on the work of Henry Giroux, focusing on his latest book Youth in a Suspect Society. It attempts to capture the experience of reading Giroux and what Giroux's critical engagements across a wide array of cultural and pedagogical formations provide in terms of assisting us in articulating substantive criticisms of and insights into current crises, burdens and challenges. Additionally, it examines the force of Giroux's insistence on pedagogies of hope and possibility that offer tools for meaningfully intervening in the world in order to awaken and develop our critical individual and social agency directed toward modes of transformation necessary in this time of creeping neoliberal cynicism and pessimism, a prowling global fatalism, and a growing contentment with the malaise. In reading Giroux we will be disturbed; it is this creative disturbance, roiling indignation and enlivened action of an awakened public that will provide us grounds for hope that new modes of resistance emergent with humanizing forms of pedagogy, struggles for internationalist solidarity and global justice, and announcements of a dignified world meriting human habitation will open up the pathways to transformation we so urgently require if we are going to save rather than lose the future.