Night School

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” We discuss the thoughts of Paulo Freire and his canonical work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.

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“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” These famous words of German philosopher Karl Marx resonated for more than a century. But what did he really intend by them?

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With almost all of us living in the shadow of the nation-state, its probably good to ask what we feel about it. Shahril Hamdan joins Fuad and Sharaad to discuss Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence, taken from the introductory essay to the collection entitled, "Nation and Narration".

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Dancer and researcher Nezia Azmi joins Night School to talk about the work of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner and his notion of liminality in performance. In this stage of in-betweenness, new forms and identities can be formed. Nezia walks us through the contemporary relevance of this idea.

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“Reason is like a runner who doesn’t know that the race is over, or like Penelope, constantly undoing what it creates… It is better suited to pulling things down than to building them up, and better at discovering what things are not, than what they are.” This week we explore the work of 17th Century philosopher Pierre Bayle.

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Cultural relativism is the idea that different cultures have different sets of moral values and therefore there is no such thing as a universal and objective morality. Your hosts explore the consequences of accepting this argument.

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The little known book “Myths and the Malay Ruling Class” by Sharifah Maznah Syed Omar come into focus in this episode. The book of literary criticism focuses on key texts of the classical Malay periods from Sejarah Melayu, Hikayat Hang Tuah and Merong Mahawangsa. The show grapples with the mythic in political discourse.

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The British cultural critic F.R Leavis penned these words "When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not." With the help of Nottingham University's Sean Matthews we explore the essay "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture".  

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