Pedagogy : the unsaid of socio-cultural theory

The formation of subjectivities has long been central to contemporary social and cultural theory. There has been substantial work across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and beyond, considering the ways in which various domains of the modern world shape minds and bodies by discursive and material means. Yet this work tends to emphasise already formed subjects or particular social and cultural effects which are seen to constitute classed, gendered and radicalised subject. The processes that produce, for example, these effects – or how forms of conduct are acquired through particular relations and practices across a range of settings –receive far less scrutiny. This book deploys the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’ to recast the processes of subject formation, institutional conduct, cultural representation and human capacities as pedagogic practices of teaching and learning, broadly understood, which produce cumulative changes in how we act, think, feel and imagine. Existing work on critical and public pedagogies and the recent proliferation of work on ‘pedagogies of…’ (place, consumption and gender, for example) offer important starting points, but we believe a more comprehensive approach to cultural forms of pedagogy is still needed, building on this work and pushing it in the new directions.