Crap detecting. Autoethnographic reflections on critical practice in marketing pedagogy

In this commentary, I use selected autoethnographic passages from my life in teaching to reflect on what, if anything, the designation of ‘critical’ might mean in my own practice of marketing education. I draw selectively on some ideas from educational and critical theory, particularly the notion of interpellation as applied to marketing academics, to reach the conclusion that my personal idea of critical marketing pedagogy is probably closer to the notion of classroom education as a subversive practice than it is to any neo-Marxist versions of liberatory pedagogy. Ernest Hemingway suggested that the primary virtue of a writer’s education ought to be the refinement of the students’ ability to detect crap. By nurturing the fundamental transferable life-skill of crap detection, I like to think that marketing can fulfil a worthwhile pedagogic role alongside the other subjects in a liberal intellectual university curriculum.