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Abstract

This article starts with a brief analysis of what it means to be an intellectual within the US tradition of critical pedagogy. Pointing toward important socio-technological transformations which have taken place in the past few decades, the article situates the concept of the intellectual into the contemporary postdigital context. The article looks into two main areas of intellectual work which seem to have undergone significant transformations—automation and post-truth. It develops possible responses to recent challenges in these areas and shows that contemporary intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy need to take technology seriously. Heading toward the conclusion, the article promotes Greta Thunberg as an important example of a postdigital intellectual. Our analyses show that critical pedagogy has an important role in the development of contemporary intellectual work. Aiming at constantly transforming challenges, however, old theories require constant reconceptualization in and for our postdigital context. Within this mash-up of questions and answers old and new, we identify a starting point for this reconceptualization in the notion of critical praxis.

Keywords

Intellectual critical pedagogy postdigital automation post-truth praxis

Introduction

Critical pedagogy is a theory, a practice, a praxis, an ethical perspective, a (critical utopian) vision of a future society, and much more. In fact, we could say in summary that “critical pedagogy is not a methodology, per se, sequestered in schools of education. It’s not simply or mainly a set of pedagogical procedures or analytical steps as one might typically envision … It is more about problem-posing than solution-giving” (McLaren, 2019a: 177). While such a wide definitional arc enables practitioners of critical pedagogy to successfully address a broad range of problems, it also presents us with many unresolved questions: How should I practice critical pedagogy in my daily life? What kind of critical engagement would provide the best fit for this or that problem?—and more deeply—What kind of teacher/person should I become? These are questions that have been raised since the very beginnings of the critical pedagogy movement.

A multitude of scholars from a diverse assemblage of disciples have been answering these questions in various historical moments and under various circumstances (see Giroux, 1988). Yet circumstances change—and answers to these questions cannot remain intact. In the critical pedagogy movement, we all work toward certain social goals such as emancipation and justice—yet the roads to these goals, and even the goals themselves, are constantly moving targets. Should we therefore stop reading Paulo Freire, Antonia Darder, Henry Giroux, or Joe Kincheloe? Not at all—their works have lain some of the most solid foundations of critical pedagogy as we know it. Should we read Freire or early Giroux or early McLaren, and follow everything they said? Not at all—back in the day, their circumstances had been hugely different from those facing teachers and prospective teachers today. Should we try to distill some “prescriptions” for critical educators based on their works? Not in a million years! Critical pedagogy is not about prescriptions, blueprints, or primers. Critical pedagogy has its heroes but despises followers (see Jandrić, 2018b). Critical pedagogy is deeply historical and contextual, and requires constant reinvention of our theories and practices joined in and through the act of critical praxis.

This article starts from a simple truism that one cannot be a critical pedagogue at work and then stop being a critical pedagogue at home, in the street, or on social networks. Critical pedagogy requires our engagement in all walks of life, yet our research and literature often focus on schools and classrooms. Thus our question becomes: How do we, critical pedagogues, prepare ourselves for meeting a variety of challenges posted by our existence in multiple roles—teacher, parent, neighbor, voter, amateur musician, sports supporter? How do we, critical pedagogues, negotiate our various social roles and our convictions? How do we, critical pedagogues, respond to common threats of today such as post-truth, religious fundamentalism, fascism? Answers to these questions have been sought, from Freire until today, in a broad, often over-used concept of the intellectual¹. Building on the body of work of the Western critical pedagogy tradition since Paulo Freire, this article reconceptualizes the concept of the intellectual in and for the year 2020.

Who is an intellectual?

Being an intellectual is a complex idea which defies attempts at definition. Intellectuals are people who use their own reason, often against the grain of the majority opinion, to uphold certain (usually humanistic) values and improve society through critique. For instance, Peter McLaren’s debate with the Nobel prize laureate Vernon Smith published at Chapman University’s blog (McLaren and Smith, 2017) provides a social critique aimed at improving communication between theorists of critical pedagogy who support socialism and prominent economists who support capitalism. So far so good … but the right also has its intellectuals! As we write these words, for instance, an article in The Washington Post claims: “Conservative intellectuals are at a turning point: Normalize Trump or resist him?” (Applebaum, 2019). Indeed, normalizing Trump is arguably among the biggest nightmares of critical pedagogues, which can probably be outweighed only by even more radical tendencies such as calls for US engagement in new wars over resources. However, it cannot be denied that right-wing intellectuals engage in thinking and expressing opinions about contemporary challenges facing our society at least as much as left-wing intellectuals. While it is easy to dismiss certain people as “non-intellectuals” because we disagree with their views, we need to accept that being an intellectual can mean different things to different people.

And what about intellectuals’ education and public reception of their works? Should intellectuals not be educated, well-read, distinguished? Should we perhaps assume that intellectuals—regardless of their positioning within the ideological spectrum—are well-educated people whose opinions carry a lot of weight in our society? Well, it is easy to agree that intellectuals should have a full grasp of theories and be able to relate those to helping non-intellectuals negotiate, cope with, and even transform everyday life. Yet, many intellectuals (historical and contemporary) have not had much formal education, have not possessed degrees, and have not been recognized during their lifetimes. While we can agree that an intellectual should “know stuff,” we don’t know what it is exactly that intellectuals should know, and we don’t know always how to determine whether someone possesses that knowledge.

What we do know, is that intellectuals should not “sell” their opinions. The easiest way to disqualify someone from being an intellectual is to show that they advocate certain worldviews and opinions for personal gain. More often than not, we openly pronounce those selling their attitudes as profiteers and cowards. In the words of Ford and Jandrić (2019: 92), intellectuals are those who “speak truth to power and challenge dominant ways of thinking.” Yet, history shows that this definition is also slippery. What happens when people speak truth to power but get it wrong? For instance, the key European philosopher, Martin Heidegger, made important theoretical contributions which lie at the very basis of critical pedagogy. However, Heidegger is also well known for his public support of Nazism, which brought him a lot of prestige in Germany under Hitler’s regime who bestowed upon him the position of Rector of Freiburg University. Despite Heidegger’s deeply immoral support of the Nazi regime, these days many people (even in the critical pedagogy movement) would nevertheless claim that Heidegger was an intellectual.

As we can see, the notion of the intellectual is indeed very hard to describe. There are some basic shared ideas of what an intellectual might be, but practice is full of borderline cases and surprising twists. Looking for “general” rules, we could proceed to examine the history of the concept of the intellectual, we could compare Western and Eastern traditions, we could look closely at the conflict of interest from these (and many more) perspectives. Such an approach might result in a nice philosophical treatise such as Steve Fuller’s book The Intellectual: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (2005), but it wouldn’t answer our question about what it means to be an intellectual working in the tradition of critical pedagogy. While it is important to acknowledge a wide variety of perspectives and issues, therefore, we turn to the US tradition of critical pedagogy started by Paulo Freire and developed by Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Antonia Darder, Ira Shor and others.

We could start building this theoretical grounding from as far back as Plato. For the sake of brevity, however, we will start with one of the most cited works in the field written at the beginning of 20th century: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1992). Writing in his prison cell between 1929 and 1935 (the notebooks were first published only in the 1950s), Gramsci (1992: 115) argues: “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.” Expanding this thought, he concludes:

When one distinguishes between intellectuals and nonintellectuals, one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals, that is, one has in mind the direction in which their specific professional activity is weighted, whether toward intellectual elaboration or toward muscular-nervous effort. (Gramsci, 1992: 115)

Like a good Marxist, Gramsci sees social relationships primarily through class, and eloquently argues that the left needs its own intellectuals in order to win the class war. He calls these people organic intellectuals. According to a recent definition, an organic intellectual is “an intellectual member of a social class, as opposed to a member of the traditional intelligentsia that regards itself as a class apart from the rest of society” (Wikionary, 2019). Gramsci’s key feature of the organic intellectual, class consciousness, and class identity has retained the key feature of an intellectual working in the tradition of critical pedagogy (see Mayo, 1999). Similar thinking can also be found in works of postcolonial theory from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963), which heavily influenced Paulo Freire, to more recent works such as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), and elsewhere.

Angela Davis, arguably one of the most important US public intellectuals in the second half of 20th century, expands on this thought further. Reminiscing about another great figure of the Frankfurt School for Social Sciences, her teacher, Herbert Marcuse, Davis writes: “He emphasized the important role of intellectuals within oppositional movements, which, I believe, led more intellectuals to frame their work in relation to these movements than would otherwise have done so” (Davis, 2005: xii). As can be seen from the theory and practice of people such as Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse, intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy also need to actively engage in oppositional (popular) movements.

These thoughts are echoed in the early works of founders of the critical pedagogy movement as we know it today:

Influenced by Fanon and Gramsci, Freire was committed to the idea and practice of legitimizing the experiences and knowledge of his students so that organic intellectuals would emerge. These organic intellectuals would in turn be in the best position to contribute to the solutions of the community’s problems since they would know their community, the intricacies of their context, and their problems and solutions better than any expert who had studied the problem merely academically. (Díaz, 2019)

Building on Freire’s work, Giroux and McLaren change the direction of argument—together with speaking of developing students as organic intellectuals, they also examined the theory and practice of developing teachers as public intellectuals. In an early book on the theme, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, Giroux (1988: xxiv) describes this work as “a particular form of cultural politics” and provides an opportunity “for exercising as teachers the dialectic of re-reading and re-appropriating elements of a body of work that resonates with contemporary concerns.”

With a preface by Paulo Freire and an afterword by Peter McLaren, Teachers as Intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) is an important milestone on our road from Gramsci and Fanon through Marcuse and Freire to early Giroux and McLaren. However, there has been a lot of water under the bridge since this milestone book—and our understanding of intellectuals’ work has developed alongside other social developments. In consequence, Teachers as Intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) is much more optimistic than Giroux’s and McLaren’s recent writings. In 2012 Giroux launched a powerful popular attack on the deskilling of teachers through various measurements, depoliticization of education, and even deaths of students in bouts of violence which seem to regularly occur in US schools. The article we are referring to, “The war against teachers as public intellectuals in dark times” (Giroux, 2012), is just one among many writings in which Giroux speaks of teachers as intellectuals—often without even mentioning the word intellectual. Similarly, in 1987 Russell Jacoby (Jacoby, 2000) famously penned a treatise that sounded the death knell of the hardscrabble American intellectual who, far from being the freelance thinker of yesteryear forged in the urban crucible of public debate, had retreated to the icy precincts of academia to ponder the heady ideas of postmodern theory while draped in the jargon laden language no one understands or cares to understand. In a recent article, McLaren (2019b: 328) invokes the Gramscian class struggle and writes:

The challenge is not to ask vanguard intellectuals with too much ink in their veins to lock arms with motley workers on the picket lines but to understand that the fear of those advocating revolution is proportionate to the fear of those who oppose it.

Critical pedagogy’s mission toward emancipation and social justice has remained the same, but the social context in which this mission resides, and the available strategies, have significantly changed. It is worth noting that the term ‘critical pedagogy’ itself has been refigured by McLaren since the mid-1990s at which time he adopted the term, ‘revolutionary critical pedagogy’ to advance the idea that critical pedagogy has been domesticated politically by progressive educators such that it no longer challenges capitalism and needs to return to Marx in advancing the struggle for a socialist alternative to capitalism (McLaren, 2015). McLaren has argued that the left has not offered a clear anti-capitalist alternative to address the coronavirus pandemic and this political vacuum has enabled dangerously bizarre conspiracy theories (such as QAnon) to emerge about the nature of the pandemic and whether or not it even exists.

Since we submitted the first draft of our article, the United States now finds historical inflection point, an unprecedented crucible of crises that seem almost apocalyptic and have been intersecting at a neck snapping pace and becoming increasingly entangled: nationwide protests led by Black Lives Matter in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police, the coronavirus and the crisis of capitalism. According to William Robinson (202 (Robinson, 2020) 0), “[f]renzied financial speculation, unsustainable debt, the plunder of public finance, over-inflated tech stock, and state-organised militarised accumulation have kept the global economy sputtering along in recent years in the face of chronic stagnation, and concealed its instability.” Robinson (2020) warns that the post-pandemic global economy will include more rapid and expansive applications of digitalisation to every aspect of global society, including surveillance technology, war and repression of civil rights protest, enabling a powerful new transnational capitalist bloc (including giant tech companies and the military industrial complex) to consolidate its control over the global economy. It is at this precise juncture that a growing number of Trump supporters have embraced the Nazi-like conspiracy of QAnon. QAnon refers to an anonymous government official known simply as “Q” who communicates clandestinely with his followers, sending cryptic messages suggesting that an event known as “The Storm” is brewing in which Trump will single-handedly crush a global elite pedophile sex trafficking ring run by Democrats and headquartered in Washington, D.C. The QAnon conspiracy cult bleeds into other conspiracies that claim Angela Merkel is Hitler’s granddaughter, Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son, Vladimir Putin is the reincarnation of Rasputin, Bill Gates is planning to use invisible ink to tattoo vaccination status into children's skin, members of the global elite are harvesting children’s blood before they are murdered as a sacrifice to Satan (this echoes anti-Semitic and conspiratorial themes related to blood libel that accuses Jews of sacrificing Christian children to drain their blood for Passover matzo), hundreds of thousands of missing U.S. children are being raped by demons in sex dungeons established by Democrats, all Democrats are possessed by demons, and that the drug adrenochrome, which is derived from the oxidation of the stress hormone adrenaline, is thought to be imbibed by the illuminati and other global elites for its psychedelic high (apparently the drug’s psychedelic prowess was a ruse created by Hunter Thompson). The global elite are believed to manufacture it by first torturing children into a frenzied state of fear, extracting their adrenaline, and then turning into lizards before devouring their quivering flesh. QAnon adherents are poised to take seats in the U.S. Congress. The exponential growth of this cult reveals how so many Americans (and now Europeans) can be duped with such chilling precision into the toxic online ecosystem consisting of Big Tech platforms manipulated by savvy technicians bent on creating havoc. QAnon has now merged into a complex of information systems giving out false information on the coronavirus that could have lethal consequences.

The postdigital challenge of critical intellectuals

Human existence has always been inextricably linked to technologies. The technology of fire enabled early humans to cook their meals, the technology of building shelters and agriculture enabled ancient nomads to settle in one geographical location, and the technology of the wheel enabled ancient peoples to transport large amounts of goods and people from one place to another. All these technologies brought about revolutions in the ways we eat, dwell, and travel; and the latest generation of human technologies, digital technology, is no exception. During recent decades humankind has undergone a deep socio-technological change known by numerous, often bombastic names, as the information revolution, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the network society (see Peters et al., 2019b), and so on. In our recent writings (Jandrić et al., 2018b), we call this the postdigital age. While these concepts are fiercely debated in academic literature (see McLaren and Jandrić, 2014), it is fair to say that we now live in a world where human lives cannot be separated from digital technologies (Fawns, 2019; Jandrić and Kuzmanić, 2020). This socio-technological shift carries deep consequences for intellectual work. All social critique consists of three main elements: (a) things we know about society, which help us develop a critique (available information), (b) ways in which we can express this critique (dissemination of information), and (c) available opportunities for constructive dialog between the critiques (democracy).

These three elements have always been technologically mediated, but the nature of that mediation has radically changed in the last few decades. Most 20th-century theories of what it means to be an intellectual working in the tradition of critical pedagogy have been based on analog, one-way communications: books, magazines, radio, and television. However, today’s intellectuals work in a very different media environment of two-way media supported by the internet (see Castells, 2001). Furthermore, technological changes reach far beyond communication media as they interact with all aspects of our society. While this is not the place for extensive debates of the postdigital condition, the following quotation outlines its basic features:

The contemporary use of the term “postdigital” does describe human relationships to technologies that we experience, individually and collectively, in the moment here and now. It shows our raising awareness of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism. (Jandrić et al., 2018a: 896)

The postdigital condition is not about technology, but it insists that technology co-creates our reality. Speaking of education, Tim Fawns hence rejects the traditional distinction between education and technology:

All teaching should take account of digital and non-digital, material and social. Ideas like “digital education” are useful insofar as they encourage people to look closer at what is happening, but become problematic when used to close down ideas or attribute instrumental or essential properties to technology. (Fawns, 2019: 142)

In a recent publication one of us has already theorized the postdigital challenge of intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy. Taking a broad historical view, and delving into the nature of the postdigital society, the article concludes:

Networks have replaced the detached academic, who if they are to join in the new pedagogy of the public intellectual will do so not as an academic but as a node in an ever-expanding network. It is with this message, that we welcome the birth of the postdigital public intellectual into our world who, it should be clear by now, is always already a collective assemblage whose educational logics run along the lines of collective postdigital study, and not traditional teaching and learning. (Ford and Jandrić, 2019: 105)

Against this theoretical backdrop, we now briefly outline two main areas of intellectual work which seem to have undergone significant transformation and possible responses to this transformation: automation and post-truth.

Automation

The first promise of any human technology is the reduction of labor. A wheel cart helps us to transport more goods than we can carry in our hands; an axe helps us to chop logs that we cannot chop using our hands. During industrial revolutions, however, automation has become more than a tool—it has also become a powerful social force which has significantly impacted employment. Faced with reduction in available workplaces caused by automation, in 1779 the English weaver Ned Ludd destroyed two stocking frames and started a whole movement of workers who destroyed new waving machines, called Luddism. These days we won’t find many people destroying computers which took away their job, but the primitivist refusal of innovation, Luddism, is still a prominent social force (Jandrić, 2017; Peters et al., 2019b).

However, the fallacy of Luddism had already been shown by Karl Marx. Here, we turn to a brilliant summary of Marx’s critique of Luddism offered by Curry Malott:

Marx demonstrates that those same machines used to destroy the working-class under capitalism can liberate workpeople from the need to labor under socialism. Since new value created capitalistically is based on unpaid labor hours, labor saving technology, over time, which reduces the total number of labor hours set in motion, contributes to falling rates of profit. To compensate for this tendency the capitalist class, historically and currently, has found ways to capture ever-larger sums of surplus value … However, if production is planned and driven by human need, as is the case under socialism, then labor-saving machines can actually reduce the number of labor hours society has to commit to the production of needs such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and education. Rather than destroy the instruments of labor they should be sublated and converted into the common property of the broadest masses of workers. (Malott, 2019)

Marx taught us that automation of labor is not a problem—capitalism is the problem. Intellectuals do need to take the connections between automation, unemployment, and education seriously (see Peters et al., 2019b). However:

[t]he idea that more education can resolve the problem of technological unemployment is a political construction which has largely failed to deliver its promise … Instead of attributing responsibility for social change to abstract notions of education, market and technology, a new shared vision is needed where more agency is explicitly attributed to the researchers, teachers, and students who are the genuine human future of work. (Peters et al., 2019a: 242)

Obviously, intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy have an indispensable role in creating this new shared wisdom.

The digital automation of today is very different from the analog automation of factory work critiqued by Marx. We now live in a world where ubiquitous devices collect huge amounts of data, and then feed this data into automated systems called algorithms, to assist us in almost every activity. Phones count our footsteps, self-directed vacuum cleaners send our floorplans to online shops (which then offer to sell us furniture of suitable size while we surf the internet), and automated systems determine our eligibility for support and healthcare. These systems cause a huge number of issues in areas such as privacy and security (Collier and Ross, 2020). And what happens when a system makes a wrong decision? We are now reading an increasing number of testimonies in which people have been wronged by technologies and could not get any help from living human beings (see Eubanks, 2018; Zuboff, 2019).

The 2020 intellectual needs to recognize the postdigital nature of these questions. In Marx’s analysis, automation was not a problem per se because it was confined to the factory—it was capitalism, on top of technology, that was the problem. These days, however, we cannot make a clear distinction between technology and capitalism: today’s technology is everywhere, and capitalism is built into today’s technology. The 2020 intellectual working in the tradition of critical pedagogy cannot afford the luxury of ignoring technology, neither can they be led to believe that technology is the root of social problems. Whether they like it or not, the 2020 intellectual needs to take technology seriously.

Post-truth

A good case in point is the post-truth condition which plagues our political scene, our personal lives, and even our identities. The idea of post-truth has spread rapidly since 2016, when the Oxford Dictionary declared it their word of the year (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016). In a more recent definition, The Oxford Learner Dictionary (2019) defines post-truth as “relating to circumstances in which people respond more to feelings and beliefs than to facts” and immediately gives an example: “In this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and reach any conclusion you like.” Looking at this definition, the post-truth condition does not seem in any way related to technology, as one could argue that some people have always relied more on feelings than on facts. Indeed, authors like Jodi Dean (Dean et al., 2019) and Henry Frankfurt (2005) were writing about similar issues in great depth decades ago. But—and it is a truly big but—the post-truth condition became prominent with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and especially his use of Twitter (Oliver, 2020). This sudden bout of popularity did not arrive out of thin air, it was based on technological developments that have allowed the expansion of post-truth rhetoric to previously unforeseen heights.

Weeks after post-truth was declared the 2016 word of the year, everyone seemed to be writing about it. Periodically returning to the post-truth condition over the years, Giroux (2019) links it to the development of fascism. Jandrić (2018: 119b) claims that postdigital critical pedagogues need to develop a “critical pedagogy of trust.” Michael Peters (2018: 148) writes:

It takes little imagination to draw some conclusions from this melange of past examples to understand that the notion of “facts” and “evidence” in a post-truth era not only affects politics and science, but also becomes a burning issue for education at all levels.

A recent Special Issue, “Lies, bullshit and fake news: Should we be worried?” examines the postdigital nature of post-truth (MacKenzie and Bhatt, 2020b). The first paper in the Special Issue develops a nuanced view of the relations between post-truth and its infrastructure:

Although Twitter has made post-truth political rhetoric easier, I suggest it may yet be possible to find ways either to resist enthralment by learning to play this game better or even by engaging with the fundamental logic that favours these specific forms in the first place. Rather than feeling limited to either opting out or remaining silent, it may instead be possible to change the debate through, for example, coopting the software layer by marshalling bots in more effective ways, developing laws that protect groups from violence and aggression (on any platform, not just Twitter), or simply by turning the sceptical gaze back onto the political moves made to discredit expertise. (Oliver, 2020: 35)

Subsequent papers look into various aspects of the post-truth problem such as critical media literacy; many of them make direct reference to Paulo Freire and the critical pedagogy movement. Thus, Carr et al. (2020: 53) write: “In an era where truth is played like a bluffing game, the first and most important principle in facing misinformation is to encourage and cultivate critical thinking and engagement in and through education.” While this is not the space for a detailed elaboration of all insights developed in the Special Issue, the final paper nicely summarizes its main message: “As our information ecosystem becomes increasingly complex, unpredictable, and balkanised educators have a vital role in helping an informed public navigate what it encounters online” (MacKenzie and Bhatt, 2020a: 217).

Post-truth is among the clearest contemporary examples of complexities facing contemporary intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy. Our information ecosystems are not confined to the workplace, and we need to combat truth in each and every interaction we make. Technology shapes post-truth discourse, and simultaneously offers new affordances for developing counter-discourses; while technology is not all there is, it does need to be taken very seriously. Traditional critical pedagogy can offer us plenty of theoretical guidance, but this guidance is at a high theoretical plane; practical strategies for combatting post-truth need to be developed pretty much from scratch. “The postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation” (Jandrić et al., 2018a: 895), and intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy, in our postdigital age, need to accept uncertainties and complexities which arrive from that position.

Who remembers Greta Thunberg?

As we wrote the first version of this text in late 2019, a 16-year-old Swedish child Greta Thunberg has just started a heated debate about the environmental consequences of capitalism. Blaming older generations for stealing the future of our planet’s children, Thunberg has gained significant media attention and inspired a worldwide wave of environmental protests. While her actions are extremely important and remarkable, Thunberg did not say anything new about the dangers of global warming. The content of her claims has been known for decades, and has been continuously present in the critical pedagogy movement (e.g., Kahn, 2010). So what makes Thunberg’s actions so powerful? How did she manage to get her message across to the whole world? More importantly, why did we not manage to get the same message across to the world in all these years before Thunberg?

One aspect of Thunberg’s success is technology. Others are the structure of contemporary media, her youth, and her parents’ and teachers’ support. And yet another aspect that we would hate to see neglected is Thunberg’s brilliance—she, among millions of children, has managed to do something that no-one else has done. While this may seem like a stretch, we believe that Greta Thunberg is a true postdigital public intellectual and critical pedagogue. She speaks truth to power. She challenges theoretical assumptions of contemporary capitalism. She organizes, networks, acts. She develops our sense of collectivity and enables collective action. While she could not be further from traditional educational systems, Thunberg teaches the world some important lessons; she also makes many of us want to learn more about the arguments surrounding environmental debates. We cannot all become like Greta Thunberg, but studying her example has the potential to improve our theories and practices.

We submitted the first version of this article days before the outbreak of Covid-19, and we are now making our revisions approximately six months into the pandemic. In the meantime, we have pointed toward the need to study the effects of the pandemic as they unfold (Jandrić, 2020). We have explored the concept of viral modernity (Peters et al., 2020a) and have expanded it toward a viral theory of post-truth (Peters et al., 2020b). We have also explored religious responses to the pandemic (McLaren, 2020). And we are not the only people who have suddenly refocused their work—in fields from medicine, through education, to logistics, and many others, most researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners have joined their efforts in the “war” against the immediate threat of Covid-19 (Wagener, 2020). Very recently, while we discussed revisions to this article, one of us asked: “Who remembers Greta Thunberg?” While we can find an occasional article about themes such as non-human animal trauma (O’Sullivan, 2020) and biopolitical management of human populations (Lewis, 2020), environmental questions have definitely slipped out of humanity’s collective focus during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our experience of this sudden pandemic outbreak may be out of the ordinary, but it does point toward a larger principle. In order to make a difference, public intellectuals should combine the ephemeral nature of their public appearances with engagement in longer-lasting measures such as policy development. With time, Greta Thunberg’s viral j’accuse speeches will cease to attract so many clicks and eyeballs, yet policies she managed to influence will continue to shape the lives of millions. Certainly, this does not imply that postdigital intellectuals should somehow stop being “public” or that they should transform into politicians and lobbyists. However, this does send a clear message that a postdigital public intellectual and critical pedagogy should simultaneously work on many fronts, combining public appearances with political organizing and policy work.

Conclusion

This article started with a brief analysis of what it means to be an intellectual. We examined the main theoretical insights from the US tradition of critical pedagogy and situated them in the contemporary postdigital context. We looked into two main areas of intellectual work which seem to have undergone significant transformation—automation and post-truth—and examined possible ways that contemporary critical intellectuals might respond to these challenges. We promoted Greta Thunberg as an important example of a postdigital intellectual who has the power to inspire, encourage, teach, and learn from those, to paraphrase Freire (1998), who dare to be critical intellectuals in our postdigital times. Finally, we concluded that postdigital public intellectuals should wear many hats, including but not limited to those of public personae, policy-makers, lobbyists, and others.

The concept of the intellectual has always defied definition, and it is impossible to provide firm primers or guidelines about what it means to be an intellectual working in the tradition of critical pedagogy. The tradition of critical pedagogy provides an indispensable theoretical background for contemporary intellectuals, yet our strategies and practices are in a need of constant reconceptualization in and for the postdigital times in which we live. The continuous reimagination and reinvention of our theories and practices, and their joining together in the concept of critical praxis, are the true critical pedagogue’s starting points for responding to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Footnotes

Author's Note

Petar Jandrić is also affiliated with University of Wolverhampton, UK.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Petar Jandrić

Note

Petar Jandrić is Professor at the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Croatia, and Visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His previous academic affiliations include Croatian Academic and Research Network, National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, and Cass School of Education at the University of East London. Petar’s research interests are situated at the post-disciplinary intersections between technologies, pedagogies, and society, and research methodologies of his choice are inter-, trans-, and anti-disciplinarity. He is Editor-in-Chief of Postdigital Science and Education journal and book series.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies at Chapman University, USA, and Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. He is also Emeritus Professor of Urban Education, UCLA, USA, and Emeritus Professor of Educational Leadership, Miami University of Ohio, USA. He is also Honorary Director of the Center for Critical Studies in Education in Northeast Normal University, China. He is the author/editor of over 40 books including Postdigital Dialogues on Critical Pedagogy, Liberation Theology and Information Technology (McLaren and Jandrić, 2020).

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Critical intellectuals in postdigital times

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Who is an intellectual?

The postdigital challenge of critical intellectuals

Automation

Post-truth

Who remembers Greta Thunberg?

Conclusion

Footnotes

Author's Note

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Note

References