Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Combining mythos (myth) with episteme (“science”), this presentation “theorizes” about and critically analyzes the undemocratic and dehumanizing “discontents” of Globalization, and in M.Castells’ terminology, the Information/Technological Epistemological Paradigm (ITEP). Using the Greek myths of Agamemnon and Prometheus it is staged as a duology (a two-episode performance) whose hypothesis/plot is twofold: (a) the dehumanizing consequences of Globalization and the ITEP on knowledge, pedagogy, society and the individual, and (b) the “re-enchantment”re-invention of Humanistic Paideia -- the cultivation of the mind and the soul. In the first episode, I shall use the myth of Agamemnon, as dramatized in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, to view critically the dehumanizing effects of Globalization and ITEP (e.g. instrumental rationality, possessive individualism, restriction of the public domain, pedagogy of the oppressed, deskilling of teachers, sacrifice of humanistic culture and the paideia of the soul), and the construction of a “post-human” homo economicus/ homo barbarus rather than what Martha Nussbaum would call a homo civilis and homo humanus cosmopolitan citizen. In the second episode, I shall use the myth of Prometheus, as dramatized in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, to argue for the “re-invention” of Humanistic Paideia to empower, to liberate and to “humanize” the anthropos-politis (citizen-human/person) in the globalized Knowledge/Learning Cosmopolis.