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Youth Culture, Education and Resistance: Subverting the Commercial Ordering of Life is a ground-breaking collection of essays that illustrate how youth culture has the potential to build solidarity amongst teachers, activists, scholars, and practitioners for the purposes of confronting the dominant ideological doctrine influencing life at today's historical juncture-emblemized through neoliberalism-as well as building a society free from oppressive social formations. Several leading international scholars and educators provide empirically and theoretically rich portraits of youth challenging the commercialized status quo inside and outside K-12 classrooms. They also illustrate how cultural manifestations of youth speak directly against the social actors who continually vilify youth as the source of their own marginalization and the world's suffering and misery.
Youth Culture, Education and Resistance: Confronting Commerialization and Neo-Liberalism continues the important legacy of critical pedagogy by remaining defiant in the face of what seems an unimpeachable foe. Given the daunting task faced by critical educators, it is heartening to see Brad Porfilio and Paul Carr bringing together such a relentlessly creative and courageous group of critical educators, who refuse to give up the struggle to bring social justice to education and the world-at-large, a world increasingly eviscerated of social services on behalf of finance capital.
-Peter McLaren, UCLA ((from the Foreword)
Youth Culture, Education and Resistance by Brad Porfilio and Paul Carr is a timely and powerful intervention in contemporary literature on youth, education, and neo-liberalism. Collectively, the authors and editors open up the discussion around young people today, offering us a new and richer language to think about the specific kinds of inequalities young people face today-and how they are being resisted.
-Greg Dimitriadis, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (from the Afterword)
What I find valuable about this volume is the way in which the authors look beyond tinkering with the policies of current or outgoing leaders. As this volume emphasizes, the real hope is to be found where it always has been found: in the resistance of youth. Our masters criminalize youth for the same basic reasons that they marginalize and racialize others: to divide and subjugate. I strongly recommend this volume to teachers and academics interested in looking beyond our immediate and localized concerns.
-Douglas Fleming, University of Ottawa
The contributors to this volume present both a theoretically complex analysis of neo-liberalism and the negative consequences for education, and a pedagogically rich portrayal of what is possible if we only placed people before profits. Engaging, critical, and ground-breaking.
-David Hursh, University of Rochester
