Vanguard Party

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Critical vocabulary for liberatory discourses. We’re relying on Joe L. Kincheloe’s Critical Pedagogy (Peter Lang Primer), because the marginal glossary is geared to readers new to critical theory without condescending or being patronizing. The definitions are concise, terse, and therefore necessarily simplistic - often oversimplified and problematic. They remain nevertheless a remarkable starting point. We'll continue to cultivate a glossary committed to the theory of culture.

Postdiscourses

The theoretical ways of understanding that developed in the last third of the twentieth century that questioned the assumptions about the world put forth by modernist, scientific Western frameworks.

Emancipatory Literacy

involves revealing the ways dominant power operates in a manner that allows an individual and groups to act in resistance to its efforts to oppress them.

Bourgouis

middle class, conventional, unimaginative, and selfish.

Hyperrationalization

the application of reason alone to analyses of the world in lieu of emotion, affect, and concerns of worth and justice.

Zeitgeist

German term for spirit of the times.

Dialectical Authority

Involves studies that account for the importance of opposites and contradictions within all forms of knowledge and the relationship between these opposites. Knowledge is not complete in and of itself. It is produced in a larger process and can never be understood outside of its historical development and its relationship to other information.

Ideologies

traditional definition involves systems of beliefs. In a critical theoretical context, ideology ideology involves meaning making that supports form of dominant power.

Agency

persons’ ability to shape and control their own lives, freeing self from the oppression of power.

[Human rights starts] in small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, 

wife of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Chair of the United Nations Commission that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Fair warning: Originally intended as a practicuum - an adolescent's guide to siezing the promise of universal human rights (and civil liberties) from the institutions that bar them, this article seems subject to slide.

Two decades after “creating the internet,” Berners-Lee has recognized that web access is a univeral human right:

…humans have become so reliant on it that access to the Web should now be considered a basic right. In a speech at an MIT symposium, Berners-Lee compared access to the Web with access to water. “Access to the Web is now a human right,” he said. “It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”

Werners Lee, an authority with some clout in technology but perhaps not in political action, echoes action initiated by the United Nations and realized in a few European states:

The United Nations has proposed that Internet access should be a human right. This push was made when it called for universal access to basic communication and information services at the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination. In 2003, during the World Summit on the Information Society, another claim for this was made.^[2][3]

In some countries such as Estonia,^[4]France,^[5]Finland^[6] and Greece,^[7] Internet access has already been made a human right. (WIkipedia)

Whether pitched as a civil liberty or a universal human right, it seems adolescents in the United States are the last empowered, last enfranchised, the community with the most at stake, and perhaps the one positioned to be the largest threat.

Let’s contend - or perhaps fantasize - that Foucault always intended to address adolescent oppression as his final anaylsis of dynamics power and resistance.

Adolescents, take action to seize your human rights from the institutions that bar you from them - Ironically, as Roosevelt points out, the very institutions with greatest influence on your liberation.