thapliyal, nisha - learning, knowledge, and activism. an introduction to the special issue

8/9/2019 Thapliyal, Nisha - Learning, Knowledge, And Activism. an Introduction to the Special Issue

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Postcolonial Directions in Education, 3(1), pp. 3-17, 2014, 3ISSN: 2304-5388

LEARNING, KNOWLEDGE, AND

ACTIVISM: AN INTRODUCTION TO THESPECIAL ISSUE

Nisha Thapliyal, Guest EditorUniversity of Newcastle, Australia

All social practices, including activism, involve

the production of knowledge (Santos, Nunes andMeneses 2008). This Special Issue of thePostcolonial Directions in Education journal islocated in the multidisciplinary body of literaturethat explores the relationship between knowledgeand collective action for social transformation. Itemerged out of a panel presentation at the 2013World Council of Comparative and International

Education Societies in Buenos Aires, Argentina.After the panel, entitled Social mobilisations foreducation in Brazil, USA and India: A dialoguebetween activists and academics, discussionsaboutthe papers presented led to this Special Issue, whichincludes essays about multiple forms of knowledgeproduction within sites of social mobilisation; andstrategies for doing activist research and teaching in

the corporate academy.The five contributors explore learning for action

and learning in action in a range of social sitesincluding the university classroom, non-governmental organisations, and social movements.At the same time, they engage with the politics ofknowledge production within and across these sitesin the context of globalisation and the neoliberal


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knowledge economy and society. Here I draw onNancy Fraser (2001:5)s description of conditions inthe knowledge society:

In this society...identity is no longer tied soexclusively to labor, and issues of culture are

intensely politicized. Yet economic equalityremains rampant, as a new global informationeconomy is fueling major processes of classrecomposition. Moreover, to- days diversifiedpopulation of ...workers...and those suffering

from social exclusion is highly conscious ofmultiple status hierarchies, including those ofgender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, andreligion.

In this context, progressive social movementsmust engage with a neoliberal discourse ofdemocratic politics that has denuded the public

domain of histories of oppression, systematicallyattacked spaces of collective mobilisation andreplaced collective responsibility with individual,privatised philanthropy (Mohanty 2006; Dagnino2005). As social movement scholars Cox andFominaya (2009:3) point out, neoliberalism

rewards fragmentation whether in the form ofcooptation by the state, commodification of

identities, or the impermeability of academicspecialisations.The authors in this issue share a common

interest in activist spaces and structures that offercounter or alternative perspectives to market-drivendevelopment. The transformative knowledgeproduced in these spaces is concerned with basicdemands - for life, for dignity - and yet, as adult


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education scholar John Holst (2007) writes, giventhe nature of globalization today, basic demands bythe most marginalized are increasingly striking atthe very heart of capitalism.This body of knowledgebears witness to the fact that neoliberalism isnothing more or less than a policy choice brutallyimplemented by nation-states and theirinternational institutions (Holst 2007).

This Special Issue is divided into two sections.The first section focuses on the Landless WorkersMovement (MST), Brazil. It begins with an overview

or introduction to landless struggles in Brazil andthe central role of knowledge production within themobilisation spaces occupied by the MST. Readerswho are not familiar with the MST will find it helpfulto read this overview before proceeding to the otherarticles in this section. In this overview, MSTeducators and founding members of one of theoldest state education sectors in the MST, Marli

Moraes and Elisabete Witcel provide a detailedexplanation of the philosophical and pedagogicalprinciples that define MST education, known as thePedagogy of the Land.In the subsequent essay,they reflect on their lived experiences within theMST and specifically,the meaning and purpose of

the first MST Itinerant schools (established in thestate of Rio Grande do Sul). They also provide some

insights into the central role of research within theknowledge production work of the movement. Thejoint reflection is followed by an autobiographicalnarrative from Witcel on her lived experience as anMST activist. The concluding essay in this section iswritten by Rebecca Tarlau who critically reflects ondoing research with and about the MST as asympathetic researcher located in the U.S. academy.


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The second section consists of articles thatexplore the relationship between knowledge andactivism in diverse contexts ranging from anti-corporate activist NGOs, an emerging socialmovement for public education in India, and a NorthAmerican university classroom. The special issueconcludes with articles that further exploreknowledge for social transformation, with NinaAshers celebration of the social and educationalsignificance of Nelson Mandela, a tribute fromDeborah Hickling on the life and work of two great

Caribbean scholars - Professor Stuart Hall andProfessor Norman Girvan, and reflections by AnneHickling-Hudson on the resonance of the theme Forthe Socially Responsible University at University2014, the bi-annual conference on higher educationin Cuba, held in February of this year.

Knowledge, activism and social change

Critical and feminist social movement scholarshave shown that the work of knowledge productionand transmission, albeit contested, is intrinsic to thework of organising and mobilising masses of people(most recently see Pinnington and Schugurensky

2010 ; Motta and Nilsen 2011; and the 2009 and2013 Special Issues of Interface and the Journal of

Social Movement Studies, respectively). Knowledge-making is central to the working of hegemony andcounter-hegemony in which every relationship is apedagogical relationship (Mayo 1999). Socialmovements engage in collective knowledge work tostimulate oppositional consciousness or build andsustain new and collective political subjectivities andidentities; and also to articulate demands and win


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positions of power in relation to the institutions andstructures they seek to transform (Cox andFominaya 2009).

The authors approach their analyses withpluralist conceptions of social justice and the role ofknowledge production in movements for social

justice. They present situated conceptions ofoppositional politics or the politics of protest buttogether underline the intricate link betweencognitive justice and social justice (de Sousa Santoset al 2008). The theme of knowledge production cuts

across these essays along with shared questionsabout presence and play of power (Ortner1995:175) in the relationships and activities thatconstitute activist and academic spaces.

Choudry argues that everyday struggles are notonly the means to build movements, alliances, andcounterpower but are generative of, and in turninformed by the learning/knowledge aspects of this

activity.Drawing on the critical adult educationand social movement learning literature thatemphasises the social character of all knowledgeproductions, he explores knowledge production byactivist researchers located outside the academy.Although diverse in their geographical location and

methodological approach to research, their inquiriesare located in the socio-economic and environmental

struggles of working-class and poor againsttransnational corporations and other organisationsrepresenting international and domestic capital.Choudry highlights activist representations of thedifferent ways in which ordinary people struggle,learn, educate and theorise where they findthemselves and the tensions they negotiate in theprocess. He argues explicitly against the dominant


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academic inclination to categorise andcompartmentalise this knowledge into existingframeworks based on dichotomous and hierarchicalthinking.

In Thapliyals essay, activist narratives aboutpublic education in India reveal experiential,situated, concrete forms of knowledge as well astheoretical and theorised knowledge. Themultiplicity of meanings and representations ofpublic (and private) education do not diminish theeveryday realities of exclusion, discrimination,

disparity, and alienation that define the particularways in which diverse subaltern groups engage withthe politics of education. Instead, activists draw onthis diverse tacit knowledge (Cox and Fominaya2009) to challenge the dominant developmentalistapproach to education and development thatreproduces historical social hierarchies. This essayalso provides insights into what constitutes

knowledge that is relevant to activists as they reflectand theorise about the challenges confronting theirmovement.

These conceptions of knowledge whichconnects, empowers, and transforms is reiterated byMST activists Marli Moraes and Elisabete Witcel in

their analysis of the MST Itinerant schools and theunderlying philosophical and pedagogical principles

that guide education work in the MST. Theirdiscussion of the MST Itinerant Schools expose theinherent contradictions of capitalist education anddevelopment. For the MST, constructing knowledgewhich reflects the lived realities of the landless iscentral to the efficacy of their struggles. The depthand breadth of the MST knowledge project is shapedby the realisation that countering neoliberal


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hegemony requires counter-knowledge thatarticulates the connections between struggles foridentity and redistribution amongst poor andworking-class, rural and urban Brazilians. Despitebeing a movement of poor people with scarceresources and numerically one of the smallest ruralmovements in Brazil (Carter 2010), the MST hasbecome a global exemplar for anti-capitaliststruggles. In large part, this can be attributed totheir determination to speak for themselves and ontheir own terms. And the voice(s) that the MST have

inserted into public discourse in Brazil speak outagainst historical cultural marginalisation andoppression as well as unequal class relations (Fraser2001; Frampton, Kinsman, Thompson, Tilleczek(2006:256). In dialogue with MST activists I amalmost always reminded by somebody that thestruggle of the landless is legitimate but not legal.

The MST has developed highly organised

structures for media and communication as well asresearch in order to counter hostile media coverageas well as the dominant neoliberal discourse ofdevelopment. However, knowledge production is notonly oriented towards the outside public. Themovement has constructed its own primary and

secondary schools, literacy programmes, teachertraining institution, and university wherein

educational processes critically reflect on theongoing landless struggle. Hence, for both MSTactivists, the movement was and continues to betheir school.For Witcel in particular, as she tells usin her autobiographical narrative, it is through herparticipation in the landless struggle that she waseventually able to achieve her dream to continue herformal education. Both women were members of the


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first group of MST students to participate in a state-recognised teacher training course based on MSTeducational principles and pedagogy. Perhaps moreimportantly, as MST students, educators, andresearchers, both women have been part of theongoing project to construct educational processesthat reflect and fortify the struggles of the landlessand other groups rendered subordinate by thecapitalist order.

Resistance in the Corporate Academy

Sousa Santos et al (2008) remind us, the end ofcolonialism has not meant the end of the colonialityof power and knowledge or colonialism as a socialrelationship associated with specific forms ofknowledge which maintain extent multiple forms ofdomination and discrimination. The dominantapproach to knowledge production in the knowledge

society is defined by privatisation, fragmentationand commodification/consumption.Educational institutions, in particular the

academy, play a key though contested role inunderpinning neoliberal hegemony (Mayo 1999)through the construction and reproduction of

learning as self-interested, individualised, andcommodified, the flattening and erasure of

difference, and the domestication of radicalknowledge products (Sudbury and Ozakawa-Rey2009; Quinn and Meiners 2009 ; Mohanty2013:972). In particular, feminist scholars of colourhave and continue to engage difficult questionsabout power, positionality ,and epistemic privilege(s)as reflected in their theoretical language and framesand possibilities for non-hierarchical, accountable,


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and politically committed projects ofinquiry.(Mohanty 1984; Naples and Desai 2002;Cho, Crenshaw, McCall 2013; Gutirrez y Muh,Niemann, Gonzlez, and Harris 2014). In thiscontext, public intellectual Antonia Darder statesthat the role of the university-based researcher is,not only critically comprehending emancipatorytheories and revolutionary practices but alsocontending forthrightly with my [our] own internalcontradictions in clear and open ways" (in Borg andMayo 2007: 197).

In this milieu, Mary Pratt (1998) names some ofthe dilemmas facing well-intentioned researcherswho see themselves as sympathetic to or insolidarity with the movements they study. Shewrites about the need for outsider-intellectuals toconsciously undo the tendency in academictheorising to reproduce the structure of power thatholds in the situation being theorized, even when

the goal is a critique of that structure (434).In thisIssue, all the contributors speak to these questionsabout relevant and reflexive knowledge productionand the limitations of the canon of modern sciencewhich dominates the Western academy.

As previously discussed, Choudry and Thapliyal

both make situated critiques of the questions andframeworks that characterise conventional social

movement research and which constrain our abilityto understand the complexity of politics enacted insubaltern mobilisations. Both authors along with

Tarlau, also provide instances of movement-relevantresearch. For instance, Choudry explores a range ofrationalities and methodologies of movement-relevant knowledge production by activistresearchers located outside the academy, including


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conventional research methods. What is underlinedhere by activists is the seamless interaction or theabsence of boundaries between what they think ofas research, organising, and mobilising (Quintos inChoudry in this issue). Thapliyal weaves activistnarratives together to construct a map of theinstitutional relations and obstacles facing themovement and weak points that can and have beeneffectively challenged, as well as possibilities foralliances (Kinsman 2006).

In We do not need outsiders to study us,

Tarlau reflects critically on the evolution of herapproach to doing movement-relevant research withthe MST. In this essay, we have the privilege ofwatching Tarlau negotiate the meaning of what itmeans to be a self-identified activist-scholar andengage in collaborative knowledge production. Shedescribes the dispositions and processes by whichshe was able to coproduceknowledge with MST

activists in the course of her PhD dissertationresearch. She also reflects critically on the impact ofthe multiple identities produced by her gender,ethnicity, nationality, age, family background, andoccupation (First World doctoral student) on thedata collection process. Her discussion contributes

to the explanation provided by Moraes and Witcelabout how the MST value praxis and their

commitment to critically reflecting on all aspects oftheir political practice.In A Pedagogy of Resistance, Klees discusses

his efforts to counter the hegemony of triumphalistmarket-oriented discourses in education, economictheories of development, and social science researchparadigms. Klees addresses academics when hewrites that we always share our research but we


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rarely share our teaching.Accordingly, he presentsa reflexive analysis of his efforts to educate hisstudents about the cracks, contradictions,resistance, and room for human agency within theconstraints of conservative academy. His primarypedagogical tool is debate; Klees exposes hisstudents to key debates in each of these fields andsupports them in deepening their understanding ofhow and why people think differently. Thus, each ofhis courses explore hegemonic as well asmarginalised and excluded perspectives in a given

academic field e.g. political economy (in economictheory) (see also Rishi 1998), alternative policies andapproaches to neoliberal education anddevelopment; and critical/transformative modes ofinquiry (in the social sciences). Klees providesnuanced observations on the ways in whichstudents respond to his courses and the extent towhich this learning experience deepens their

capacity to engage with difference.

Conclusion

De Sousa Santos et al (2008:l) deem the mostdecisive epistemological question of the times as

that which investigates hierarchies of knowledgeconstellations, the reasons for those hierarchies, for

their effectiveness, and for their consequences.Allthough all the contributors in this issue do not allself-identify as post-colonial theorists, theirscholarship is representative of the kind ofcountervailing social science that carries outpower structure research, particularly theconditions underlying the production of knowledge


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which enrich some and impoverish others (Hickling-Hudson 2009:373).

The contributors to this special issue onKnowledge and Activism have endeavoured to namethat which is hegemonic(Steinberg in Borg andMayo 2007) and counterhegemonic in spaces ofresistance and activism. It is our hope that we havemade a significant contribution to activist andacademic projects that seek to democratise andhumanise the neoliberal knowledge society.

In conclusion, I would like to thank Professor

Anne Hickling-Hudson for her guidance and Dr.Deolindo Nunes de Barros for providing translationassistance in the preparation of this Special Issue.

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thapliyal, nisha - learning, knowledge, and activism. an introduction to the special issue

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