In this paper, three epistemological criteria are suggested against which analytical frameworks for studying the political dimension of history classroom practices can be deemed viable. The suggested criteria - (I) the primacy of practice, (II) the primacy of empirical openness and (III) the primacy of the political - are articulated by conducting critical and affirmative readings of previously established concepts, primarily historical consciousness. To clarify their application, the criteria are positioned in relation to the premises and concepts of a potential framework; namely, the logics of critical explanation (Glynos & Howarth, 2007), the viability of which is argued for theoretically and empirically.

This study explores the political and ideological workings of history classroom practices enacted in the context of Swedish upper secondary education. Using the post-structuralist logics of critical explanation framework (Glynos & Howarth, 2007), the paper reports on a series of video-recorded observations and outlines the discursive logics found to constitute the studied practices. At the heart of the analysis are the socially shared assumptions, political relationships of us-and-them, and ideological narratives that alternately furnish the history classroom practices with stability and contingency. The results encompass three case-specific logics: (I) a social logic demonstrating that the stability of the studied classroom practices rests on shared assumptions about historical idealism and partial progress, (II) a political logic indicating that the classroom practices are unsettled when students establish temporal equivalence between past and present us-and-them relationships, and (III) a fantasmatic logic showing that teachers and students become ideologically invested in said practices through narratives emphasizing the need to prevent the repetition of past injustices.

This paper seeks to bring John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of democratic education and the public into dialogue with Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. Recognizing populism as an integral aspect of democracy, rather than as its antithesis, the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical account of populism as being of educational relevance in two respects. First, it argues that the populist logic specifies a set of formal elements by which democratic education could operate as a collective enterprise. Second, it asserts that the notion of populism supplements any congenial understanding of democratic education by bringing political demands, conflicts and affects to the fore. Finally, the paper discusses the risks and possibilities inherent in visualizing populism as an educational modus.