By Dr Cassie Earl
The questions that interest me in this area are; How do we work with activists and activism in educational research? And, How do we keep a sense of hope? Within this work, it is my assertion that in this current climate of partial nihilism and hopelessness particularly pertinent to the study of change through education and social movements, are these notions from Arundhati Roy and John Holloway respectively: ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing’ Arundhati Roy ‘The world that does not yet exist displays itself as a world that exists not-yet’ John Holloway One of the first questions that came to my mind when thinking about writing this post concerned why we think of activists as people other than ourselves? When I say ourselves, I am specifically talking about an ‘us’ that includes researchers, and of course, therefore, teachers. There are many different definitions of ‘activist’ from different disciplinary perspectives and political stances, however, as teachers and researchers what we are actually doing is ‘taking action’ to ‘shape the future’ and how we do that could allow us to (self-)identify as activists. Many people think like this, have a read, for example, of Shantz (2013); Amsler (2011); Neary (2012); Neary and Amsler (2012); Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias (2007); Crowther et al. (2005); Edu-Factory Collective (2014) and many, many others. But the tendency in activist research is to posit an ‘us and them’ positionality: ‘us’, the researchers, and ‘them’, the activists, particularly in traditional social movement studies. However, within the community of those scholars of popular education, critical pedagogies, and often critical education more generally, these boundaries between activist and researcher/academic - which were always quite blurred - have begun to blur more and more. The question raised here is whether we can think of education itself as a form of activism and if so, who are the communities with which we should work? Some go even further than thinking of ‘education’ as a form of activism, for example Amsler et al. (2010); Chrysochou and Earl (2015); Earl (2018); Neary (2011); Neary and Amsler (2012); and Giroux (2001) ask whether knowledge in itself can be a social movement of sorts. These authors, and others, do cite empirical evidence of this being a possibility, and the debate is both ongoing and emergent. These ideas raise some interesting questions around how we frame activism and whether those activists we seek to research can, in fact, be us? In my own work I have researched social movements, and particularly learning in social movements, from an outsider perspective, my positionality here has always been one of Denzin’s (2010) critical secretary, or to go further the conceptualisation of not outsider, but not insider either, from Kincheloe and Berry (2004) and Kincheloe and Tobin (2006), wherein the researcher works, as activist in their own right, in solidarity with the social movement to assist in the creation of a form of praxis between the two. This positioning takes courage and a disregard for any form of positivist thinking about objectivity, validity, or reliability of the research, but requires rigour, criticality and often a critical distance from the immediacy of social action to analyse events. I have found that an excellent methodology for working in this way is Bricolage, mainly conceptualised by Kincheloe and Berry (2004) and formulated through thinking in the areas of popular education and critical pedagogy: the twins of radical and emancipatory pedagogies. Bricolage allows the researcher to work with activist communities through a range of methodological negotiations, encouraging forms of auto-ethnography to sit alongside case-study, or action research; critical ethnography and narrative inquiry. Methods are negotiated by the ‘research community’, which consists of all those involved in the co-production, co-creation, and co-imagination of knowledge and the possibilities of futures we would like to live. Bricolage is an intimately hopeful and future orientated methodology as it allows the blossoming of the imaginative and fictive elements, that are inherent in all research, but teased out and made apparent in Bricolage. This assists work with activist communities, whether we see them as ‘us’ or ‘them’, as the research community is able to engage in ‘mutually useful conversation’ (Earl 2017) to ensure that a praxis of change is born through the research, making it socially useful and an action of activism itself. My work with, and in, activism has always been around two areas: educational activism and anti-capitalist movements specifically. I have not engaged very much with identity politics but see these as a part of the same struggle, understanding that identity politics must be anti-capitalist in their own way due to the notion that to prevent all forms of oppression seen today, and for the last few hundred years, there is an ever more urgent need for all these movements and struggles to collectively become (where they are not already) anti-capitalist. This is because the capitalist ideology creates the very divisions and oppressions that people fight against on a variety of different platforms. This was clearly understood by people in the US Civil Rights movement and Black Panthers, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Huey Newton, as well as by many feminist movements around the globe, for example. This means that there is much work to be done in education, on activism as a form of action that can change the world and tease out education’s part in this, and what people learn from being involved. Of course, there is a great deal more to be said about the academic community as activists, particularly when it comes to the act of teaching, research is a form of teaching as well as the more traditional idea of the teacher, but that is for another post… Amsler, S. (2011) Beyond All Reason: Spaces of Hope and Struggle for England's Universities. Representations, 116, 90-114. Amsler, S., Canaan, J., Cowden, S., Motta, S. & Singh, G. eds. (2010) Why Critical Pedagogy and Popular Education Matter Today, Birmingham: Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. Casas-Cortes, M. & Cobarrubias, S. (2007) Drifting Through the Knowledge Machine. In: S. Shukaitis, D. Graeber & E. Biddle eds. Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization. Edinburgh, Oakland: AKPress, 112-126. Chrysochou, P. & Earl, C. (2015) Community Education for Social Change: Critical Education as a Social Movement. In: T. Castilla ed. Planes y Programas para la Mejora de la Convivencia en Contextos Educativos y Sociales: Diseño, Desarrollo y Evaluación. Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands: Wolters Kluwer, Crowther, J., Galloway, V. & Martin, I. (2005) Introduction: Radicalising Intellectual Work. In: J. Crowther, V. Galloway & I. Martin eds. Popular Education: Engaging the Academy, International Perspectives. Liecester: National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, 1-10. Denzin, N. K. (2010) The Qualitative Manifesto: A Call to Arms. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press Inc. Earl, C. (2017) The Researcher as Cognitive Activist and the Mutually Useful Conversation. Power & Education, 9(2), 129-144. Earl, C. (2018) Spaces of Political Pedagogy: Occupy! and Other Experiments in Radical Adult Education. London, New York: Routledge. Edu-Factory Collective. (2014) Edu-Factory: Conflicts and Transformation of the University [Online]. Online: http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/about/. [Accessed 13.03.2014]. Giroux, H. (2001) Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy of the Opposition. Westport, CT, London: Bergin and Garvey. Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism. London, New York: Pluto Press. Kincheloe, J. L. & Berry, K. S. (2004) Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research: Conceptualizing the Bricolage. Maidenhead, New York: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. & Tobin, K. (2006) Doing Educational Research in a Complex World. In: J. L. Kincheloe & K. Tobin eds. Doing Educational Research: A Handbook. Rotterdam, Taipei: Sense Publishers, 1-14.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
Archives
September 2018
Categories |