Mapping the Future, Mapping Education: An Analysis of the 2011 State of the Union Address

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson's concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president's vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which individual citizens direct their deepest aspirations into channels of capitalist development. Prominent among these channels are reconfigured structures of education. (Contains 1 note.)