Pedagogies of the Enfleshed
Critical communication pedagogy, otherwise
Pedagogies of the Enfleshed: Critical Communication Pedagogy, Otherwise (Lexington Press, 2024) proffers a historic account of the rise of education and in turn of communication studies as a distinct field of study. In so doing, Loretta LeMaster relocates communication’s disciplinary origins less in the mythos of the Ancient Greeks and more accurately in the historic context of U.S. settler colonial development and ever-expanding empire. The author argues that the point of critical communication pedagogy otherwise isn’t to instill critical sensibilities into our teaching but to instead draw on lived experience as grounds for more effectively using communication to intervene in oppressive relations across (in)formal pedagogical contexts and in service of liberatory change.
Where critical communication pedagogy desires reform, critical communication pedagogy otherwise labors in service of liberation within the long arc of revolutionary change beginning from y/our vantage as educators-as-learners. Indeed, after multiple recessions, growing climate collapse, ongoing U.S.-funded genocides, escalating fascisms, amassing white nationalisms, and amid an ongoing global pandemic, the author insists we need new critical communication pedagogy tools or, at minimum, approaches to communication pedagogy that support for critical worldmaking efforts beyond recognition and often with little to no resource support at the local level. This book offers one such attempt.