Tom Boland

1. Ideas matter. In politics, ideas can be powerful. Yet, beyond such truisms, how other people’s ideas are ‘problematised’ or framed within discourse warrants sustained analysis. Herein, I examine...

Defining the principles and practices of walking as critical pedagogy, this book engages with social questions and challenges related to understandings of the Anthropocene. Through a series of chapters that operationalize walking as a form of participatory pedagogy, it explores issues including migration and borders, sustainability and climate change, gender and feminist thought, the labour market, crime and rehabilitation, and urban life and regeneration. Showing how walking enables us to learn creatively, convivially and critically on the move in city spaces, while thinking relationally, the authors demonstrate the importance of space, time and place: the layers of history embedded in the present, and the importance of active, embodied, participatory, collaborative, creative and place based learning. A pioneering approach to walking as a form of engagement and learning, Walking as Critical Pedagogy will appeal to researchers and students across the social sciences interested in new methods and research methodologies, and creative ways of teaching and learning about – and engaging with – major global issues in society.

Chapter 7, ‘Seeing the Labour Market Unfold: Encounters on the Street Level’, engages with the authors’ decade-long work on work, labour and welfare, their use of walking in fieldwork with students and particularly as part of an annual PhD summer school, and their project of ‘seeing the labour market’. Situating the labour market in a sociological genealogy of experiences of ‘the economy’, the walk ‘attempts to grasp the elusive labour market’. Walking as critical pedagogy ‘challenges scholars to walk themselves out of the troublesome irrational rationalities of scientistic approaches’ and is presented as ‘a way of reconnecting relations to the world – to marginalised people’ ‘to our senses’ and also ‘to nature’, and it is also presented as ‘a way to isolate ourselves from the noise of everyday life so that we can think’. Walking, for Tom Boland and Ray Griffin, offers a generative alternative methodology and epistemology that facilitates critical theoretical analysis through ‘a processual way of seeing the world’. The walk provides a methodologically and epistemologically distinctive way of seeing ‘the challenges faced by those who are actively searching for employment’ as ‘a realm of uncertainty and waiting, where one never knows when an opportunity might arise’.

The introductory chapter, co-written by all the authors, contextualises the book in the literature on critical pedagogy and the new walking studies and theoretically and methodologically sets out the principles and practice of walking as critical pedagogy subsequently explored in each of the book chapters.

Unemployment scarring has been adopted as a key concept in social policy, and despite being variously defined and inadequately theorised, it is widely used to justify the administration of labour market activation policies. Herein, we develop a critical genealogy of scarring, exploring a recently crystallised concept that amalgamates empirical work on labour detachments, discouraged workers, signalling, reservation wage fluctuation, and hysteresis; then yokes this distinct formulation together with behavioural economics research on the psychological impacts of unemployment. Scarring as translated into social policy is cleaved from the complexity of its labour market economic origins, particularly methodological limitations, and becomes an evocative shorthand, a black‐box explanation of unemployment. Our genealogy suggests that scarring is not conceptually robust enough to support and justify activation and workfare, and more broadly, explores the complex relationship of policy problems and policy solutions.

Contemporary commentators, primarily on the broad right, tend to critique their opponents as being ‘just like a religion’, invoking figures of zealots, dogma, mantras, high priests and so forth. While openness to debate is often a key value of these commentators, this discursive manoeuvre tends to position the other as an unthinking ideologue or a duplicitous manipulator, not worth engagement. This critique has become commonplace from books to social media, disfiguring opponents as ‘post-modernists’, ‘critical social justice’ or ‘woke’ in a negative valance. These ‘iconoclastic critics’ position themselves as reasonable, dedicated to debate, and describe opponents via a dichotomy of ideology and critique, employing metaphors of depth. Crucially, they tend to distort or disfigure their opponents’ claims, redescribing them through religious metaphors. This analysis informs a reflexive consideration of critical discourse generally and considers the extent to which characteristics of this ‘iconoclastic critique’ are shared across political divides.

The Irish ‘Decade of Centenaries' closed in 2023, coinciding with the centenary of the founding of the Frankfurt School. The SAI Social Theory group gathered members and guests to a Symposium at University of Galway in March 2023 to consider the legacy of the Frankfurt school, marking the centenary of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung). Rather than following a rather well-established academic custom and focusing on commentaries and exegeses, the contributors embraced the ethos of Critical Theory by exploring the present-time relevance of the passions and aspirations of the Frankfurt School scholars. This article introduces the Special Issue ‘Critical Theory Today: One hundred years of the Frankfurt School’, which consists of papers inspired by the symposium, the product of reflections and conversations. The collection centers on the critical conundrum of the contemporary coexistence of the tendencies towards containment and instigation of radical socio-political change.