[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Giroux2.jpg” caption=”Henry Giroux”]McMaster's Henry Giroux, the Global TV Network Chair in Communications in the Faculty of Humanities, will present his inaugural public lecture this week.

Entitled, “Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism,” his talk will take place Thursday, March 24 at 4 p.m. in the McMaster University Student Centre, Rm. 319. A reception will follow.

In this talk, Giroux will argue that cultural studies' long standing interests in the interrelationship among power, politics, and culture is much too important in the present moment to be relegated to the passing of another academic fashion.

“Matters of agency, consciousness, pedagogy, rhetoric, and persuasion are central to any public discourse about politics, not to mention education itself,” he says. “This talk argues that culture is a central sphere of politics; it is the one site that offers both a language of critique and possibility, a site in which matters of economy, institutional relations of power, globalization, and politics can be recognized, critically understood, and collectively engaged.”

The promise of cultural studies, he says, especially as a fundamental aspect of higher education, does not reside in a false opposition between culture and politics, but in a project that bridges these concerns as part of a larger transformative and democratic politics in which matters of pedagogy and agency play a central role.

Giroux is an internationally-renowned educator, who came to McMaster last May from Pennsylvania's Penn State University. His primary research areas are cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, social theory and the politics of higher education. He was named in 2002 as one of the 20th century's top contributors in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education. He has written more than 300 articles and 40 books and had his work translated into languages around the world.