(Originally posted on June 23, 2018):
Saturday, June 23, 2018
All,
In my view Henry A. Giroux is the finest and most important public intellectual and social critic in the United States today even though technically he has lived and worked in in Canada (and has since acquired dual citizenship) since 2004 (see details of his professional bio below following this essay). An extraordinary scholar, prolific and mesmerizing writer, brilliant teacher and deeply committed activist, Giroux has written the most dynamic, critically insightful and analytically incisive books on American politics, culture, and education in this century and has been at the forefront of surgically dissecting and thoroughly critiquing the horrific Trump phenomenon in all of its many loathsome aspects. The following piece is an excerpt from his new book American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism is from the final chapter of his text. Please read carefully and pass the word…
Kofi
“What’s Past is Prologue”...
https://truthout.org/articles/a-democracy-in-exile-fights-against-fascism/
Politics & Elections
A Democracy in Exile Fights Against Fascism:
by Henry A. Giroux
City Lights Publishers
June 7, 2018
Truthout
At the forefront of public intellectuals, Henry Giroux writes a scintillating book, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, that connects the dots between historical fascism and the age of Trump. Giroux urges that the resistance not falter, and that the democracy in exile vigorously challenge the current order. The following excerpt is the conclusion to the book.
“We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time…. Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist … We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth — an indescribably difficult task…. But we keep on trying, because there is nothing else to do.”—Annie Proulx
While Trumpism attempts to expand its alt-right social base under its authoritarian hierarchy, forces of grassroots resistance are mobilizing around a renewed sense of ethical courage, social solidarity, and a revival of the political imagination. We see this happening in the increasing number of mass demonstrations in which individuals are putting their bodies on the line, refusing the fascist machinery of misogyny, nativism, and white supremacy. Airports are being occupied, people are demonstrating in the streets of major cities, town halls have become sites of resistance, campuses are being transformed into sanctuaries to protect undocumented students, scientists are marching en masse against climate change deniers, and progressive cultural workers, public intellectuals, and politicians are speaking out against the emerging authoritarianism. In a number of red states, middle-aged women are engaged in the “grinding scutwork of grassroots organizing” while addressing big issues such as “health care and gerrymandering, followed by dark money in politics, education, and the environment.” Democracy may be in exile in the United States, and imperiled in Europe and other parts of the globe, but the spirit that animates it remains resilient. Once again the public memory of an educated and prophetic hope is in the air, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.’s call “to make real the promise of democracy.
In today’s historical moment, such a promise finds sanctuary in the notion of “democracy in exile.” This concept is meant as a counterforce and remedy to the Jacksonian intolerance, violence, expulsion, and racism of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Trumpism as a nationalist movement drifting in plain sight from plutocracy and authoritarian nepotism to fascism. Democracy in exile is the space in which people, families, networks, and communities fight back. It unites the promise of insurrectional political engagement with the creation of expansive new manifestations of justice — social, economic, environmental. The concept speaks to the rise of innumerable marches, protests, and acts of political resistance that form a growing challenge to existing power relations and the expanding forces of authoritarianism and tyranny consolidated under Trump’s rule. It argues for a model of critical consciousness and an “ethical space where we encounter the pain of others and truly reflect on its significance to a shared human community.” Such sanctuaries function as alternative spheres of a democracy in exile and do more than offer refugees protection and services such “as emergency shelters, recreation, public transit, libraries, food banks, and police and fire services without asking questions about their status.” They also point toward and beyond the identification of structures of domination and repression in search of new understanding and imaginative response to the need to live well together in diverse communities. In part, this means responding to the ominous forces at work in US society, now marked by a collapse of civic culture, shared literacy, and meaningful citizenship. Such spaces call for new apparatuses enabling people to learn together, to engage in extended dialogue, and to develop new social formations in the service of advancing political, economic, and environmental justice and transformation. As democracy cannot survive without informed and socially responsible citizens, such spaces are driven by community-centered education, culture, and family.
What might it mean for educators to create sanctuaries that preserve the ideals, values, and experiences of an insurrectional democracy? What might it mean to imagine a landscape of resistance in which the metaphor of democracy in exile inspires and energizes young people, educators, workers, artists, and others to engage in political and pedagogical forms of resistance that are disruptive, transformative, resilient, and emancipatory? What might it mean to create multiple protective spaces of resistance that would allow us to think critically, ask troubling questions, take risks, transgress established norms, and fill the spaces of everyday life with ongoing acts of nonviolent organizing resistance? What might it mean to create cities, states, and other public spheres defined as sanctuaries for a democracy in exile? Cities such as Boston and Hamilton, Ontario, have declared themselves sanctuaries, or what I am calling democracies in exile. Brit McCandless recently reported that “more than 800 places of worship have volunteered to shelter undocumented immigrants who face deportation and their families — double the number since the 2016 election. They join the more than 600 cities and counties that have declared themselves sanctuaries — ordering their police not to detain people solely because of their immigration status.”
These cities and counties have not only refused to comply with Trump’s repressive policies on climate change and travel bans, but they have also defined themselves, in part, as public spaces designed to protect those who fear expulsion and state terrorism. In many respects, cities have become front lines in the fight against Trump’s repressive immigration policies and disastrous attack on climate change reform. As of February 2017, more than sixty-eight mayors have signed an open letter protesting Trump’s opposition to limiting greenhouse gases. Cities such as Seattle and Burlington, Vermont, are on the cutting edge, enacting radical legislation while promoting broad-based progressive political formations heavily indebted to the values and policies of democratic socialism. In fact, an avowed socialist, Kshama Sawant, sits on the city council in Seattle, one of America’s most insurgent cities.
In the face of Trump’s January 25, 2017, executive order in which he called for stripping federal funds from cities that defy his border enforcement and immigration policies, many cities have chosen to resist Trump anyway, because of his attacks on environmental protections and public schools. In the face of such attacks, new coalitions are emerging between labor groups, young people, immigrant rights groups, evangelicals, church groups, and others that Adriana Cadena, coordinator for Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance, points to as a reservoir of “untapped voices.” At the same time, such struggles will not be easy. Not only is the threat of repression by the federal government a looming reality, but a similar threat is posed by Republican-controlled state legislatures, which now number thirty-two. Yet many progressive states such as California are finding new ways to pass laws “that grant undocumented immigrants access to state driver’s licenses, in-state tuition, financial aid, health care and professional licenses, and that shield them by limiting state participation in enforcing federal law.”
Such cities and counties, and a host of diverse public spheres, function as parallel structures that create alternative modes of communication, social relations, education, health care, and cultural work, including popular music, social media, the performing arts, and literature. These spaces are what Vaclav Benda has called a “parallel polis,” which brings pressure on official structures, implements new modes of pedagogical resistance, and provides the basis for organizing larger day-to-day protests and more organized and sustainable social movements. Just as dissidents in Eastern Europe developed the concept of a parallel polis, there is a need in the current historical moment to create new modes of organizing, community, and resistance: democracies in exile.
Cities have become front lines in the fight against Trump’s repressive immigration policies and disastrous attack on climate change reform.
The concept of democracy in exile is grounded in community building, economic justice, and a discourse of critique, hope, social justice, and self-reflection. As a mode of critique, it models the call for diverse forms of resistance, critical dialogue, collaboration, and a rethinking of political processes and the kinds of public spaces where they can take place. As a discourse of hope, it offers the possibility of organizing new forms of social networking designed to dismantle proto-fascist formations from consolidating further. As a model for a new progressive politics, democracies in exile are open communities and collectivities joined in the spirit of mutual aid and justice; they mark the antithesis of Trumpism’s falsehoods, walls, guns, white supremacy, and menacing intolerance. These models for democracy signal a mode of witnessing and organized resistance inspired by a renewed commitment to justice and equality. This is a spirit of redemption matched by mass protests such as the “Day Without Immigrants” strike, the 4.2 million people who took to the streets in protest on Trump’s second day in office, and the thousands of scientists and their supporters who participated in the 2017 March for Science. In all of these cases, the aim was “to demonstrate the productive power of the people” in the struggle to take back democracy.
Democracy in exile offers the opportunity to fuse popular movements and reinvigorate educational spheres that include traditional sites of struggle such as unions, churches, and synagogues. For example, churches throughout the United States are using private homes in their parishes as shelters while at the same time “creating a modern-day underground railroad to ferry undocumented immigrants from house to house or into Canada.” Hiding and housing immigrants is but one important register of political resistance that such sanctuaries can provide. Organizations such as the Protective Leadership Institute and the State Innovation Exchange are fighting back against conservative state legislation by modeling progressive legislation, putting ongoing pressure on politicians, educating people on issues and how to develop the skills for disruptive political strategies, and building “a progressive power base in the states.” In addition, cities such as New York have proclaimed themselves sanctuary cities, and students in “as many as 100 colleges and universities across the country” have held protests “demanding their schools become sanctuary campuses.”
The concept of democracy in exile offers a new rhetorical approach to understanding such resistance and the new stage of authoritarianism that has made it necessary. Such outposts of exile offer new models of collaboration, united by a perpetual striving for a more just society. As such, they join in solidarity and in their differences, mediated by a respect for the common good, human dignity, and decency. Together they offer a new map for resisting a demagogue and his coterie of reactionaries who harbor a rapacious desire for concentrating power in the hands of a financial elite and the economic, political, and religious fundamentalists who seek to amass wealth and power by any means necessary. This call for a new mode of opposition connects the educational challenge of raising individual and collective consciousness with mobilizing against the suffocating ideologies, worldviews, and policies that are driving the new species of authoritarianism. These alternative spaces and new public spheres reflect what Sara Evans and Harry Boyte have called “free spaces,” which welcome the challenge of ongoing community engagement designed to revitalize civic education and civic courage.
The language of exile also projects a threat to pro-fascist nationalist networks, for it signals the rival mobilization of emancipatory social forces organizing against political intolerance, white supremacy, economic oppression, police violence, and the constant fabrications that serve to normalize and enforce them. The creation of new spaces for community resistance asserts the right to reject all such formations of domination, impunity, and abuse.
Rethinking the possibility for social movements and a new form of politics can begin by reconceptualizing what might it mean to create public spheres and institutions that represent models of a democracy in exile — sanctuaries that preserve the ideals, values, and experiences of a radical democracy. What will it take to create communities whose diverse institutions function as sanctuaries for those who fear expulsion and state terror? How might we together generate a multi-pronged resistance that revives and defends the ideals of an already fragile and wounded democracy — one that cultivates educated hope and actions that safeguard our future? Such a society would foster “the eradication of all forms of racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchy” and would be based on a call not for reform but for a radical restructuring, a substantive socialist democracy that rejects the notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous.
New coalitions are emerging between labor groups, young people, immigrant rights groups, evangelicals, church groups, and others.
This certainly raises further questions about what proactive roles educational institutions can take to counter the creeping influence and further normalization of authoritarianism in all its forms. One of the challenges confronting the current generation of educators, students, progressives, and other concerned citizens is the need to address the role they might play in any resistance effort. What can and should education accomplish in a democracy under siege? What work must educators do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring an informed, thoughtful citizenry integral to the existence of a robust democracy? In a world witnessing an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses and the erasure of historical memory, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to learn from the past and understand the present in order to challenge rabid, unbridled authority and hold power accountable?
Many of the resources are already available. In his book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder provides a list of suggestions that range from not being afraid to disobey, to defending democratic institutions. Michael Lerner has produced a number of invaluable proposals that include what he calls a global Marshall Plan and a strategy for US progressives to take seriously matters of education, subjectivity, compassion, and care in any political struggle. George Lakoff has provided a number of useful suggestions for engaging in the individual and collective practice of resistance, including the call to re-examine the nature of power and to focus on substance not sideshows in the realm of criticism. Bill Quigley has offered a number of substantive points on how to engage in direct action to stop government raids. Reverend William J. Barber II has written extensively on the need to create broad-based alliances, especially among the religious left, and in doing so has infused the call for resistance with an energizing sense of moral and political outrage. In The American Prospect, Theo Anderson has provided an insightful commentary on how the left’s long march of resistance must include direct action at the state level. Robin D.G. Kelley has written a series of brilliant articles on the need to develop emancipatory strategies in the university that call for students and faculty to move beyond framing grievances in the discourse of victimhood and personal travail. Harper’s Magazine engaged a number of intellectuals to talk about what the ecology of resistance under a Trump regime might look like. These are only a few of the many valuable sources that can be studied, talked about, and potentially used to advance networks and movements for democracies in exile.
Universities have an essential role to play in midwifing democracies in exile. In addition to creating safe spaces for undocumented immigrants and others deemed vulnerable or disposable, universities can also equip people with the knowledge, skills, experiences, and values they need to organize, litigate, and achieve higher levels of justice, openness, and accountability. For many universities, this would mean renouncing their instrumental approach to knowledge, creating the conditions for faculty to connect their work with important social issues, refusing to treat students as customers, and choosing administrative leaders who have a vision rooted in the imperatives of justice, ethics, social responsibility, and democratic values. The culture of business has produced the business of education, and to be frank, it has corrupted the mission of too many universities. It is necessary for students, faculty, and others to reverse this trend at a time when the dark shadows of authoritarianism and fascism threaten both the spaces for critical inquiry and democracy itself.
Democracies in exile are open communities and collectivities joined in the spirit of mutual aid and justice.
At the very least, students and others need the historical knowledge, critical tools, and analytical skills to be able to understand the underlying factors and forces that gave rise to Trump’s ascendency to the presidency of the United States. Understanding how “the possible triumph in America of a fascist-tinged authoritarian regime” is poised to destroy “a fragile liberal democracy” is the first step toward a viable and sustained resistance. It is crucial to repeat that this authoritarian regime draws on a fascist legacy that not only decreed the death of the civic imagination but also unleashed nothing short of a mass-scale terror and violence.We must also ask what role education, historical memory, and critical pedagogy might have in the larger society, where the social has been individualized, political life has collapsed, and education has been reduced to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is narrowly focused on achieving a desired empirical outcome? What role could a resuscitated critical education play in challenging the deadly neoliberal claim that all problems are individual, when the roots of such problems lie in larger systemic forces? What role might universities fulfill in preserving and scrutinizing cultural memory in order to ensure our current generation and the next are on the right side of history? What might it mean to return to and rethink critically the ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, when university life was defined by students and faculty? What will it take to give power back to faculty and students so they can play a major role in the governing of higher education? How might faculty and students best collaborate in order to eliminate the tsunami of exploitative part-time labor that has been employed by the corporatized university to de-skill and punish faculty since the 1970s?
Historical memory is too easily subverted by manufactured ignorance. The corporate-controlled media and entertainment industries make it easy to forget that Trump is more than the product of the deep-seated racism, attacks on the welfare state, and corporate-centered priorities that have characterized the Republican Party since the 1980s. He is also the result of a Democratic Party that has separated itself from the needs of working people, minorities of color, and young people by becoming nothing more than the party of the financial elite. There is a certain dreadful irony in the fact that the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has been quick to condemn Trump and his coterie as demagogic and authoritarian. What cannot be forgotten is that this is the same ruling elite who gave us the surveillance state, bailed out Wall Street, ushered in the mass incarceration state, and punished whistleblowers. Chris Hedges is right in arguing that the Democratic Party is an “appendage of the consumer society” and its embrace of “neoliberalism and [refusal] to challenge the imperial wars empowered the economic and political structures that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to Trump.” The only answer the Democratic Party has to Trump is to strike back when he overreaches and make a case for the good old days when they were in power. What they refuse to acknowledge is that their policies helped render Trump’s victory possible and that what they share with Trump is a mutual support for bankers, the rule of big corporations, neoliberalism, and the erroneous and fatal assumption that capitalism is democracy, and vice versa. What is needed is a new understanding of the political, a new democratic socialist party, and a radical restructuring of politics itself.
At the same time, any confrontation with the current historical moment has to be infused with hope, possibility, and new forms of political practice. While many countries have been transformed into what Stanley Aronowitz calls a repressive “national security state,” there are signs that authoritarianism in its various versions is currently being challenged, especially by young people, and that the radical imagination is still alive. Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party lost the presidential election in France; Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party just dealt a blow in the United Kingdom to Theresa May and the conservatives in the 2016 election; and young people under thirty across the globe are marching for a radical democracy. No society is without resistance, and hope can never be reduced to a mere abstraction. Hope has to be informed, militant, and concrete.
Historical memory is too easily subverted by manufactured ignorance.
The dark clouds of an American-style fascism are brewing on the horizon and can be seen in a countless number of Trump’s statements and orders, including his instructions to the Department of Homeland Security to draw up a list of “Muslim organizations and individuals that, in the language of the executive action, have been ‘radicalized.’” Given Trump’s intolerance of criticism and dissent, it is plausible that this list could be expanded to target Black Lives Matter activists, investigative journalists, feminists, community organizers, university professors, and other outspoken left-wing intellectuals. One indication that the Trump regime is compiling a larger list of alleged wrongdoers was the Trump transition team’s request that the Energy Department deliver a list of the names of individuals who had worked on climate change. Under public pressure, the Trump regime later rescinded this request. Couple these political interventions with the unprecedented attack on the media and the barring of the New York Times, CNN, and other alleged “fake news” media outlets from press conferences, and what becomes clear is that the professional institutions that make democracy possible are not only under siege but face the threat of being abolished. Trumpists’ constant cry of “fake news” to discredit critical media outlets is part of a massive disinformation campaign designed to undermine investigative journalism, eyewitness news, fact-based analysis, reason, evidence, and any knowledge-based standard of judgment.Nothing will change unless people begin to take seriously the deeply rooted structural, cultural, and subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United States and what it might require to make such issues meaningful, in both personal and collective ways, in order to make them critical and transformative. This is fundamentally a pedagogical as well as a political concern. As Charles Derber has explained, knowing “how to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important” if any viable form of resistance is to take shape. Trumpism normalizes official falsehoods, intolerance, violence, and pro-fascist social manifestations. Taken as a whole, these conditions do not simply repress independent thought, but constitute their own mode of indoctrinated perceptions that are reinforced through a diverse set of cultural apparatuses ranging from local gun clubs and hate groups to corporate media such as Fox News and online commercial operations like Infowars and Breitbart News.
Despite everything, optimism and resistance are in the air, and the urgency of mass action has a renewed relevance. Workers, young people, environmental activists, demonstrations against the massive tax cuts for the rich posing as health-care reform, along with numerous expressions of protest against Trump’s draconian policies are popping up all over the United States and symbolize an emerging collective opposition to pro-fascist tendencies. As I pointed out earlier, thousands of scientists have rallied against the assaults being waged on scientific inquiry, the veracity of catastrophic climate change, and other forms of evidence-based research, and are planning further marches in the future. Mass protests movements at the local level are coming into play, as seen in the Moral Monday movement and the anti-pipeline campaigns. In addition, a number of big city mayors are refusing to obey Trump’s orders; demonstrations are taking place every day throughout the country; students are mobilizing on campuses; and all over the globe women are marching for their rights. Many people entering politics for the first time are demonstrating for affordable health care, a social wage, and a jobs program, especially for young people. Some individuals and groups are working hard to build a mass movement organized against militarism, inequality, racism, the increasing possibility of nuclear war, and the ecological destabilization of the planet.
Facing the challenge of fascism will not be easy, but Americans are marching, protesting, and organizing in record-breaking numbers.
We are witnessing the imminent emergence of new forms of resistance willing to support broad-based struggles intent on producing ongoing forms of nonviolent resistance at all levels of society. It is important to heed Rabbi Michael Lerner’s insistence that a democratically minded public, comprised of workers and activists of various stripes, needs a new language of critique and possibility, one that embraces a movement for a world of love, courage, and justice while being committed to a mode of nonviolence in which the means are as ethical as the ends sought by such struggles. Such a call is as historically mindful as it is insightful, drawing upon legacies of nonviolent resistance left to us by renowned activists as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Saul Alinsky, Paulo Freire, and Martin Luther King Jr. Despite their diverse projects and methods, these voices for change all shared a commitment to a fearless collective struggle in which nonviolent strategies rejected passivity and compromise to engage in powerful expressions of opposition. To be successful, such struggles have to be coordinated, focused, and relentless. Single-issue movements will have to join with others in supporting both a comprehensive politics and a mass collective movement. We would do well to heed the words of the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass:
"It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."
The political repression of our times requires that we work together to redefine politics and challenge the pro-corporate two-party system. In the process, we will reclaim the struggle to produce meaningful educational visions and practices, find new ways to change individual and collective consciousness, engage in meaningful dialogue with people living at the margins of the political landscape, and overcome the factionalism of single-issue movements in order to build broad-based social movements. Proto-fascist conditions are with us again. Fortunately, Trump’s arrogance as a champion of such forces is not going entirely unchecked as the great collective power of resistance to his regime deepens. Mass actions are taking place with renewed urgency every day. Facing the challenge of fascism will not be easy, but Americans are marching, protesting, and organizing in record-breaking numbers. Hopefully, mass indignation will evolve into a worldwide movement whose power will be on the side of justice not impunity, bridges not walls, dignity not disrespect, kindness not cruelty. The American nightmare is not something happening somewhere else to someone else. It’s happening here, to us. The time to wake up is now. To quote James Baldwin’s letter to Angela Davis:
Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own — which it is — and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens, no justice without a language critical of injustice, and no change without a broad-based movement of collective resistance.
Copyright (2018) by Henry Giroux. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher, City Lights Publishers.
Henry Giroux, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Email: girouxh@mcmaster.ca
Phone: 905-525-9140 ext. 26551
Office: Chester New Hall, Room 229
Areas of Interest:
Education and Pedagogy; Politics; Neoliberalism and authoritarianism; War; Public vs. private; Aesthetics
Profile
Giroux received his Doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in 1977. He then became professor of education at Boston University from 1977 to 1983. In 1983, he became professor of education and renowned scholar in residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he also served as Director at the Center for Education and Cultural Studies. He moved to Penn State University where he took up the Waterbury Chair Professorship at Penn State University from 1992 to May 2004. He also served as the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. He moved to McMaster University in May 2004, where he currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest. From 2012 to 2015 he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. In 2018 he was appointed Jarislowsky Fellow in Global Engagement at Waterloo University.
In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.
In 2007, he was named by the Toronto Star as one of the “12 Canadians Changing the Way We Think.”
In 2018, he was named one of Transcend Media Service’s “100 Peace & Justice Leaders and Models.”
He has received honorary doctorates from Memorial University in Canada, Chapman University in California, and the University of the West of Scotland. He is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals, and he has served as the editor or co-editor of four scholarly book series. He co-edited a series on education and cultural studies with Paulo Freire for a decade. He is a regular contributor to a number of online journals including Truthout, Truthdig, and CounterPunch. He has published in many journals including Social Text, Third Text, Cultural Studies, Harvard Educational Review, Theory, Culture, & Society, and Monthly Review. His work has appeared in the New York Times and many other prominent news media. He is interviewed regularly on a number of media. He is on the Board of Directors for Truthout. His books are translated into many languages.
His primary research areas are: cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and public education. He is particularly interested in what he calls the war on youth, the corporatization of higher education, the politics of neoliberalism, the assault on civic literacy and the collapse of public memory, public pedagogy, the educative nature of politics, and the rise of various youth movements across the globe. His website can be found at
His website can be found at www.henryagiroux.com.
Select Publications
Books (selected recent publications):
America at War with Itself: Authoritarian Politics in a Free Society. City Lights Publishers, 2016.
America’s Addiction to Terrorism. Monthly Review Press, 2015.Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle. City Lights Publishers, 2015. Co-authors Henry A. Giroux and Brad Evans
Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism. Routledge, 2015.
Paulo Freire and the Curriculum. Routledge, 2015. Co-authors George Grollios, Henry A. Giroux, Panayota Gounari, and Donaldo Macedo.
Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism. 2nd edition. Peter Lang, 2014.
The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine. City Lights Press, 2014.
Neoliberalism’s War On Higher Education. Between the Lines, 2014.
America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth. Monthly Review Press, 2013.
Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future. Routledge, 2013.
Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability. Routledge, 2012.
Disposable Youth, Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty. Routledge, 2012.
Education and the Crisis of Public Values:: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, & Public Education. Peter Lang, 2012.
On Critical Pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror. Routledge, 2010.
Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy. Routledge, 2010.
The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. 2nd edition. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. Co-authors Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock
Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009.
Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed. Routledge, 2008.
Eleştirel Pedagojinin Vaadi. Turkey: Kalkedon, 2008.
University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Routledge, 2007.
Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability. Routledge, 2006.
The Giroux Reader. Edited by Henry A. Giroux and Christopher Robbins. Routledge, 2006.
America on the Edge: Henry Giroux on Politics, Culture, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media. Routledge, 2006.
Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life. 2nd edition. Routledge, 2005.
Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics After Abu Ghraib. Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2005.
The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. Routledge, 2004.
Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11., Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.
Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition. 2nd edition. Praeger, 2001.
Edited Books:
Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education. Eds. Henry A. Giroux, Nicholas C. Burbules, Diana Silberman Keller, and Zvi Bekerman. Peter Lang, 2008.
Beyond the Corporate University: Pedagogy, Culture, and Literary Studies in the New Millennium. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades. Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Cultural Studies and Education: Towards a Performative Practice. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and Patrick Shannon. Routledge, 1997.
Between Borders: Pedagogy and Politics in Cultural Studies. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren. Routledge, 1994.
Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics: Rethinking Educational Boundaries. Ed. Henry A. Giroux. State University of New York Press, 1991.
Critical Pedagogy, the State, and the Struggle for Culture. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren. State University Press of New York, 1989.
Popular Culture, Schooling & Everyday Life. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and Roger Simon. Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1989.
The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and David Purpel. McCutchan Publishing, 1983.
Curriculum and Instruction: Alternatives in Education. Eds. Henry A. Giroux, A. Penna, and W. Pinar. McCutchan Publishing, 1981.
Refereed Book Chapters (selected recent publications):
“Beyond Dystopian Visions in the Age of Neoliberal Violence,” in John Asimakopoulos and Richard Gilman-Opalsky, eds. Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018), pp. 139-156.
“Democracy Under Siege in a Neoliberal Society,” in Teaching for Democracy in An Age of Economic Disparity. Corey Wright-Maley and Trent Davis, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 13-24.
“Foreword.” In The Great Inequality. Michael Yates. (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. xii-xx.
“Writing the Public Good Back into Education: Reclaiming the Role of the Public Intellectual,” in The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 3-28.
“The Fire This Time: Black Youth and the Spectacle of Postracial Violence.” In Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, Dominic Willsdon, eds. (New York and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 111-129
“Public Pedagogy and Manufactured Identities in the Age of the Selfie Culture.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication.December 19, 2016. Online: http://communication.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-112.
“Critical Higher Education: Rethinking Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere. In Encyclopedia of International Higher Education systems and Institutions. Jung.C. Shin and Pedro Teixeira, eds. (New York: Springer, 2016), pp. 1-3. Online: http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_19-1
“Resisting Youth and the Crushing State Violence of Neoliberalism.” In Peter Kelly and Annelies Kamp, eds. A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century (Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 223-241.
“Foreword.” In Noam Chomsky, Because We Say So (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), pp. 7-19.
“Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging Casino Capitalism’s Punishing Factories.” In Mustafa Yunus Eryaman and Bertram C. Bruce, Eds. International Handbook of Progressive Education (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2015), pp. 629-642.
“Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University.” In Qualitative Inquiry Outside of the University. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2014, pp. 35-60.
“Memory’s Hope: In the Shadow of Paulo Freire’s Presence.” In Pedagogy of Solidarity. Eds. Paulo Freire, Ana Maria Araujo Freire, and Walter de Oliveira. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2014, pp. 7-12.
“Punishment Creep and the Crisis of Youth.” In From Education to Incarceration. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, Priya Parmar, and David Stovall. New York: Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 69-85.
“Twilight of the Social: Civic Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” In Civic Values, Civic Practices. Ed. Donald W. Harward. Washington, D.C. Bringing Theory into Practice, 2013, pp. 13-17.
“Can Democratic Education Survive in a Neoliberal Society.” In Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren. Ed. Charles Reitz. Boulder: Lexington Books, 2013, pp. 137-152.
“Memories of Class and Youth in the Age of Disposability.” In Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and material Culture. Eds. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. New York: Palgrave, 2013, pp. 203-218.
“Faculty Should Join with Occupy Movement Protesters.” In Policing the Campus: Academic Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II and David Gabbard. New York, Peter Lang, 2013, pp.201-208.
“Prologue: The Fruit of Freire’s Roots.” In Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis. Eds. Robert Lake and Tricia Kress. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. viii-xxi.
“Collaterally Damaged: Youth in a Post-9/11 World.” In Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal, and Arun Mukherjee. New York: Rodopi, 2012, pp. 591-617.
“Why Faculty Should Join Occupy Movement Protestors on College Campuses.” In Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Advocacy. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Michael d. Giardina. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2012, pp. 245-252.
“Everyday Violence, Screen Culture, and the Politics of Cruelty: Entertaining Democracy’s Demise.” In Figures de Violence. Eds. Richard Begin, Bernard Perron, and Lucie Roy. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012, pp. 15-22.
“War Colleges.” In Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. Eds. Jeffrey St. Clair Joshua Frank. Oakland, Ca.: AKPress, 2012, pp.223-230.
“Democracy: Reconnecting the Personal and the Political.” In Paulo Freire Encyclopedia. Eds. Danilo R. Streck, Euclides Redin, and Jaime Jose Zitkoski. Boulder, Rowman and Littlefield, 2012, pp. 93-96.
“From Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib: Rethinking Adorno’s Politics of Education.” In Iraq War Cultures. Eds. Cynthia Fuchs and Joe Lockard. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011, pp. 181-199.
“Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics and the Pedagogy of Display.” In The Sexuality Curriculum and Youth Culture. Eds. Dennis Carlson and Donyell L. Roseboro. New York: Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 189-216.
“Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University.” In The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance. Eds. Michael Bailey and Des Freedman. London: Pluto Press, 2011, pp.145-156.
“Dark Times: George W. Bush, Obama and the Specter of Authoritarianism in American Politics.” In How Dogmatic Beliefs Harm Creativity and High-Level ThinkingHow Dogmatic Beliefs Harm Creativity and High-Level Thinking. Eds. Don Ambrose and Robert J. Sternberg. New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 94-111.
198. “Heroin Chic, Trendy Aesthetics, and the Politics of Pathology.” In The Essential New Art Examiner. Eds. Terri Griffith, Kathryn Born, and Janet Koplos. Deklab. Illinois: NIU Press, 2011, pp. 265-279.
“Neoliberalism as Public Pedagogy.” In Handbook of Public Pedagogy. Eds. Jennifer Sandlin, Brian Schultz, and Jane Burdick. New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 486-99.
“Higher Education after September 11th: The Crisis of Academic Freedom and Democracy” In Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella, II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010, pp. 92-111.
“Black, Blue, and Read All Over: Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Race.” In Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education. Eds. Shirley R. Steinberg and Lindsay Cornish. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2010, pp 75-92.
“Higher Education: Reclaiming the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.” In Where Do We Go From Here?: Politics and the Renewal of the Radical Imagination. Ed. Mark Major. Boulder: Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 71-83.
“The U.S. University Under Siege: Confronting Academic Unfreedom.” In A Concise Companion to American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 407-431.
“Democracy’s Promise and the Politics of Worldliness in the Age of Terror.” In Representing Humanity in the Age of Terror. Eds. Sophia McClennen and Henry James Morello. West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2010, pp. 17-35.
“Governing Through Crime and the Pedagogy of Punishment.” In Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools. 2nd edition. Eds. Kenneth Saltman and David Gabbard. New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. vii-xvi.
“Neoliberalism, Pedagogy, and Cultural Politics: Beyond the Theatre of Cruelty.” In Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education. Ed. Zeus Leonardo. New York: Sense Publishers, 2010, pp. 49-70.
“Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism” [reprint]. In Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism. Ed. Arlo Kempf. New York: Springer, 2010, pp. 79-90.
“Neoliberalism, Youth, and the Leasing of Higher Education.” In Global Neoliberalism and Education and Its Consequences. Eds. Dave Hill and Ravi Kumanl. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 30-53.
“Militarizing Higher Education: Resisting the Pedagogy of Violence.” In Researching Violence, Democracy and the Rights of People. Eds. John F. Schostak and Jill Schostak. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 196-209.
“Expendable Futures: Dirty Democracy and the Politics of Disposability.” In Our Children’s World: New Visions for Education in the 21st Century. Ed. Svi Shapiro. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 223-240.
“Cultural Studies, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Higher Education.” In Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches. Eds. Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner. New York: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 88-106.
“End Times in America: Religious Fundamentalism and the Crisis of Democracy.” In Christotainment: Selling Jesus Through Popular Culture. Eds. Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe. Boulder: Westview Press, 2009, pp. 269-281.
“Border Crossings.” In The Applied Theatre Reader. Eds. Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 254-260.
“La passion de la derecha: el fundamentalismo religioso y la democracia.” In Anuario de Ciencias de la Religion 2007. Ed. Bernardo Haour, S.J. Lima, Peru: Biblioech Nacional del Peru N, 2008 –appeared in 2009, pp. 287-294.
“Higher Education Without Democracy?” In The Future of Higher Education. Eds. Gary Olson and John Presley. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009, pp. 53-62.
“Memory’s Hope: In the Shadow of Paulo Freire’s Presence.” In Pedagogy of Solidarity. Ed. Anna Marie Freire. Sao Paulo: Editora Villa ds Letras, 2009, pp. 11-17.
“The Attack on Higher Education and the Necessity for Critical Pedagogy.” In Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hopes and Possibilities. Ed. Sheila Macrine. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009, pp. 11-26.
“Militarized Knowledge and Academic Soldiers: Arming the University.” In The Impact of 9/11 on Politics and War. Ed. Mathew Morgan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 203-222.
“Dirty Democracy and the New Authoritarianism in the United States.” In The White Supremacist State. Ed. Arnold H. Itwaru. Toronto: Other Eye Press, 2009, pp.157-184.
“The Biopolitics of Disposability.” In Cultures of Fear. Eds. Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith. New York: Pluto Press, 2009, pp. 304-312.
“Turning America into a Toy Store.” In Critical Pedagogies of Consumption. Eds. Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 249-258.
“Beyond the Corporate Takeover of Higher Education: Rethinking Educational Theory, Pedagogy, and Policy.” In Re-reading Educational Policy: Studying the Policy Agenda of the 21st century?. Eds. Maarten Simons, Mark Olssen, and Michael Peters. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009, pp. 458-477.
“Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle.” In Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society. 11th edition. Eds. Alison Alexander and Jarice Hanson. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009, pp. 258-263.
“Militarization, Public Pedagogy, and the Biopolitics of Popular Culture.” In Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education. Eds. Henry A. Giroux, Nicholas C. Burbules, Diana Silberman Keller, and Zvi Bekerman. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2008, pp. 39-54.
“Disabling Democracy: The Crisis of Youth, Education, and the Politics of Disposability.” In Education for Social Justice. Ed. Canadian Teachers’ Federation. Ottawa: Canadian Teachers’ Federation, 2008, pp.131-140
“Challenging Neoliberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Eds. Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008, pp. 181-189. Co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux.
“Militarized Knowledge and Armed Subjects: Higher Education in the Shadow of the National Security State.” In Military Pedagogies and Why They Matter. Eds. Tone Kvernbekk, Harold Simpson, and Michael A. Peters. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008, pp. 159-174.
“Youth and the Politics of Education in Dark Times.” In Worlds of Difference: Rethinking the Ethics of Global Education for the 21st Century. Ed. Peter Trifonas. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008, pp. 199-216
“Disabling the Future: The Assault on Higher Education and American Youth.” In Power, Power, and Praxis: Social Justice in the Globalized Classroom. Eds. Shannon A. Moore and Richard C. Mitchell. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008, pp. 55-72.
“Cultural Studies as Performative Practice.” In Contesting Empire/Globalizing Dissent. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina. Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, pp. 213-230.
“Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy and the Project of Educated Hope.” In Utopian Pedagogy. Eds. Mark Cote, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 25-42.
“Democracy, Education, and the Politics of Critical Pedagogy.” In Critical Pedagogy: Where are we now?. Eds. Peter McLaren and Joe Kincheloe. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007, pp. 1-5.
“Drowning Democracy: The Media, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Hurricane Katrina.” In Media Literacy: A Reader. Eds. Donaldo Macedo and Shirley Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 229-241.
“Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability: Floating Bodies and Expendable Populations.” In Schooling and the Politics of Disaster. Ed. Ken Saltman. New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 43-69.
“Foreword: When the Darkness Comes and Hope is Subversive.” In The Politics of Possibility: Encountering the Radical Imagination. Eds. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007, pp. vii-xiii
“Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Antiblack Racist Pedagogy.” In The Globalization of Racism. Eds. Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006, pp. 68-98.
“Foreward.” In The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics. Ed. Sut Jhally. New York: Peter Lang, 2006, pp. v-xv.
“Dystopian Nightmares and Educated Hopes: The return of the Pedagogical and the Promise of Democracy.” In Edutopias: New Utopian Thinking in Education. Eds. Michael Peters and John Freeman-Moir. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006, pp. 43-62
“Radical Pedagogy and the Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Pedagogies of the Global. Ed. Arif Dirlik. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006, pp. 59-75.
“Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence.” In Critical Readings: Violence and the Media. Eds. C. Kay Weaver and Cynthia Carter. New York: Open University Press, 2006, pp. 95-107.
“On Seeing and Not Seeing Race: “Crash” and the Politics of Bad Faith.” In Popping Culture. 4th edition. Eds. Murray Pomerance and John Sakeris. Boston: Pearson Education, 2006, pp. 241-256. Co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux.
“Critical Pedagogy in Action.” In Marxism and Communication Studies: The Point Is to Change It. Eds. Lee Artz, Steve Macek, & Dana Cloud. New York: Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 203-216. Co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux.
“The Corporate University and the Politics of Education.” In The Ethics of Teaching. Ed. Michael Boylan. Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2006, pp. 95-102. Co-authored with Stanley Aronowitz.
“Christian Fundamentalism Threatens Democracy in the United States.” In World Religion. Ed. Mike Wilson. New York: Greenhaven Press, 2006, pp.170-176
“Higher Education and Democracy’s Promise: Jacques Derrida’s Pedagogy of Uncertainty.” In Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities. Eds. Peter Trifonas and Michael Peters. New York: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 53-81.
“War Talk and the Shredding of the Social Contract: Youth and the Politics of Domestic Militarization.” In Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies, and Global Conflicts. Eds. Peter McLaren and Gustavo Fischman. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, pp. 52-68.
“Globalizing Dissent and Radicalizing Democracy: Politics, Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Critical Intellectuals.” In Radical Relevance: Toward a Scholarship of the Whole Left. Ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005, pp. 141-159.
“Terrorism and the Culture of Permanent War: Democracy Under Siege.” In Education, Globalization, and the State in the Age of Terrorism. Ed. Michael Peters. Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2005, pp. 179-199.
“Shredding the Social Contract: America’s War Against Children.” In Communities of Difference. Ed. Peter Trifonas. New York: Palgrave, 2005, pp 3-26.
“The Politics of Public Pedagogy.” In If Classrooms Matter: Place, Pedagogy and Politics. Eds. Jeffrey Di Leo, et al. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 15-36.
“ The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear.” In Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric. Ed. Donald Lazere. Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2005, pp. 25-28.
“Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence.” In The Critical Middle School Reader. Eds. Enora R. Brown and Kenneth J. Saltman. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 131-148.
Refereed Journals (Special Issues):
“The Profession of Literature at the End of the Millennium,” [Special Issue] College Literature. Guest-editors Henry A. Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades. Fall 1999.
“Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy,” [Special Issue] Cultural Studies. Guest-editors Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren. January, 1993.
“Schooling in the Age of Postmodernism.” [Special Issue] Boston University Journal of Education. August, 1989.
“Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture,” [Special Issue] Curriculum and Teaching [Australia]. 3 (1): 1988. Guest-editors Henry A. Giroux and Roger Simon.
“Ideology, Culture and the Hidden Curriculum,” [Special Issue] Journal of Education 162 (1): Winter 1980.
“On the Politics of Education,” [Special Issue] Social Practice. Spring, 1980.
Refereed Journal Articles (selected recent publications):
“White Nationalism, Armed Culture and State Violence in the age of Donald Trump,” Philosophy and Social Criticism XX: X(2017), pp. 1-24.
“The Scourge of Illiteracy in Authoritarian Times,” Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 9(1): (2017), pp. 14–27.
“Pedagogy, Civil Rights, and the Project of Insurrectional Democracy,” Howard Journal of Communication (March 10, 2017).
“Hope and Resistance in the Age of Donald Trump,” DarkMatter Journal. 10 (January 27, 2017).
“Poisoned City in the Age of Casino Capitalism,” Theory in Action 10:1 (January 2017), pp. 7-31.
“Hurricane Sandy and the Politics of Disposability in the Age of Neoliberal Terror,” JAC (in press).
“Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Policy Futures in Education (in press).
“Reclaiming Public Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism,” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies (in press).
“The Swindle of Democracy in the Neoliberal University and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Democratic Theory: An Interdisciplinary Journal (in press).
“Between Orwell and Huxley: America’s Plunge into Dystopia,” Tidal Basin Review (in press).
The Retreat of Academics as Public Intellectuals,” Cahiers de l’idiotie (in press).
“The Poison of Neoliberal Miseducation,” Arena Magazine (in press).
(co authored with Brad Evans), “Intellectual Violence,” JAC (in press).
“Norway is Closer than You Think: Extremism and the Crisis of American Politics,” JAC (in press).
“Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Dark Times” Fast Capitalism 11:1 (in press).
“Democracy in Crisis, the Specter of Authoritarianism, and the Future of Higher Education.” Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs (in press).
“Austerity and the Poison of Neoliberal Miseducation,” Symploke (in press)
“America’s Descent into Madness,” Policy Futures in Education. 12:2 (2014), pp. 237-241.
“Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Cultural Studies. (2014).
“Protesting Youth in an Age of Neoliberal Savagery,” E-International Relations. (May 20, 2014).
“La Esperanza en nuestra Era,” Mundo Siglo XXI. Núm. 33, Vol. IX (2014), pp. 41-41.
“Beyond Dystopian Education in a Neoliberal Society,” Fast Capitalism. 10:1 (2013).
“When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto,” Policy Futures in Education. 12:4 (2014), pp. 491-499.
“Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination,” Tikkun. (Summer 2014), pp. 9-12, 59-60.
“Defending Higher Education in the Age of Neoliberal Savagery,” Discover Society. (March 6, 2014).
“Youth in Revolt: the battle against neoliberal authoritarianism,” Critical Arts:South-North Cultural and Media Studies (New Zealand). 27:6 (2014), pp. 103-110.
“The Specter of Authoritarianism and the Politics of the ‘Deep State’” Ragazine. CC (March 1, 2014). Also republished in Henry Giroux, “The Politics of the Deep State,” Arts & Opinion: Arts, Culture, Analysis. 13:3 (2014).
“Public Intellectualism Today: Intellectuals as the Subject and Object of Violence,” Arena Magazine. No. 128 (2014), pp. 42-45
“Youth and the War on Public Education in the Age of Casino Capitalism,” PowerPlay: A Journal of Educational Justice. 5:2 (2013), pp. 640-668.
“Scandalous Politics: Penn State and the Return of the Repressed in Higher Education,” JAC. 32:1-2, pp. 57-82. Co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux.
“Gated Intellectuals and the Challenge of a Borderless Pedagogy in the Occupy Movement,” Policy Futures in Education. 10:6, pp. 728-733.
“The Scorched Earth Politics of America’s Fundamentalisms,” Policy Futures in Education. 10:6, pp. 720-727.
“Santorum and God’s Will: The Religonization of Politics and the Tyranny of Totalitarianism,” Policy Futures in Education. 10:6, pp. 717-719.
“Occupy Wall Street’s Battle against American-Style Authoritarianism,” Fast Capitalism. 9:1 (2012).
“Age of Disposability: Hurricane Sandy, Unwanted Populations and Climate Change,” Arena 122. (March 2, 2013), pp. 30-33.
“The Disappearance of Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Higher Education as a Public Good,” Trans-Scripts. 3 (2013).
“Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Hardening of Everyday Life.” Monthly Review. 65:1 (May 2013), pp. 37-54.
“Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals,” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies. 13: 3 (June 3, 2013), pp. 150-153.
“The Occupy Movement Meets the Suicidal State: Neoliberalism and the Punishing of Dissent.” Situations. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 7-34.
“Racism, Popular Culture, and Public Memory,” Arena Magazine. No. 125, Aug/Sept 2013: 31-34
“The Quebec Student Protest Movement and the New Social Awakening,” Social Identities. 19:5 (September 2013), pp. 515-535.
“A Pedagogy of Resistance in the Age of Casino Capitalism,” Con-Ciencia Social. N0. 17 (2013), pp. 55-71.
“Más allá de la Máquina de la Desimaginaciónα,” Mundo Siglo XXI. Núm. 31, Vol. IX (2013), pp. 39-49
“The Disimagination Machine and the Pathologies of Power,” Symploke. 21: 1-2 (2013), pp. 263-275.
“Neoliberalism’s War Against Teachers in Dark Times,” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies. 13:6 (December 2013), pp. 458-468.
“La Pedagogic Critica en Tiempos Oscuros,” Praxis. 7:2 (Argentina, December 2013), pp. 1
“Universities Gone Wild: Big Money, Big Sports, and Scandalous Abuse at Penn State,” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies. 12:4 (August 2012), pp. 267-273. Co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux
“Punishing Youth and Saturated Violence in the Era of Casino Capitalism,” CounterPunch. (August 9, 2012).
“The Quebec Strike and the Politics of a New Social Awakening,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. 11:2-3 (2012).
“Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Reform Beyond Electoral Politics,” Tikkun. (Fall 2012), pp. 49-50.
“The Post-9/11 Militarization of Higher Education and Popular Culture of Depravity: Threats to Future of American Democracy,” RISE: International Journal of the Sociology of Education. I:1(February 25, 2012), pp. 27-43.
“Disturbing Pleasures: Murderous Images and the Aesthetics of Depravity” Third Text. N0.116 (May 2012), pp. 259-273.
“Beyond the Limits of Neoliberal Higher Education: Global Youth Resistance and the American British Divide,” Journal of Wuhan University of Science and Technology. 14:3 (June 2012), pp. 233-242 [earlier version appeared in Campaign for the Public University –November 7, 2011]
“Public Intellectuals, the Politics of Clarity, and the Crisis of Language.” State of Nature. (Spring 2010).
“Paulo Freire and the Crisis of the Political,” Education and Power. 2:3 (2010), pages 335-340. [A different version of this article appeared in Henry A. Giroux, “Paulo Freire and the Courage to be Political,” Our Schools, Our Selves. 20:2 (Winter 2011), pp. 153-163.]
“Formative Culture in the Age of Imposed Forgetting,” Tikkun. 26(1): p. 41.
“Youth in the Age of Disposabilty.” Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. (February 5, 2011).
“The Crisis of Public Values in the Age of the New Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication. 28: 1 (2011) pp., 8-29.
“Shattered Bonds: Youth in a Suspect Society and the Politics of Disposability.” PowerPlay. 3:1 (2011), pp. 3-20.
“Racialized Memories and Class Identities: Thinking About Glenn Beck’s and Rush Limbaugh’s America.” Policy Futures in Education. 9:2 (2011), pp. 296-302.
“The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism.” Policy Futures in Education. 9:2 (2011). pp., 163-172.
“Neoliberal Politics as Failed Sociality: Youth and the Crisis of Higher Education.” Logos. 10:2 (2011).
“Neoliberalism and the Death of the Social State: Remembering Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.” Social Identities. 17:4 (July 2011), pp. 587-601.
“The Politics of Militarization and Corporatization in Higher Education: Beyond Armed Subjects and Commodified Knowledge.” CounterPunch. (June 29, 201).
“‘Instants of Truth’: The “Kill Team” Photos and the Depravity of Aesthetics.” Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. (Summer 2011), pp. 4-8.
“Higher Education Under Siege: Youth Fights Back: Higher Ed Under Siege in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” CUNY Graduate Center Advocate (April 14, 2011).
“In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis.” Itinerarios: Forum Global de Investigacao Educacional. 1:1 (January 2011), pp. 20-25. Online:
“Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Humiliation: Neoliberal Generosity and the Attack on Public Education.” Negotiations: Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies [India]. 1.1 (March 2011), pp. 39-54.
Barack Obama and the Resurgent Specter of Authoritarianism.” JAC 3.4 (2011), pp. 415-440
“Fighting for the Future: American Youth and the Global Struggle for Democracy.” Cultural Studies / Critical Methodologies. 1.:4 (2011), pp. 328-340.
“Once More, With Conviction: Defending Higher Education as a Public Good.” Qui Parle. 20.1 (Fall/Winter 2011), pp. 117-135.
“Beyond the Limits of Neoliberal Higher Education.” Campaign for the Public University. (November 7, 2011).
“Living in the Age of Imposed Amnesia: The Eclipse of Democratic Formative Culture.” Policy Futures in Education. 9.5 (November 5, 2011), pp. 548-553.
“Business Culture and the Death of Public Education: Mayor Bloomberg, David Steiner, and the Politics of Corporate Leadership.” Policy Futures in Education. 9.5 (November 5, 2011), pp. 554-560.
“Higher education under siege: challenging casino capitalism’s culture of cruelty.” Open Democracy. (November 27, 2011).
“The Politics of Ignorance: Casino Capitalism and Higher Education.” CounterPunch. (October 31, 2011).
“Rejecting Academic Labor as a Subaltern Class: Learning from Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy,” Fast Capitalism. 8.2 (2011).
“Torturing Children: Bush’s Legacy and Democracy’s Failure.” Policy Futures in Education. 8.1 (2010), pp. 142-147
“Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability,” Policy Futures in Education. 8.1 (2010), pp. 1-7.
“Challenging the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex after 9/11,” Policy Futures in Education. 8.2 (2010), pp. 232-237.
“Uma Geracao Ameacador e Ameacada.” Patio Ensino Medio. (June/August 2010), pp. 14-16.
“Bare Pedagogy and the Scourge of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Higher Education as the Practice of Freedom.” The Educational Forum. 74 (2010), pp184-196. [Also published in Ars Educandi (Poland). Vol. VII (May 2010), pp. 75-89.].
“Tortured Memories and the Culture of War.” Policy Futures in Education. 8.5 (2010), pp. 608-610.
“Stealing of Childhood Innocence–Disney and the Politics of Casino Capitalism: A Tribute to Joe Kincheloe.” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies. 10.5 (October 2010), pp. 413-416.
“Higher Education, For What?” Education in Review (Portugal). 37 (May 1010), pp 25-38.
“Learning from Paulo Freire.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. (October 22, 2010), B15-B16.
“Memories of Hope and the Politics of Disposability,” JAC. 31.1-2 (2011), pp 102-121. “
“Dumbing Down Teachers: Rethinking the Crisis of Public Education and the Demise of the Social State.” Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies. 32 (September-December, 2010), pp. 339-381
“Youth in Dark Times: Broken Promises and Dashed Hopes.” Culture Machine. (November 2010).
“Public Values, Higher Education, and the Scourge of Neoliberalism: Politics at the Limits of the Social.” Cultural Machine. (November 2010).
“Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered.” Fast Capitalism. 7:2 (2010).
Recent Interviews
Scholar Henry Giroux On Gun Violence And Administration Agendas | Interview with Allen Ruff | WORT 89.9 FM Madison | February 15, 2018
Philosopher Henry Giroux on the culture of cruelty and Donald Trump: America is “a democracy on life support — it can’t breathe” | Interview with Chauncey DeVega | Salon | April 23, 2017
Trump is the endpoint: On cruelty and isolation in American politics. | Interview with Chuck Mertz, This Is Hell | Episode 948: Rot In Here | Truth Out | April 15, 2017
Henry Giroux, public intellectual, on the menace of Trump and the new authoritarianism | By Joan Pedro-Carañana | Open Democracy | April 12, 2017
The Menace of Trump and the New Authoritarianism: An Interview with Henry Giroux | Interview with Joan Pedro-Caranaña | Truth Out | April 11, 2017
The Culture of Cruelty in Trump’s America | Truth Out | March 22, 2017
Trump’s War on Dangerous Memory and Critical Thought | Tikkun | March 13, 2017
Our President Is Up to No Good: Bill reflects on Trump’s tweet storm and shares Henry Giroux’s remarks about George Orwell, authoritarianism and Donald Trump | Interview with Bill Moyer’s | Moyers & Company | March 4, 2017
Rethinking Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World in Trump’s America | Ragazine | February 2017
‘They produced the Frankenstein monster:’ Mac prof on democracy in the time of Trump | Interview with Steve Buist | The Hamilton Spectator | February 28, 2017
Steeltown sanctuary: Hamilton is among the few ‘sanctuary cities’ in Canada | Interview with Jon Wells | The Hamilton Spectator | February 24, 2017
Be Thankful for a Dysfunctional, Chaotic White House | Interview with Paul Jay | The Real News Network | February 24, 2017
Pledge Drive: America At War With Itself | Interview with Alan Ruff | WORT 89.9FM | February 09, 2017
Revisiting Orwell’s ‘1984’ in Trump’s America | Moyers & Company | January 30, 2017
