Michael Forsman 226 premise and the result of an awareness of social injustice, and thus a need for social change and a redistribution of resources. This more political and emancipatory epistemology lead our ex- position over to Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, where critique often is understood as being negative, comparative, con- structive and even instructive, both in a theoretical and practical sense (FAY, 1987). Modernity has been described as “The age of criticism” and in many ways critique and a critical mindset appear as uni- versal and cosmopolitan ideals for citizenship and a civic subjectivity (POPKEWITZ, 2008). This process of global governance around liberation and agency was perhaps foreseen by Michel Foucault (1997/1984) who argued that criticality, through the Modern era and especially during the 20th century and after WWII, had become integrated in the biopolitics of “the good citizen”. Or as Judith Butler (2002, p. 7) puts it. “Certain kinds of practices which are designed to handle certain kinds of prob- lems produce, over time, a settled domain of ontology as their consequence, and this ontological domain, in turn, constrains our understanding of what is possible”. What she means here is that there are certain forms of critical awareness and sub- jectivity that tend to become institutionalized through certain practices, over time, and that this not only define what presently is preferred but also projects what is possible. Butler (and Fou- cault) suggests a less prescriptive form of critical mindset that is based on “the art of not being governed” or at least not “gov- erned like that and at that cost” (ibid, p. 29). 7. Critical thinking and the critical thinker Critical thinking is a self-rectifying ideal for being and becoming aware of yourself as as an independent and innova- tive thinker, as a subject. This means that critical thinking is the opposite to unintentional and insufficient, mindless, and purposeless thinking (DAVIES, 2015, p. 45). Otherwise, the most common way to describe critical thinking is as a set of generic skills that are connected to inquiries, evaluations and inference, analysis, and interpretation. Often within a specific academic
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjEzNzYz