Talk Dirty/Get Arrested: Policing Social Class Discourse in Education Cultural Studies

Abstract

This article is a search for the promises of public education and the place where they are broken by progressive critics feeding at the academic and professional trough. It is an indictment of the exploitation of proliferating education academic simulations of working-class solidarity, borrowing the image of emancipation while feeding off the social capital of postmodernist sign value. The author conducts this exploration as a fellow edu-racketeer, too often guilty himself of this phony lifestyle radicalism. The author uses a comic bit and surrealist techniques to pry open the lid of these researches. In homage to Lenny Bruce, the author charts the course of censorship and academic exclusion from the American Educational Studies Association, where a few radicals who write about transgression threw the author out of the conference and the conversation, because he actually, not virtually, transgressed.

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