Sajay Samuel

is a Clinical Associate Professor of Accounting at Penn State University. He has spoken on science, economic thought, and the vernacular for Canadian radio. His academic publications aim to undermine the current fascination with accounting and related numbers as a modality of management.

In Defense of Vernacular Ways

In Defense of Vernacular Ways

The crises continue to accumulate: the economic crisis, the ecological crisis, the social crisis, crises upon crises. But as we try to create “solutions,” we distressingly find ourselves up against a limit, discovering that the only alternatives we can imagine are merely modifications of the same. We have forgotten how to think the new – or the old. Ivan Illich, priest, philosopher, and social critic, is not a figure that most would expect to read about in a Marxist magazine. But he identified this problem long ago, and argued that the only “way out” was a complete change in thinking. His suggestion, both as concept and historical fact, was the “vernacular.”