Striving against the Eclipse of Democracy Henry A. Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice

This paper focuses on the work of Henry Giroux and attempts to provide a coherent overview and critical analysis of his extremely large output spanning almost thirty years. It traces the evolution of his thought throughout this period and discusses such aspects of his work and themes as his engagement with Freire’s work, his treatment of social class and race, his contribution to cultural studies, his trenchant critique of the Bush Jr years as well as of the corporisation of various aspects of the public sphere including schooling and higher education, his notion and analysis of different forms of ‘public pedagogy,’ his contibution to a politics of Educated Hope and to the development of a substantive democracy, and his treatment of the recurring theme of the war being waged on different fronts against youth and children.