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The definition of terrorist activity includes an act or omission undertaken, inside or outside Canada, for a political, religious, or ideological purpose that is intended to intimidate the public concerning its security, including its economic security, or to compel a person, government, or organization (whether inside or outside Canada) from doing or refraining from doing any act, and that intentionally causes one of several specified forms of serious harm (p. 6).
A critical context is provided by sociocultural critical theorists (Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Talal Asad, Noam Chomsky, Paulo Freire, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Fazlur Rahman, Ali Sharīʻatī) in their views on the Islamic Arab world, the West, and the broader global Islamic world or ummah. The critical perspective occurs at a macro holistic level. “Critical,” as used in this paper means to explore how language is used to maintain power structures in society and how the less powerful, without realizing it, cooperate to maintain inequality. In other words, it explains how the oppressors use language to oppress the less powerful and, as a result, legitimize ideology and organized power.
The role of adult educators is to point out all aspects of the learned material. The effect of media and commercial power needs to be neutralized to give agency back to citizens. Edward Said described the effect of the power of the media as “the usurpation of the public space” (Said & Viswanathan, 2001, p. 205), so a rebalance is necessary. As a discipline, adult education is perhaps best positioned to facilitate the rebalance. Adult education has an interest in all areas of the discursive moment’s six elements in an issue at hand: (a) discourse/language, (b) power, (c) social relations, (d) material practices, (e) institutions/rituals, and (f) beliefs/values/desires. The discourse facilitated by the educator challenges the commodification of that moment with the resultant dialogue fitting into a discursive space that is critically challenged between learner and educator. At the macro level, Habermasian theory suggests that the lifeworld is constantly subjugated to mediatized colonization by the economy and the state, in particular, money and market, power, and bureaucracy (Pusey, 1987). Adult education, with an emancipatory intent, could manage to facilitate the discursive space situated at the interface between Habermas’s society as a system and society as a lifeworld. A challenge in academics is noted by Klaehn et al. (2022). The authors suggested that in the current employment paradigm, “specialization is valorized, and ‘fit’ can trump merit, not joining in with the flock, or not demonstrating allegiance with neoliberal norms that align with dominant configurations of power, at the macro and often micro levels simultaneously, can significantly impact perception, reception” (Klaehn et al., 2022, p. 348).
An academic’s life chances in terms of employment, mobility, opportunities, publications, prestige, status, and socioeconomic position are guided in the interest of concentrated power. Ideological levees that channel intellectual labor towards interests of concentrated power need to be broken down. A more critical cognizant learning model used as a framework could be used to facilitate the discursive space and break down some ideological levees.