1. Knowledge and Experience

2. Knowledge and Experience everyday thought vs. scientific thought
What thinking is like in the pervasive contexts of people’s lives?
What kind of knowledge underlies lived-in experience?
What people do in weekly, monthly, ordinary cycles of activity?
relation of social (cultural system) and individual
experience

3. Knowledge and Experience everyday thought vs. scientific thought
methods / models (functionalist vs. practice theory):
cognitive science (1970s) (focuses on problem-solving; practice/knowledge emanates from scientific thought; informs education, research) learning transfer / knowledge domains
anthropologists (detailed knowledge of ‘real life’ activities & situations; now also informs education) activity of persons-acting in setting / located nature of activity

4. Knowledge and Experience everyday thought vs. scientific thought
Problem-solving:
individual, rational, cognitive, experiment, information processing
life skills disembodied from contexts of use; extraction of knowledge from particular experience, activity, context, in order to make it generally applicable in all situations

5. Knowledge and Experience everyday thought vs. scientific thought
Lived-in, in situ action:
socially contextualized experience in ways that require theorizing
empirical description, or analysis
ethnographic study of that process

6. Knowledge and Experience everyday thought vs. scientific thought
Why important? power relation of whose thought / knowledge worlds are expressed in education, institutions, social processes
Lave, Cognition in Practice
deCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life

7. Knowledge and Power

8. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge systems (Foucault)
hegemony (Gramsci)
critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.)

9. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge systems (Foucault)

10. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
hegemony (Gramsci; 1930s)
ability in certain historical periods of the dominant classes to exercise social and cultural leadership and by these means, rather than direct coercion of subordinate classes, to maintain their power over the economic, political, and cultural direction of the nation

11. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
hegemony does not operate by having people concede power against their common sense, but we bear complicity in our own subordination
winning of consent to unequal class relations (peasants-workers’ strike in Italy)

12. _____________________________________
Gramsci and Hegemony
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ilkustration credit:
Introducing Cultural Studies
(Icon Books, 1999)

13. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
hegemony binds a society together without the use of force, under the leadership of the dominant classes
how achieved? manipulations of images and meanings; institutions as producers of sense, knowledge, and meaning

14. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
realm of consciousness and representations: when totality of social, cultural and individual experience is capable of being made sense of in terms that are defined, established and put into circulation by the power bloc

15. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
realm of cultural agency of institutions (the state, the law, the educational system, the media, the family): prolific producers of sense, knowledge, and meanings; organizers and producers of individual consciousness; yet institutions are taken as impartial or neutral, representative of everybody (no apparent reference to class, race or gender)

16. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
institutions (cont): site on which hegemony can be established and exercised if captured or colonized by a power bloc which finds allies in professionals and managers and intellectuals of various kinds (subaltern classes) who perceive their interest as congruent to or identical with those of the dominant group

17. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
Results? Hegemony naturalizes what is historically a class ideology, and renders it into the form of common sense
Power is exercised not as force but as authority; cultural aspects of life are depoliticised; ideology is naturalized
Culture seen as mode of domination and liberation (cultural studies)

18. ____________________________________
illustration credit:
Introducing Cultural Studies
(Icon Books, 1999)
Gramsci and Hegemony
____________________________________
consent
compromise
culture as site of struggle of competing interests
intellectuals forge consent in the interest of the ruling class

19. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.)
analysis of culture in terms of its relationships to a mode of production and its specific social formation

20. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
culture is a form of superstructure which articulates the interests and ideologies of those who control the economic base of society (reductionism, economic determinism)
recognition that institutions are involved in distribution of power in society

21. Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society
capitalist mode of production structure political, legal and cultural institutions of their time
contribution: analysis of art, literary form and ideology, reading of cultural texts as expressions of social experience and ideology