Books & Chapters
https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/1445
2024-03-28T18:05:01ZThe Modern Practice of Adult Education: A Postmodern Critique
https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/2001
The Modern Practice of Adult Education: A Postmodern Critique
Briton, Derek
1996-01-01T00:00:00ZThe Teaching Imaginary: Collective Identity in a Post-Prefixed Age
https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/1558
The Teaching Imaginary: Collective Identity in a Post-Prefixed Age
Briton, Derek
Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental
questions: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and in
what are we? What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking? Society must
define its identity, its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the
objects it contains, its needs and its desires. Without the answer to these
questions, without these definitions, there can be no human world, no society, no
culture for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos. The role of imaginary
significations is to provide an answer to these questions, an answer that, obviously,
neither reality, nor rationality can provide. (Castoriadis, 1998, pp. 146 147)
2002-01-01T00:00:00ZThe Case of Alberta Education: Retooling Through Deschooling
https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/1556
The Case of Alberta Education: Retooling Through Deschooling
Kachur, Jerrold L.; Briton, Derek
Until the recent election of Mike Harris’s conservatives in Ontario, the siege mentality of
economic crisis in Canada was nowhere more apparent than in Alberta. Haunted by the
costly limitations of diversification strategies undertaken during the 1980s, Alberta’s
conservatives have rejected the statist conservatism of the Lougheed and Getty years in
favour of a new form of neoliberal conservatism under premier Ralph Klein. This neoliberal
conservatism, otherwise known as New Right politics, combines laissez-faire economics
with cultural and political conservatism.1 Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives are committed
to both a dis- and re-mantling of government. In keeping with the tenets of neoliberalism,
their call is for a smaller, noninterventionist state when it comes to economic policy, but at
the same time, in keeping with the tenets of conservatism, they call for a stronger state when
it comes to issues of social control and cultural regulation.
Consequently, Klein and Alberta’s new breed of conservatives have committed
themselves to a process of “reinventing government” in order to establish an “Alberta
Advantage” in the world market. The result: a transformation of the Province’s public sector
according to a logic Osborne and Gaebler refer to as an American perestroika.2 Klein's
initiatives have won praise from The Wall Street Journal and support from the foremost
promoters of neoliberal state policy in Canada: the Fraser Institute and Canada West
Foundation.3 But Klein’s predecessors—Peter Lougheed and Don Getty—have publicly
criticized Alberta’s new breed of conservatives for divesting themselves of traditional Tory
social obligation. Such criticisms are confirmed by more comprehensive reviews that
describe Klein’s social and education reform in Alberta as a revolution, a deepening
Americanization of Canada, and a corporate assault on Canadian schools.4
1998-01-01T00:00:00ZPsychoanalysis and Pedagogy: Or Teaching/Research/Writing as a Living Practice
https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/1554
Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy: Or Teaching/Research/Writing as a Living Practice
Briton, Derek
The veil of representation actually conceals nothing; there is nothing behind
representation. Yet the fact that representation seems to hide, to put an arbored screen of
signifiers in front of something hidden beneath, is not treated by Lacan as a simple error
that the subject can undo; nor is this deceptiveness of language treated as something that
undoes the subject, deconstructs its identity by menacing its boundaries. Rather,
language’s opacity is taken as the very cause of the subject’s being, that is, its desire, or
want-to-be. The fact that it is materially impossible to say the whole truth—that truth
always backs away from language, that words always fall short of their goal—founds the
subject.1
1997-01-01T00:00:00ZLearning the Subject of Desire
https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/1549
Learning the Subject of Desire
Briton, Derek
1997-01-01T00:00:00Z