Mind Sciences

In Dangerous Counterstories in the
Corporate Academy: Narrating for Understanding,
Solidarity, Resistance, and Community in the Age of
Neoliberalism, Daniels and Porfilio have collected thirteen
critical narratives that offer a wide range of experiences,
analyses, and ideas for how to work within and resist the
corporate academy. The edited volume contains the
insightful voices of students, scholars, and activists from
multiple disciplines, organizations, and institutions across
North America. Explaining the purpose of the volume,
Daniels and Porfilio explain that "some scholars have
found fissures amid the alienating, often hostile academic
world to learn, grow, cope, and create socially generative
and transformative communities. Until recently, however,
their stories have not been captured" (viii). Thus, by
collecting and sharing these narratives, the book acts as a
resource for knowledge, encouragement, and hope for
other students and scholars who are resisting the anticritical
forces that encroach on their work toward social
justice.

Jan McArthur’s (2013) Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education: Adorno and Social Justice is a lucid and forceful inquiry into, and argument for, the unique role that higher education can play in contributing to social justice within and without the academic boundaries of specific educational institutions. A relatively short work at 160 pages, it is a refreshingly concise yet rich journey through a number of wide-ranging and complex topics such as higher education, critical pedagogy, knowledge, social justice, critical theory, academic research, and socioeconomic change. More specifically, McArthur argues that higher education, through a rethinking of the knowledge engaged there, can and should contribute to a more just and equitable social order both within the academy and throughout the world at large.

Over the course of the past few decades, scholars and theorists have engaged in a dynamic and concerted effort to interpret, make sense of, and resist a variety of social phenomena often categorized under the concept of “postmodernism.” This project has also been taken up by educators of various stripes, especially those who identify their work as belonging in a “critical” tradition such as critical theory or critical pedagogy. In this paper, I aim to join the discussion of critical education scholars through an analysis of Albert Camus’s work on the concept of the absurd. In particular, I interpret the absurd as it relates to the identity and work of critical academics in the postmodern university. After providing an orienting perspective of the key elements of postmodernity and critical pedagogy that are relevant to my project, I move into a discussion of the connections between Camus’s concept of the absurd and postmodernism. Working from this basis, I then suggest the relevance and value of the absurd to critical academics within two general constellations of challenges: critical thought/identity and moving from theory to practice, especially in the absence of any forthcoming consensus or unity of intellectual or ethical systems. I conclude by recapitulating my main arguments and gesturing toward potential for further development. Ultimately, the essay ends by raising the question of the value of raising a question.

Mindfulness-based interventions are becoming an increasingly popular means for helping students deal with the multidimensional challenges they face in contemporary educational settings. While potentially helpful, an uncritical employment of mindfulness in education can paradoxically function to reify the very neoliberal social conditions leading to the need for mindfulness in the first place. I assess this trend in educational theory and practice through John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. I show that the potential for both mindfulness and Dewey's theory of mind and inquiry to support critical, sustainable social change is truncated by an uncritical retaining of the modern paradigm of mind that defines mind and cognition as private mental events internal to individual subjects. Following Dewey, I critique this view of mind as dubious according to the ontological assumptions underlying this paradigm. By presenting an original reading of Dewey's theory of mind, life, and inquiry based on an autopoietic process ontology and the life-mind continuity thesis, I show that the sciences of mind are currently in the midst of a revolutionary period of science, shifting from a paradigm rooted in the substance metaphysical tradition to a new, transdisciplinary paradigm animated by process metaphysics and radically different theories of mind, life, and cognition, heuristically captured by the life-mind continuity thesis. On this view, life and mind are of a piece; where there is life there is mind. Showing that Dewey developed one of the first and most complete theories of this thesis, I integrate Dewey's theories of mind and inquiry with the contemporary mindfulness movement and discuss how they can work together to enable a critical, socially engaged yet compassionate and uniqueness-respecting framework for a somatic-based holistic social inquiry in education. I call this mindful inquiry.