Critical pedagogies in cultural studies: On teaching Marxism online
Abstract
When online teaching burst on the scene in the late 1990s, it appeared to be nothing less than the latest stage in the ongoing neoliberal assault on higher education. Online teaching promised to degrade the learning experience and squeeze instructors into a regimented, assembly-line work regime. This essay describes the author’s effort to resist that trend by developing an online graduate course in Marxist Cultural Theory that instead leverages the internet for progressive educational ends, focusing on quality enhancement rather than metrics of quantity and cost-efficiency. Internet technology is used to sharpen the critical production of knowledge with faculty and students from several different universities participating, and to make the course as widely public as possible, with lectures widely viewed on YouTube.