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Critical Theory: Frankfurt School
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Critical Theory is a broad tradition based upon the use of the critique as a method of investigation (McCarthy, 1991). The primary characteristic of this school of thought is that social theory, whether reflected to educational research, art, philosophy, literature, or business, should play a significant role in changing the world, not just recording information. The first generation of critical theorists working in Frankfurt between WWI and WWII, rejected rationalism, or the positivist understanding of research, although not scientific analysis as a whole, and embraced modernism and the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
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Arguing against the postmodern claim that systematic theory is unable to account for difference, Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of cultural judgement and social change. With music as her model for theory, Hanrahan explores the role of time, the creation of meaning, the identification of difference, and the basis for judgements in cultural life. In doing so she provides a foundation for the critique of cultural objects and practices that avoids both the elitism of traditional aesthetics and the unwavering relativism of so much contemporary cultural analysis. A broad-ranging and deeply philosophical work building on the scholarship of the Frankfurt School, Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture drives home the need for critique in the evaluation and revision of social knowledge and of the institutions of democratic civic life.
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The term Critical theory has its origins in the 20th century Frankfurt School, and now is associated with scholars across a range of disciplines. Among these scholars, Anthony Giddens and Jurgen Habermas are two who have been particularly influential in the current project. In media studies, scholars employing a Critical approach include persons such as Andrew Calabrese, Janice Peck, John Durham Peters, Hanno Hardt, Todd Gitlin, Douglas Kellner, Kevin Robins, Slavko Splichal, Thomas Streeter, Dan Schiller, Janet Wasko, and others. While early research in this tradition focused on class oppression, more recent works have argued that focusing only on one form of oppression (class vs. race, gender, sexual preference, etc.) denies the frequent interconnections to be found between them.
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In addition to its regular seminar series, the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory regularly hosts international conferences attracting high profile speakers from all over the world. In recent years it has organised conferences on ‘Theory, Faith and Culture’, ‘Deleuze and Cinema’ and ‘Alain Badiou’. This year the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory is pleased to announce that it will be hosting the inaugural international Deleuze Studies conference. Deleuze Camp, a week long summer school on the work of Gilles Deleuze for postgraduate students, is held in August.
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Curriculum study in the United States has progressed from the critical theory of the early Frankfurt school to researchers who now attempt to become actively engaged in promoting social change within the education system and the culture itself. They seek to promote change by "becoming part of the self-consciousness of oppressed social groups (Hoy and McCarthy, 1994)". These researchers have rejected the realism of the past to embrace theories from postmodernism.
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Frankfurt School