Abstract
Contemporary efforts to rethink the philosophical foundation of critical pedagogy are part of the ongoing project to make the field relevant to current struggles against oppression. Inherent to this project is an invitation to account for the plurality of ways and spaces in which privilege is performed in North American society and the troubling relations between privilege and oppression. The author employs Iris Young's social group concept to frame the construction of the Privileged Social Group (PSG), which, he contends, is a collectivity that has and continues to create relations to Others that systematically result in a range of social benefits for PSG members. The author defines the PSG through an analysis of its social position and the relational performances that it enacts to claim and maintain privilege. Three distinct social contexts in which the PSG is active are also examined, as well as two group control techniques through which PSG members influence one another's beliefs and behaviour for the purpose of claiming privilege as a group.
