Engaging academic activism: a preface

Kalle Lasn, the founder and publisher of the political activist magazine Adbusters, criticizes what he sees as the failure of academics to engage directly with social, environmental, and other injustices: “Most academics just ramble. Far too few raise a fist or a voice.” “[T]heories and explanations,” he insists, are insufficient. In contrast to Lasn's bleak view of the academy, feminist social critic and theorist bell hooks presents a positive view of the potential of academic work: “The academy is not paradise,” she contends. “But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.” This special issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies explores the classroom as a “location of possibility,” examining ways in which educators, scholars, and students can ensure that our critiques, theories, and explanations contribute towards material social change. Such an effort not only involves critical engagement with arguments like Lasn's, but also requires that we interrogate and make productive use of our privileged positions as educators and researchers, even as these positions are increasingly threatened by budget cuts, corporatization, and policy changes.