informed by theoretically rigorous discourses that affirm the critical but
refuse the cynical, and establish hope as central to a critical pedagogical
and political practice but eschew a romantic utopianism. Central to such
a project is the issue of how pedagogy might provide cultural studies
theorists and educators with an opportunity to engage pedagogical
practices that are not only transdisciplinary, transgressive, and opposi-
tional, but also connected to a wider project designed to further racial,
economic, and political democracy. ³ By taking seriously the relations
between culture and power, we further the possibilities of resistance,
struggle, and change.

Critical Studies in Education and Culture is committed to publishing
work that opens a narrative space that affirms the contextual and the
specific while simultaneously recognizing the ways in which such spaces
are shot through with issues of power. The series attempts to continue
an important legacy of theoretical work in cultural studies in which
related debates on pedagogy are understood and addressed within the
larger context of social responsibility, civic courage, and the reconstruc-
tion of democratic public life. We must keep in mind Raymond
Williams's insight that the "deepest impulse (informing cultural poli-
tics) is the desire to make learning part of the process of social change
itself." ⁴ Education as a cultural pedagogical practice takes place across
multiple sites, which include not only schools and universities but also
the mass media, popular culture, and other public spheres, and signals
how within diverse contexts, education makes us both subjects of and
subject to relations of power.

This series challenges the current return to the primacy of market
values and simultaneous retreat from politics so evident in the recent
work of educational theorists, legislators, and policy analysts. Profes-
sional relegitimation in a troubled time seems to be the order of the
day as an increasing number of academics both refuse to recognize
public and higher education as critical public spheres and offer little or
no resistance to the ongoing vocationalization of schooling, the con-
tinuing evisceration of the intellectual labor force, and the current
assaults on the working poor, the elderly, and women and children. ⁵

Emphasizing the centrality of politics, culture, and power, Critical
Studies in Education and Culture will deal with pedagogical issues that
contribute in imaginative and transformative ways to our under-
standing of how critical knowledge, democratic values, and social
practices can provide a basis for teachers, students, and other cultural
workers to redefine their role as engaged and public intellectuals. Each
volume will attempt to rethink the relationship between language and

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