With no adequate role to play as consumers, many youth are now considered disposable, forced to inhabit "zones of social abandonment" extending from homeless shelters and bad schools to bulging detention centers and prisons.

I know she [Hillary Clinton] comes out of a legacy with her husband in which the Democratic Party did more, it seems to me, to subjugate blacks to the dynamics of oppression, poverty. The mass incarceration state.

All too often the worst thing that can happen to the young is to depoliticize them. When that happens, not only are young people told that they do not count – your agency is worthless, your experiences are worthless, and your voice should remain silent – but they are also told that there is no alternative to current state of affairs.

Young people now reside in a world in which there are few public spheres or social spaces autonomous from the reach of the market, warfare state, debtfare, and sprawling tentacles of what is ominously called the Department of Homeland Security.

The environment in Canada is much more conducive to doing critical work, though Canada has its own set of problems, but nothing like those emerging in the United States. Unlike Penn State which was a huge recipient of Pentagon funds, and was hostile to any criticism of its connection to the military and intelligence services, McMaster is a very open university that takes its commitment to a quality education and function as a democratic sphere very seriously.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.