G. Honor Fagan - Culture, Politics, and Irish School Dropouts: Constructing Political Identities (Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series)

Cover

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Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series

Building Communities of Difference:
Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
William G. Tierney

The Problem of Freedom in Postmodern Education
Tomasz Szkudlarek

Education Still under Siege: Second Edition
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux

Media Education and the (Re)Production of Culture
David Sholle and Stan Denski

Critical Pedagogy: An Introductlon
Barry Kanpol

Coming Out in College: The Struggle for a Queer Identity
Robert A. Rhoads

Education and the Postmodern Condition
Michael Peters, editor

Critical Multiculturalism:
Uncommon Voices in a Common Struggle
Barry Kanpol and Peter McLaren, editors

Beyond Liberation and Excellence:
Reconstructing the Public Discourse on Education
David E. Purpel and Svi Shapiro

Schooling in a Total Institution:
Critical Perspectives on Prison Education
Howard S. Davidson, editor

Simulation, Spectacle, and the Ironies of Education Reform
Guy Senese with Ralph Page

Repositioning Feminism and Education:
Perspectives on Educating for Social Change
Janice Jipson, Petra Munro, Susan Victor, Karen Froude Jones, and Gretchen Freed-Rowland

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Culture, Politics,
and Irish School Dropouts

Constructing Political Identities

G. Honor Fagan

Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series
Edited by Henry A. Giroux and Paulo Freire

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fagan, G. Honor.
Culture, politics, and Irish school dropouts : constructing
political identities / G. Honor Fagan.
p. cm. (Critical studies in education and culture series,
ISSN 10648615)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0897894391 (alk. paper)
1. School dropoutsIrelandAttitudes. 2. School dropouts
IrelandInterviews. 3. Group identityIreland. 4. Politics and
educationIreland. 5. EducationSocial aspectsIreland.
I. Title. II. Series.
LC145.I73F34 1995
371.291309417dc20 956949

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright 1995 by G. Honor Fagan

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 956949

ISBN: 0897894391
ISSN: 10648615

First published in 1995

Bergin & Garvey, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.481984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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One of the central characteristics of radical social theories within the last decade has been a move away from the singularity of class or gender as a defining principle of identity and political struggle. In part, such a theoretical move has opened up the possibility for recognizing the multiple subject positions that constitute any claim to identity. In more specific terms, it has meant recognizing the complex ways in which identities are formed, lived out, and reconstructed. It has also brought about a renewed interest in addressing how domination, accommodation, and resistance works itself out within specific institutional and cultural sites. Similarly, the pluralization of identity has generated a renewed interest in the importance of a discourse of critical agency and a renewed hope in constructing energized social movements based on democratic models of struggle.

It is worth noting that the field of critical education has a distinguished history of remarkable ethnographic studies that explore how student identities are constructed within the often repressive atmosphere of schools. But most of the theoretical work done in this field bears the weight of a historical time in which domination

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either appears to close off the possibility for active social change or is defined so narrowly that it unconsciously reproduces its own brand of racist and sexist discrimination. Even where such studies became more inclusive around issues of class, race, and gender, they suffered from a refusal to link complex representations of identity formation to broader considerations of how to reconstruct public life as part of a radical democratic project. Too much of this workin its attempt to provide access to the voices of subordinate groups of studentsvalidated such voices, and experiences were either constructed or might be critically engaged. Experience appeared, in these studies, to guarantee its own politics as well as a particular species of anti-intellectualization.