Disenfranchisement: An Essay on the Infrastructure of Critique

By Rasmus Willig

Why is it important to take a critical approach to your work? And what are the consequences if your critical voice is suppressed? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Disenfranchisement , which focuses on the deteriorating possibilities for a group of kindergarten staff members to utter criticism and influence their work places. The central point of the book is that the inability to criticise is closely related to a more general process of disenfranchisement that is corroding the lives of staff both professionally and privately. Through interviews with kindergarten workers, the book reveals how these processes have resulted in a widespread sense of powerlessness and paralysis. This book is for anyone who seeks a conceptualisation of the feeling that it has become more worthwhile to keep silent than to speak your mind - a widespread impression in a time when several groups in the public sector, including nurses, teachers, kindergarten workers and police officers, report increased political control and a lack of tolerance of critical voices in a neoliberal era. The book focuses on the informal norms that determine our ability to criticise, rather than on the formal, statutory rights of freedom of speech, press and assembly.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3034308469
• ISBN13: 9783034308465
• Release Date: July 2012
• Publisher: Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publis
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.8"