Repowering Intellectual Life - bell hooks and the Critique of Racial Education - Roberta Ferrari

Aug 27, 2026

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For bell hooks, the relationship between teaching and learning is historically grounded in how knowledge is located within differences of race, class, and gender. Her reflection on education examines the hierarchies universities reaffirm and the spaces of thought they make possible. In response to the corporatization of the U.S. university and the institutionalization of women’s and Black studies, hooks advances a radical vision: teaching as transgression and learning as a collective process of transformation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Core argument

Critique of the corporate university classroom

Radical vision of education

Repowering Intellectual Life. bell hooks and the Critique of Racial Education Roberta Ferrari Submitted: November 23, 2022 – Revised version: December 20, 2022 Accepted: February 23, 2023 – Published: March 6, 2023 Abstract For bell hooks, the relationship between teaching and learning is historical. What the academy is from the perspective of a concept of knowledge that is historically located within differences of race, class and gender, what hierarchies it reaffirms and what spaces of thought it opens is the focus of hooks’ reflection on education. Faced with the corporatization of the US university, the institutionalization of women’s and black studies, hooks puts forward a radical vision of education, which considers teaching a transgression of any “bureaucratization of the mind:” learning is about opening up a process of collective transformation. Keywords: bell hooks; engaged pedagogy; feminism; liberation; community. Roberta Ferrari: University of Bologna (Italy) 􀃑 roberta.ferrari6@unibo.it; 􀂑 https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/roberta.ferrari6 Roberta Ferrari holds a PhD in History of Political Thought and is a teaching tutor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. Her main research interests concern late Victorian and early 20th century England, Ireland and European Socialism, the birth of the welfare state and planning in the 1930s in Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States. She also works on feminist and Marxist theory. Copyright © 2023 Roberta Ferrari This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License. [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) 27 All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if weare to transform educational institutions—and society—so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.1 1 Engaged Pedagogy. Teaching as a Political Act In the weeks before the English Department at Oberlin College was about to decide whether or not I would be granted tenure, I was haunted by dreams of running away—of disappearing—yes, even of dying. These dreams were not a response to fear that I would not be granted tenure. They were a response to the reality that I would be granted tenure. I was afraid that I would be trapped in the academy forever.2 This confession reveals bell hooks’ critics of the academy as a space that traps teaching and learning in the rules of “the corporate university classroom,”3 “a degree-centered context” and hardly a space where learning can be practiced as a process of collective transformation,“a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership.”4 In the context of what has been called US “corporate university”5 and “academic capitalism,”6 describing the complicated relationship between Black Studies and Women’s Studies programs and dominant “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal values,”7 hooks has the audacity to propose the “building of a teaching community.”8 Since the academy has been not only a “knowledge factory”9 but also a place of contested and critical knowledge, of mobilizations crucial to feminist struggle,10 the increasing privatization of U.S. higher education institutions has had profound consequences not only on feminist work in the academy, but especially on that radical attempt to face the historical conflict between feminism and antiracism and to resist the “management of race” in the liberal academy since the ‘80s.11 The globalization of North American academy12 has led to a less segregated space but has not necessarily really hit and affected what hooks calls the “domineering mentality”13 at the base of the institutionalization of multiculturalism in the academy. Her work is therefore an innovative attempt to theorize 1. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. Educat

FAQs

What historical relationship does bell hooks identify between teaching and learning?

Hooks treats teaching and learning as historically grounded in how knowledge is shaped by race, class, and gender differences.

How does the corporatization of the U.S. university affect education according to the text?

It leads to institutional and cultural consequences that undermine radical educational work, especially feminist efforts in the academy.

What does hooks propose as an alternative vision for education?

Education should be understood as collective transformation, where teaching functions as transgression of bureaucratized thinking and builds a teaching community.

Aug 27, 2026

Upload by Violet