Those who are in shock that truth doesn't seem to matter in politics miss the mark: politics has never corresponded with the truth. Rather, political struggle is about the formulation and materialization of new truths. The “post-truth” era thus offers an important opportunity to push forward into a different world. Embracing this opportunity, Derek R. Ford articulates a new educational philosophy and praxis that emerges from within the nexus of social theory and political struggle. Blocking together aesthetics, queer theory, urbanism, postmodern philosophy, and radical politics, Ford develops arguments and proposals on key topics ranging from debt and time, to the death drive and forms of political organization. Through forceful yet accessible prose, Ford offers contemporary left politics an imaginative and potent set of educational concepts and practices.
This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive.
In the second edition of this groundbreaking work, Derek R. Ford contends that radical politics needs educational theory, posing a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and contingency? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, Ford develops a dynamic pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. In charting this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Lenin, Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Althusser, and Butler. Demonstrating how learning underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic that, perhaps paradoxically, demands the revolutionary reclamation of testing. Poetic, performative, and provocative, Communist Study is oriented toward what Ford calls “the sublime feeling of being-in-common,” which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.
Originally published in 1989, Karst Geomorphology and Hydrology became the leading textbook on karst studies. This new textbook has been substantially revised and updated. The first half of the book is a systematic presentation of the dissolution kinetics, chemical equilibria and physical flow laws relating to karst environments. It includes details of the many environmental factors that complicate their chemical evolution, with a critique of measurement of karst erosion rates. The second half of the book looks at the classification system for cave systems and the influence of climate and climatic change on karst development. The book ends with chapters on karst water resource management and a look at the important issues of environmental management, including environmental impact assessment, environmental rehabilitation, tourism impacts and conservation values. Practical application of karst studies are explained throughout the text. "This new edition strengthens the book's position as the essential reference in the field. Karst geoscientists will not dare to stray beyond arm's reach of this volume. It is certain to remain the professional standard for many decades." Journal of Cave and Karst Studies, August 2007
Emerging from a radical pedagogical tradition, Education and the Production of Space deepens and extends Henri Lefebvre’s insights on revolutionary praxis by revealing the intimate relationship between education and the production of space. Synthesizing educational theory, Marxist theory, and critical geography, the book articulates a revolutionary political pedagogy, one that emerges as a break from within—and against—critical pedagogy. Ford investigates the role of space in the context of emerging social movements and urban rebellions, with a focus on the Baltimore Rebellion of 2015, and shows how processes of learning, studying, and teaching can help us produce space differently, in a manner aligned with our needs and desires.
The first monograph on Lyotard and education engages Lyotard’s work through different pedagogical modes of reading, writing, voicing, and listening, revealing crucial educational, political, aesthetic, and epistemological distinctions between knowledge and thinking.
A sometimes humerous, sometimes serious autobiographical tale of growing up in the turbulant times of political change in Southern Africa during the 50's and 60's. The whole story is told from the perspective of a boy during his early years from six to thirteen. A boy who was caught with one foot in either camp.
Introduction: Lyotard's thought as pedagogy -- Reading -- Writing -- Intermezzo : from the beautiful to the sublime -- Voicing -- Listening -- Sectarian initiation -- Afteword: Towards a post-human approach to (in)humanity : reflections on Derek Ford's inhuman educations.
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