In Khartoum the work of managing displacement and organising the future involved extensive educational projects. Residents of all socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds organised adult night schools and taught their own syllabuses of critical political and social education, using self-written alternative history textbooks, in multiple mother tongues or in a common southern Sudanese Arabic. Based on private archives of teaching resources, school records, aid agency archival marginalia, and personal accounts of educative work, this chapter reconstructs this intellectual terrain. It explores the definitions of education among these residents, which included practical and moral knowledge, linguistic creativity, and critical political analysis.

The current context of regressive border regimes challenges critical theory’s commitments. Can we still take recent legal and political practices as starting points for reimagining political norms and institutions based on a reconstruction of hidden emancipatory potentials? The chapter argues that critical border theory could benefit from recentering the idea of political representation, and especially from building on insights of the recent constructivist turn in representation theory. Understanding political representation as shape-shifting and constituency-mobilizing changes long-held assumptions about the spaces, subjects, and demands articulated in border politics. While this representative perspective has diagnostic advantages, it is unable to criticize the legitimacy of existing border regimes owing to its thin normative assumptions. Reconstructive approaches to border politics should therefore use the diagnostic tools of the recent representation scholarship without committing to their limited critical potential

A brief coda situates evolutionary aestheticism within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about aesthetic pleasure and its capacity to facilitate (or hinder) the establishment of a more just society. First, the coda conducts a partial survey of post-1960s critiques of I. A. Richards’s New Criticism and related approaches – critiques in which “aestheticism” often emerges as a byword for solipsism, obscurity, and political quietism. Shifting to more recent work by the literary scholars Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, the New Left philosopher Kate Soper, and the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, among others, the coda finally suggests that we are witnessing a renewed interest in the transformative potential of taste and the concomitant importance of cultural education.

In the 21st century, educators’ work is arguably more complex and more needed than ever before. The last six decades have witnessed significant changes involving global economic forces, increased competitive production modes, climate change and its ramifications on human and non-human beings. We have felt the impact in education of a pandemic, which seemed to ‘slow us down’, amid a fast-moving and ever-developing technological landscape which had, and continues to have, significant impacts on people’s ways of life. There has been a merging of finance, trade and communication knowledges; societal instability; and a global resurgence in right-wing politics and social movements which are exercised around assumed threats of immigration, ‘race’ and ethnicity and other forms of diversity.

‘Islamophobic discourse’ refers to the systemic and widespread negative attitudes, beliefs and narratives surrounding the Islamic religion and Muslims. In Australia, Islamophobia has been constructed in media and political spheres, and manifests through everyday experiences of discrimination for the Muslim community. Islamophobia is often characterised by the construction of stereotypes and disinformation that operate to promote fear and mistrust towards Muslims and the Islamic religion, and features Muslims as threatening and disloyal. In addition to Islamophobic discourses and the resulting negative attitudes, Islamophobia has become deeply embedded across societal institutions, and the government has addressed ‘terrorism’ as a priority. This includes education and is evident through the de-radicalisation and countering violent extremism (CVE) policies that have been rolled out in some schools.

This introduction offers a theoretical model for reading the relation between the conditions that determine the possibility of literary expression, and those possibilities that literature itself invents. It is in the relation between these two forms of possibility, the introduction argues, that the politics of literary form resides.

The last two decades of critical thinking have seen a quite radical shift in our understanding of this relationship. The introduction traces these shifts, and places the essays collected in this volume (written over that two decade period) in the context of such theoretical and political transformations. The passage of literary thinking in the current century, the introduction argues, requires a new critical understanding of literary possibility, which it is the task of these essays to perform.

This chapter introduces students to the rich and controversial legacy of Marxism and one of its major offshoots in the twentieth century, Critical Theory. The chapter is presented in two parts. The first part touches on the historical and intellectual context that ‘created’ Marxism, Marx’s notion of historical materialism and the issue of how Marx’s ideas have been received in IR. The second part concentrates on the two strands of Critical Theory that have emerged within IR: one derived from the so-called Frankfurt School and the other from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

This chapter introduces students to the range of theoretical issues that have animated the study of international relations through the years. First, it explains why theoretical reflection is indispensable to explaining and understanding international relations. Second, it addresses unavoidable ontological and epistemological issues in the quest for theoretical understanding. Third, it traces the growth of mainstream International Relations theory up to the present conflict in Ukraine. Finally, it touches on some of the diverse critical approaches to the study of international relations.

This chapter tracks the emergence and acceleration of global environmental problems since the end of World War II and delineates the field of global environmental politics. It also introduces the proposed new geological epoch called ‘the Anthropocene’ and the concept of planetary boundaries along with the key global environmental discourses of limits to growth/degrowth, sustainable development/green growth, ecological security and environmental justice. The chapter then examines how scholars working in the major theoretical traditions of International Relations – realism, liberalism, Critical Theory, constructivism and English School theory – have approached global environmental challenges. The conclusion reflects on the pivotal roles of the United States and China in tackling global warming.

The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

The radical ethics of critical theory, from Marx to Habermas, proposes principles through which ethical deliberations might be pursued. The radical nature of Habermas’s ethics involves a recognition of “the other” as worthy and valid in their own right. Such radical openness to others has the potential of transforming us toward what is better. When an individual’s conception of the good life necessitates an awareness and orientation toward what is good for “others,” ethics converges with the moral point of view through what is just: the good life as synonymous with just living. The chapter begins with a compelling story of a Ugandan peaceworker through which the authors draw out critical ethical principles. Then, the authors apply the radical ethics of Habermas’s critical theory to the contemporary US policy discourse around trans athletes’ participation in school sports. That discourse is analyzed according the principles introduced through the story at the beginning of the chapter.

This chapter provides a chronological review of critical responses to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The ‘book-prose vs free-prose’ debate is the starting-point for this overview, which then focuses on modern scholarship on sagas. The approach of the Icelandic school is discussed, followed by consideration of theoretical issues such as orality, structuralism, anthropological methods and the influence of non-Icelandic literary forms. Next come post-structuralism and narratology. The diversity of theoretical approaches which grew up towards the end of the twentieth century is documented, including post-colonialism and polysystem theory. Long-held generic distinctions are reviewed, and the development of gender studies with regard to Old Norse is described. Recent developments in the study of orality in prose and poetry are discussed, as are theoretical topics such as memory studies and the role of the paranormal. The chapter concludes with an account of the diversity of critical approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic literature and explains the need to employ integrated theories bringing in research from a number of disciplines, including archaeology, psychoanalysis and sociology.

Ressler introduces a sociological theory of transformative symbolic reality to illuminate a specific, but often overlooked, impact of the nonprofit sector that is directly tied to improving the quality of life for individuals and groups within society. Grounded in the sociology of communities and nonprofit theory, transformative symbolic reality states that society reproduces itself or changes through social reality, and that social reality can be purposefully manipulated to challenge the forces of inequity. Specifically, individuals or organizations can create both the physical and metaphysical spaces in which people manifest and manipulate social norms, expectations, and behaviors in an inter-relational way that generates transformative social capital. Through the lens of transformative symbolic reality, the chapter conceptualizes the nonprofit sector as a wellspring of this overlooked public good and argues that it is this transformative aspect of the nonprofit sector that undergirds connections between nonprofit organizations and any long-term social impact.

This chapter focuses on some of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)s criticism of investment law and the CIL rules contained therein, and proposes an engagement with this criticism at the stage of interpretation. Based on an examination of the interpretation of the customary minimum standard of treatment, it argues that interpretation plays two roles in relation to CIL – a constructive and an evolutive role. In light of these two roles, interpretative arguments may be deployed strategically so as to flag problematic rationales in the rules and argue for their re-interpretation. In particular, I propose three interpretive strategies which may achieve this goal, which are differentially suited to the different actors who may wish to deploy them. These strategies are limited by the actors who deploy them, the forum where they are deployed, as well as the rules of procedure in which the dispute takes place. Nevertheless, they present an opportunity for a constructive TWAIL engagement with international investment law which does not summarily dismiss the existing system.