The Research Justice Reader: Strategies for Social Transformation

Edited by Andrew Jolivette in collaboration with the DataCenter: Research for Justice

The Research Justice Reader: Strategies for Social Transformation

Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsPrefaceDataCenter: Research for Justice

Part I. Research Justice: Strategies for Knowledge Construction and Self-DeterminationChapter 1 Research Justice: Radical Love as a Strategy for Social TransformationAndrew Jolivette

Chapter 2 Imagining Justice: Politics, Pedagogy, and DissentAntonia Darder

Chapter 3 Blurred Lines: Creating and Crossing Boundaries between Interviewer and SubjectAmanda Freeman

Chapter 4 Ethnography as a Research Justice StrategyLiam Martin

Chapter 5 Queered by the Archive: No More Potlucks and the Activist Potential of Archival TheoryAndrea Zeffiro & Ml Hogan

Chapter 6 More Than MeNicole Blalock

Part II. Research Justice: Strategies for Community MobilizationChapter 7 The Socio-Psychological Stress of Justice Denied: The Alan Crotzer StoryAkeem T. Ray and Phyllis A. Gray

Chapter 8 Formerly Incarcerated Women: Returning Home to Family and CommunityMarta Lpez-Garza

Chapter 9 Disaster Justice Feat. Research JusticeHaruki Eda

Chapter 10 Undocumented Research and Researchers: A Collective Journey to Document our Stories and Speak for OurselvesAlma Leyva, Imelda S. Plascencia and Mayra Yoana Jaimes Pena

Part III. Research Justice: Strategies for Social Transformation and Policy ReformChapter 11Everyday Justice: Tactics for Navigating Micro, Macro and Structural Discriminations from the Intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane KatrinaSandra Weissinger

Chapter 12 The Revolutionary, Non-Violent Action of Danilo Dolci and His Maieutic ApproachDomenica Maviglia

Chapter 13 Decolonizing Knowledge: Towards a Critical Research Justice Praxis with Dr. Michelle FineTranscription by Andrew Millspaugh

Chapter 14 Decolonizing Knowledge: Towards a Critical Research Justice Praxis with Dr. Linda Tuhiwai SmithTranscription by Andrew Millspaugh

Acknowledgements

Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels. The contributors to this volume are anchored with community organizations and non-profits as well as with academic institutions. What each author has in common is an understanding of the power associated with the knowledge production process as an outcome of research. I am deeply grateful to miho kim, former Executive Director of the DataCenter: Research for Justice for coining the phrase in 2006 and for envisioning the framework for the type of work that this group of university and community scholars are producing to make this book a reality. Kims voice and articulation of the concept, Research Justice calls upon all marginalized populations groups to place themselves at the center of their own healing in research as an act of ceremonial recovery. The DataCenter has continues to be represented by a powerful team of dedicated staff members who contribute enormously to the on-going work of articulating a research justice methodological framework. Celia Davis, Jay Donahue, and Bill Hogan. DataCenter is also fortunate to be represented by amazing group of board members who lead with great vision and reciprocity in ensuring the success of the organizational mission. Many thanks to Marla, Aspen, Carolyn, Margaret, Aspen, Jill, Sujata, Miloney, and Max.I also offer my thanks to Haruki Eda who has been instrumental in thinking through some of the complexities of crafting a book of this nature. We have done our best to construct a project that includes the voices and methodologies of those living on the margins as well as those who come from communities facing socio-cultural and economic disparities. Andrew Millspaugh was extremely generous with his time in volunteering to provide crucial transcriptions of remarks delivered by prominent practitioners of research justice, Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Dr. Michelle Fine. The inclusion of these leading scholars in the manuscript is only possible because of Andrews fine work. I am also indebted to the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University, Dr. Su Rosser. The SFSU Office of Academic Affairs granted a sabbatical leave during the fall of 2013 which allowed me to compete the writing and editing for this first ever anthology on the foundations and possibilities for research justice as a new socially engaged form of methodological inquiry and action. My department colleagues in American Indian Studies: Joanne Barker, Robert Keith Collins, Melissa Nelson, John-Carlos Perea, Gabriela Segovia-McGahan, Amy Lonetree, Clayton Dumont, Jacob Perea, Esther Lucero, Sara Sutler-Cohen, Phil Klasky, Kathy Wallace, Amy Casselman, Jessica Hope LePak, and Eddie Madril, have also been a wonderful resource for many years and I am very appreciative of their encouragement of my work for the past thirteen years. I am above all most thankful to my family. They have seen me through so many difficult life challenges over the years. My siblings continue to inspire me with their love of life. They along with their children are a constant source of joy. In particular, I want to offer my love and appreciation to my uncle Charlie, my brothers Eric, Derick, Kevin, Nathan, and Charles and my sister Makeba. I have also found in Melissa Attia, Justin Bernard, and Ruben Moreno new family members who shine a light of joy so bright that I have a renewed commitment to social justice, to human rights, and to liberation as a daily practice of radical love and responsibility to leave the world in a better place for the seven generations that will follow us. My heart is always with you my Creole Bandits. My parents have always demonstrated through their actions how deeply they loved me and how much they wanted me to succeed and contribute something meaningful. Even in death, my mother has taught me to keep fighting and working to be the best person that I can be. And since my mothers recent death in 2012, my father has taught me how to hold on to faith and to those you love. My parents were my first teachers when it came to research justice for they knew that education coupled with love and an active commitment to equality would not only make my life better but it would also add to the circle of individuals from marginalized communities who are working to transform the social order of power relations for the betterment of our world. Annetta and Kenneth Jolivette you are my hope and my inspiration for this work. PrefaceDataCenter: Research for Justice situates Research Justice as a vehicle for the community to be able to reclaim, own and wield ALL forms of knowledge and information as political ammunition in the hands of community members to advance their change agenda, in ways that are consistent with the communitys unique cultural and spiritual identity and values (Miho Kim, 2006). In order for this to become reality, the community must have:1. access to information (not just misinformation and outside expert research but what they truly seek and deserve) that impact their lives1. the ability to define what is knowledge, and what is information as well as what the methods are to produce them. 1. Capacity to produce its OWN knowledge 1. Capacity to use all forms of its knowledge 1. Control over all stages of the knowledge lifecycle that involves the knowledge of communities, or impact themon equal footing with all other institutions in society.Research Justice is a key strategic component of contemporary social justice agendas, and this process is actualized by strengthening the communitys sustainable capacity to not only effect policies that impact their lives but to transform the notion of who has the right to determine community-based research questions, designs, and methodologies. This process must center indigenous and community of color knowledge systems as legitimate, truth-telling experts who have the power, agency, and ability to shape the research process and outcomes from the beginning and completion of the research process. To this end, critical research support for indigenous and disenfranchised communities is hardly new at the DataCenter, which has, for decades now, provided key intelligence as a tactically necessary aspect of political ammunition in midst of heightened campaign efforts to disenfranchise the most marginalized members of society, many of our efforts to shift the policies impacting disenfranchised populations have led to key victories over the past threedecades of our existence. But we also knew that for people of color, research is one of the dirtiest words (to borrow the words of a Maori scholar activist, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith) in not only indigenous but other oppressed communities -having been scrutinized and de-legitimized through outsider-led research. And so, we began to feel the need for a powerful strategy to reverse the role of the passive research subject weve been conditioned to assume as oppressed peoples, and to proactively redefine research as a positive, if not emancipatory concept. Informed strategies can lead to victories but only when it is obtained, then utilized, and deployed as political ammunition through action to achieve an agenda.In 2007, DataCenter conducted a movement assessment on research oppression in an attempt to unpack the hidden barriers to grassroots ownership of research. Through this process we found out that there were at least five ways in which research from a traditional academic stand point was producing inequality, a sense of exclusion, and disempowerment in marginalized populations as a result of:1. lack access to (accurate) data about them in mainstream sources (e.g., Census, etc.);2. mis/underrepresentation in the mainstream data sources;3. assault(s) on/violation of individual political and collective cultural rights, justified by data-backed allegation of criminality & immorality4. lack of community control over production, documentation, possession and use of their own data 5. lack of mainstream political legitimacy as valid, credible producers of data;DataCenter believes that these are some of the most evident indications of externalized research oppression in underrepresented and politically vulnerable communities. For indigenous communities of North America, research oppression, both internalized and externalized is not only systemic but historical, and is a direct legacy of more than 500 years of colonization. We also believe that research oppression affects communities in multiple ways, and no impact on one community is identical to the other. Strategies to Fight Research Oppression:DataCenter believes that research oppression can be successfully addressed, by engaging in liberation work under three complementary frameworks of:1. Reclaiming Research by recognizing community expertise (developing ones identity as a veteran researcher and a real expert); 2. Ensuring the Right to Know by accessing information; and 3. Envisioning Research Justice by truth-telling and shifting values (exercising our Right to be Heard).In Social Justice, we always affirm We (the affected communities) are the experts and yet, community expertise is rarely seen as comparable to mainstream expertise, spoken by mainstream research experts. Time and again, we would encounter community leaders who were neither social scientists nor policymakers and yet, they were the real experts about issues they faced, and how to generate viable solutions. Because these community experts wield a certain degree of intimate knowledge of their own communities we found that they were best equipped to use internal community knowledge and research to organize and produce meaning social and political changes related to U.S policy. We believe in the principle of people speaking for themselves. But what we experience is that people speak over and over again, and those in power dont have to listen, or can simply dismiss whats been said for one reason or another. Many times, the excuse we hear is that community member truth-telling and testimonies, spoken or written, are at best anecdotal, pulled from unreliable sources (their own lived experiences), compiled with questionable methods of analysis (talkstory and dialectic processes). Science is the currency of the discourse in policymaking so, un-scientific community knowledge can be disregarded with complete impunity. Another excuse we hear is that community information doesnt really represent a critical mass of the constituency and therefore, should not weigh into policy decisions as more than a minority concern. Clearly, putting the tools of social science into the hands of marginalized communities is one reasonable way to empower community voices in decision-making. However, the social sciences in and of themselves will not deliver the long-term solutions necessary to obtain political empowerment and cultural sovereignty of nations and peoples most impacted by current mainstream social science. The systemic change agenda underlying this challenge is the very fact that western science dominates the world of valid knowledge production in policymaking. This assumption implies that communities that did not practice western science historically lack a legitimate means of knowledge production worthy of recognition in decision-making that impact their own lives. In other words, research justice acknowledges that traditionally Western science operates from a paternalistic position of assumed superiority that has been unsuccessful in producing meaningful reforms and social justice for indigenous nations and communities of color. A part of the long-term vision for research justice is that all methods of producing the building blocks of our own worldview and realities must be recognized as equally valuable and relevant, if not critical. DataCenter recognizes the diversity of methods that exist around us in contributing to a tremendous wealth of knowledge that humankind has amassed over time. We believe in a truly multicultural society. Genuine multiculturalism in research methods is the vision DataCenter seeks to advance as a research justice organization. If this were achieved, community members will be recognized by default to be the real experts of the issues they face every day, not only amongst their families and sympathizers, but also the policy makers and other institutions participating in decision-making at the table. It is within the context of this framework and vision for research justice that this book has been written. If we truly envision a world that is more democratic, socially just, and equitable than we must acknowledge new, traditional, and emerging forms of indigenous and community of color research knowledge systems that can produce lasting policy reform at local, regional, national, and international levels. The Research Justice Reader: Strategies for Social Transformation opens up a set of timely and innovative discussions about the importance and power of transforming research methodologies and practices from the margin to the center to ensure that all voices, especially those most impacted by social science research are not only counted and heard, but also re-positioned from subjects to experts. -miho kim, Former Executive Director, DataCenter: Research for Justice

Part I. Research Justice: Strategies for Knowledge Construction and Self-Determination

Chapter 1Research Justice: Radical Love as a Strategy for Social TransformationAndrew JolivetteThe Research Justice Reader: Strategies for Social Transformation builds upon the methodological frameworks developed by the national non-profit organization, DataCenter: Research for Justice. Research Justice (RJ) is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research. RJ centralizes community voices and leadership in an effort tofacilitate genuine, lastingsocial change andseeks to foster critical engagement with communities of color, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups to use research as an empowering intervention and active disruption of colonial policies and institutional practices that contribute to the (re)production of social inequalities in researchand public policy.DataCenter believes that research justice is achieved when marginalized communities are recognized as experts, and reclaim, own and wieldallforms of knowledge and information. With strategic support, the knowledge and information generated by these communities can be used as political leverage to advance their ownagendasfor change. Research Justice calls upon all community experts and witnesses to violence, legal violations, education and health disparities and other social inequities to be active participants in processes for change and policy reform at local, regional, national, and global levels.The Research Justice Reader examines the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction, and political power/legitimacy in society. The RJ Reader centers community experts as vital partners in contributing to the emergence of research justice as a powerful, transdisciplinary method that envisions the co-existence of three forms of knowledge production (Experiential, Cultural/Spiritual, and Mainstream, See Table 1). The Research Justice Reader examines how the co-existence of these various form of knowledge can lead to greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change. Building on the tools and visions articulated by the DataCenter, the contributors to this historic collection write from three fundamental aspects of Research Justice as a movement building strategy: (1) Strategies for Knowledge Construction and Self-Determination; (2) Strategies for Community Mobilization; and (3) Strategies for Social Transformation and Policy Reform. Accordingly each chapter is divided into one of the three foundational aspects of Research Justice. Each of these chapters along with community/university research intervention models provide students at undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, and community researchers with new and unique sets of tools to produce social transformation and justice in the research processes they will undertake throughout their lives.

Table 1: Knowledge Production

The production of knowledge in the world today is typically constructed, transmitted, and maintained by those with the most power and privilege in society. The poor, indigenous peoples, and people of color, along with women, those with physical and mental disabilities, LGBTQ, people and other marginalized groups are seldom in a position to produce or control nor own the system of mainstream knowledge production that is generally used to create policies that impact these often under-served populations. In the DataCenter Model above research justice as both a theory and a method envisions equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge including the cultural/spiritual and experiential. By centering knowledge production and research projects based on cultural, spiritual, and experiential frameworks we as academics attempt to share power and in many cases surrender our own power over research subjects. I contend that radical love as a fundamental aspect of research justice requires that we see research participants as members of our family and not as a group of study participants or as sets of data to study and simply write about for our own career advancement. We have to invest in what I call Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness (CCRR). CCRR in a Research Justice Model contains three fundamental aspects: 1). It defines research processes as a collective endeavor and a shared knowledge creation process between academic and community researchers; 2). It creates, maintains, and engages with the knowledge that is produced by community experts, traditional knowledge keepers, as well as cultural leaders in ways that envision research as a ceremonial act of mutual respect and co-sharing; and 3). Only research that is responsive to the social, legal, economic, cultural, and political policy needs as identified by community experts should be conducted. The Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness Model takes Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) models a step further by shifting more dramatically the distribution of power in the research process by seeking to build ceremonial relationships and by yielding to the specific needs of community experts and community researchers. An example of CCRR in action would entail the creation of cultural protocols and IRB procedures controlled not by universities alone, but in a separate review process controlled by community groups. The Research Justice Reader also acknowledges and documents the many ways that RJ functions as a daily ceremonial process of resistance, revitalization, and cultural autonomy that supports the knowledge production, design, dissemination and stewardship of critical research practices by and from the communities most impacted by the negative consequences of globalization and capitalism. This anthology recognizes the positive and innumerable ways that people on the margins utilize research to transform their communities with the ultimate goal of liberation, self-determination, and self-actualized freedom. The most fundamental goal of RJ is the development of global citizens who actively work to transform the structures of power and privilege to engage everyday people as research leaders, change agents, and visionary leaders equipped with the necessary tools to build community infrastructures that will support the healthy development of self-sustaining, grassroots, and Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness approaches that will support the advancement of human rights in all fields, disciplines, and social sectors where research/knowledge is produced.This project also centers a concept that I have worked on for the past four years-radical love. I argue that as we re-center community members, tribal experts, and marginalized populations as leaders in research that we must also center radical love as a primary and foundational component of our research agendas both within and outside of academia. Radical love is defined as the activation of a deeply embedded and reciprocal devotion to holistic and ethnic specific self and community care through a balance of human feelings, emotions, and practices that reduce egocentrism while centering a symbiotic relationship between the physical and spiritual as co-constitutive factors of health promotion among indigenous peoples and communities of color. Radical love in research is also about speaking individual and collective truths no matter how painful. Radical love in these collective essays requires that each author ask important questions about who will benefit from their research and how we learn from past mistakes to ensure that we are building respectful research relationships today. In some of my previous writing, I define, radical love within the context of vulnerability: Radical love is about being vulnerable. It is about being unafraid to speak out about issues that may not have a direct impact on us on a daily basis. Radical love is about caring enough to admit when we are wrong and to admit to mistakes. Radical love should ask how the work in which we are engaged helps to build respectful relationships between ourselves and others involved in social justice movements. Radical love asks if we are each being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Finally, radical love in critical mixed race studies, means asking ourselves if what we are contributing is giving back to the community and if it is strengthening the relationship of all of those involved in the process. Is what is being shared adding to the growth of the community and is this sharing reciprocal? Is what we are working toward leading to a more peaceful and equitable society? (Jolivette, 2012).

As researchers both in academia and in the community we must be willing to constantly ask ourselves if we are being responsible in fulfilling our individual roles and obligations to the other participants in the struggle for social justice and human rights. Each of the contributors to this volume were asked this precise question. Chapters 2-7 begin by examining how research justice can be used as a strategy for Knowledge Construction and Self-Determination. In chapter 2, Imagining Justice: Politics, Pedagogy, and Dissent Antonia Darder examines the uses of critical pedagogy in education research and reform within the context of international and neo-liberal articulations of terrorism and fear that lead to a silencing of those most marginalized within educational institutions. In a compelling manner Darder asserts that critical pedagogy as an act of dissent must forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities [that] requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy while leaving those most marginalized in a state if social, cultural, political, and economic disadvantage. In chapter 3, Blurred Lines: Creating and Crossing Boundaries Between Interviewer and Subject Amanda Freemans provocative essay addresses her experiences as both an insider and an outsider in a research project dealing with single mothers from low-income backgrounds an essay in which she examines the blurred lines between being a researcher who is unexpectedly impacted by the same issues facing her research participants. Similar to Darders essay, Freeman claims that ultimately it is the voices of the marginalized-in this case-poor, single women-who become central to understanding issues of gender inequality, economic disparities, and mothering because of their own efforts in starting a support group to chronicle their experiences and empower one anther through their daily challenges in a society that treats the women like second class citizens. Darder and Freeman both articulate a framework for using research justice as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. Students and single mothers know better than anyone else the challenges that they face and what types of information, knowledge systems, and practices will best support access to services while reducing social stigmas in education, health, and employment. In Chpater 4, Ethnography as a Research Justice Strategy, Liam Martin is even more specific in his discussion of ethnography as a research justice methodological tactic for defining and documenting the knowledge and acts of self-determination utilized by both the incarcerated and the formerly. Martins chapter deals with is strong commitment with centering the subject as the researcher. In this case, Joe who resides in halfway house is also a co-researcher and a participant in Martins ethnographic study. By moving Joes voice to the center of the research as an expert, Martin underscores the DataCenters first principle of research justice-research as a strategy for knowledge construction and self-determination. What better method of transformation than to center the formerly incarcerated as the experts when it comes to understanding life in prison as well as life after prison. Similar to Freemans chapter on centering single mothers as experts who produce useful knowledge in thinking through difficult questions of policy reform, Martins project also removes the stigma of research subject or victim to be saved to a role that gives those most impacted by research a mechanism to contribute to their own empowerment and self-determination. Chapter 5, Queered by the Archive: No More Potlucks and the Activist Potential of Archival Theory by Andrea Zeffiro and Ml Hogan document how NMP (No More Potlucks) supports marginalized voices and modes of knowledge production and dissemination, which facilitate acts of self-determination and cultural autonomy among queer writers, artists, and activists in Canada. These collective writings are put together into a journal to document the possibilities of new media publishing venues and a sense of urgency around the dissemination of underspoken voices and underappreciated perspectives. Zeffiro and Hogan offer practical methods for understanding the importance of archives in documenting often invisible histories. Using archival and oral history approaches the authors unveil a uniquely post-modern method of research justice that supplies communities with their own knowledge systems that will support greater self-determination and international visibility. The first five chapters of the reader along with the final contribution to the first section of the book are in many ways not just statements about the role of researchers and subjects in the making of the research project, but these are also interventions into areas that I would align with a human rights agenda. Nicole Blalocks More Than Me perhaps speaks most specifically to the issues of cultural recovery, invisibility, and knowledge construction/self-determination as human rights issues, as she interweaves poetry and prose to tell the story of her own family with that of indigenous peoples throughout history who have struggled with trauma, poverty, and the very essence of research as a tool for self-determination and knowledge construction as necessary steps toward justice and liberation. In section two, Research Justice: Strategies for Community Mobilization we learn the story of Alan Crotzer through the work of Akeem Ray and Phyllis Gray who enact research justice as a strategy for mobilization through teaching. Ray and Gray explain the proves that students undertake in studying wrongful convictions and limits of the criminal justice system when it comes to those most marginalized in society. Continuing with the theme of prison incarceration, Chapter 8, Formerly Incarcerated Women: Returning Home to Family and Community also examines the impact of the prison industrial complex on the lived daily experiences of women and mothers who were formerly incarcerated. Marta Lpez-Garza asks critical questions about the role that these formerly incarcerated women play in their own healing processes in the face of societal inequalities. Again, Lopez-Garza like Ray and Gray reveals how issues of solidarity, collective action, and resistance to unfair policies can lead to mobilization as well as new forms of knowledge production. The Belmont Report which was created by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1978 not addressed key guiding principles for conducting research, but it also identifies vulnerable populations. The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated are among the groups identified as vulnerable at-risk populations because of the exploitation that has taken place within this segment of society. These chapter contributions go along way toward re-imagining how we can better support those who are at-risk or already living within prisons. While Zainichi Koreans (Koreans residing in Japan) are not physically incarcerated, they are politically, socially, and ideologically displaced and removed from conversations about equity and social justice in the face of natural disaster. In an effort to understand how these processes work, one must consider the history and representation of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. The displacement of Koreans, according to Haruki Eda in the face of Japanese disaster nationalism functions in both structural and social mechanisms that rob Zainichi of true liberation as a result of imperialism and on-going colonial acts during natural disasters. In Chapter 9, Disaster Justice Feat. Research Justice Haruki Eda demonstrates how utilizing Research Justice arms Zainichi people with effective mobilization strategies to respond to Japanese colonial rule in the face of natural disasters that scapegoat and ignore the material and physical losses of a minority population in an imperialist nation. Chapter 10, Undocumented Research and Researchers similar to Edas chapter takes up the issues of mobilization through direct participatory research. Alma Leyva together with Imelda Plascencia and Mayra Jaimes Pena demonstrate how placing the power of constructing a research agenda into the hands of those being researched can bring about powerful changes at both the micro and macro levels of policy reform in disenfranchised populations such as those fighting for legal status in the United States. Part III. Research Justice: Strategies for Social Transformation and Policy Reform examines the ways that Research Justice as a strategy for social transformation and policy reform can re-center the political, economic, legal, and cultural concerns of indigenous nations and across different communities of color. Chapter 11, Everyday Justice: Tactics for Navigating Micro, Macro and Structural Discriminations from the Intersection of Jim Crow and Hurricane Katrina by Sandra Weissinger begins the final section of the book with a look at discrimination in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and what mobilization tactics are most useful when we consider the need for policy reforms that disproportionately impact communities of color and other marginalized population demographics. Chapter 12, The Revolutionary, Non-Violent Action of Danilo Dolci and His Maieutic Approach offers an important overview of a key figure in revolutionary theory, Danilo Dolci and presents the Maieutic Approach as a tactic for achieving social and political reforms by shifting the modes of knowledge production and power. The final chapters are excerpts from leading international scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Michelle Fine who were both invited to deliver remarks to an audience of nearly 600 people for the 35th anniversary of the DataCenter and to also celebrate the 15th anniversary of the groundbreaking publication, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. This event, Decolonizing Knowledge: Toward a Critical Research Justice Praxis brings together many of the central themes of this book. Issues of power, knowledge, and policy are covered by each of the speakers along with remarks that will inform, inspire, and motivate students and academics alike to study the foundations of Research Justice as new methodological framework that can shift the balance of power in not only producing knowledge, but also in disseminating that knowledge and cultivating a generation of leaders who will focus more on research as a relationship of solidarity and reciprocity to achieve liberation, democracy, and justice for those global citizens who are most often marginalized by traditional Western research practices that render them invisible and/or powerless.

Chapter 2

Imagining Justice: Politics, Pedagogy, and Dissent

Antonia Darder

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglas

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. Howard ZinnThe current international landscape leaves little doubt that we are living in a tumultuous era. Steeped in the lingering political fears of the culture of terror, dissenting voices are still discouraged or silenced altogether, while neoliberal policies of greed and destruction seem rendered impenetrable in the face of massive global protests. Xenophobic pundits of the last decade denounced the Muslim world, the poor, and the foreign, exploiting the fear of both material scarcity and military invasion as clear and present dangers. The threat of terrorists, immigrants, and the impoverished vividly commingle in our historical psyches. Yet, U.S. acts of aggression persist in the Middle East and other parts of the world, while overwhelming economic, political, and military violence at home are made invisible by distorted notions of patriotism and speculative schemes of corporate greed. During the last decade, the political ramifications of conservative zeal were not only responsible for the passage of the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and the invasion of Afghanistan, but also numerous mean-spirited political antics dramatically enacted in Congress, as well as State Capitals. On the domestic scene, the rampant incarceration of more than two million people has been justified through a flood of media stereotypes that parade as news, reality cop shows, and pseudo criminal documentaries, such as American Justice and Cold Case Files. Whether at home or the international arena, U.S. citizens are systematically conditioned to perceive the impoverished and undocumented as ignorant or criminaltwo major sectors of the population that are rapidly expanding, given the hardening structures of economic inequality in the United States and abroad.The fear of uncertainty generated by the tragedy of 9/11 led to the formation of Homeland Security, which deeply shifted our perceptions of safety on both city streets and in the air. Over the last two decades, civil liberties seem to have been vastly compromised in the name of protecting our borders. Through a variety of politically induced, media campaigns, U.S. citizens are warned repeatedly of orange alerts and aroused to question the safety of our own homes. In turn, this has inspired nativist sentiments, giving rise to a variety of local, state, and federal legislative actions geared toward ridding the country of illegal immigrants. Simultaneously, widespread efforts to militarize the border by both official border patrol agents and border vigilantes prevail, as unemployment continues to rise for every income groups, but particularly those in the poorest sector. 2In the new millennium, Muslims and other immigrants became the scapegoats of the culture of terror, shrouding Americas political and economic improprieties at home and abroad. A Newsweek poll, although fairly positive, reported that 25 percent of Americans would consider putting Muslims in U.S. detention camps if another 9/11-style attack were to occur. 3 Meanwhile, obvious and long-standing determinants of inequalitypoor job security, insufficient income, lack of health care, substandard education, and the wholesale incarceration of the deeply impoverishedare ignored or dismissed as secondary to issues of national protection or economic exigencies. As a consequence, trillions of dollars have being poured into Homeland Security and military actions at the border and overseas, while social justice is conveniently redefined in ways that abdicate the State of any responsibility to its distressed citizenry. Instead, the free market continues to be touted as the great equalizer of the twenty-first century, leaving those outside the field of its neoliberal global order to fend for themselves or suffer the bitter consequences.A leading proponent of neoliberal policies on the international arena, the U. S. still remains the worlds wealthiest nation, yet one of the most economically unequal. We live in a society in which 1 percent of the population owns 60 percent of stock and 40 percent of total wealth. The top 10 percent of Americans own over 80 percent of the total wealth. 4 At the same time, the poor are nickel and dimed into subsistence by the increasing cost of substandard housing and food products, the lack of health care benefits, expensive transportation and commuting costs, poor child care options, low-wage employment, and increasing job insecurities tied to persistent out-sourcing of well-paying jobs and plant shutdowns.5 It is disturbing to note that neoliberals often claim that such actions are good for the world because it redistributes the wealth, while remaining closemouthed about the staggering profits gained from employing low-wage workers and operating their enterprises in environmentally deregulated zones.To forge a socially just pedagogy that supports political dissent in the face of persistent inequalities requires educators to remain thoughtful about the manner in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies can easily conflate to protect profits and a hegemonic stronghold on the economy. As such, dissenting voices that clamor against current national policies or persistently demand greater democratization of institutional structures are often perceived as a danger to the unity of our American identity as a nation, justifying the silencing of protestors and dissenters. This is even more disturbing when the politics of neoliberalism, couched in alarmist rhetoric, is enacted on the both the domestic and international arena in the name of democratic life. Often, such rhetoric functions well to conceal the inseparability of racism and class inequalities, in ways that perpetuate the underlying social injustices at work within schools and society. The Hidden Inseparability of Racism and Class InequalityWhat tends to disappear from view is the relations of exploitation and domination which irreducibly constitute civil society, not just as some alien and correctable disorder but as its very essence, the particular structure of domination and coercion that is specific to capitalism as a systemic totalityand which also determines the coercive function of the state. 6Ellen Meiksins Wood (1995).Contemporary struggles for democratic schooling do not arise in vacuum. They are, instead, historically on a continuum with the dissent and struggles of workers at the turn of the twentieth century and the antiwar, feminist, and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. However, unlike earlier political protests, the civil rights movement incorporated a liberal politics of rights, which prevailed as the common orthodoxy for dissent. Notwithstanding, a small cadre of political dissenters adamantly argued that any movement for social justice in the United States should be linked to a larger international anti-imperialist agenda, one that clearly challenged the inequalities and social exclusions intrinsic to a capitalist political economy. In concert with the times, however, the decision was made to retain a civil rights approach, firmly anchored in a strategy of litigation to wage dissent and organize communities. This direction in the movement was to represent a significant political juncture that, unwittingly, left unchallenged the unfettered advancement of globalization in the final decades of the twentieth century.As a result of court gains, movement efforts in schools were chiefly driven by repeated demands for a multicultural curriculum, bilingual education, ethnic studies programs, and affirmative action efforts that were principally founded upon identity politics, which pushed aggressively against traditional institutional boundaries linked to race and other forms of inequalities. Although this approach to dissent most certainly served to initiate and marshal a new population of minority professionals and elites into a variety of fields and professions, it did little to transform the larger structural conditions of inequality that prevailed in poor, working class, and racialized communities. Moreover, despite its contribution to debates on race inequalities, the race relations paradigm, unfortunately, also failed to challenge the fundamental contradictions of capitalism that misinformed policies and practices within schools and societycontradictions that inadvertently conserved and disguised asymmetrical relations of power. Necessary then to this discussion is an understanding of racism that acknowledges the totalizing logic of capitalism as inextricably linked in ways that do not apply to other categories of exclusion. Class inequalities encompass the States cultural and political-economic apparatus, which functions systematically to retain widespread control and governance over material wealth and resources. As such, racism operates in conjunction with other ideologies of exclusion (whether cultural, political, class, gendered, sexual, or racialized) to preserve the hegemony of the modern capitalist state, engendering its capacity to appropriate even revolutionary projects born of dissent and strip them of their transformative potential. An important study conducted by Gary Orfield7 at the Civil Rights Project, for example, concluded that although progress toward school desegregation had peaked in the late 1980swith the courts concluding that the goals of Brown v Board of Education had largely been metthe current trend is moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Concerns regarding segregation, therefore, still have tremendous political saliency today, particularly with respect to questions of academic achievement and the failure of U.S. schools to educate Latino, African American, Native American, and other racialized and working-class student populations. In fact, as Latinos became the largest minority population in the U. S., hegemonic forces at work in the reproduction of racialized class inequalities have rendered Latino studentswho can be considered today the new face of segregationmore segregated today than their African American counterparts. Accordingly, contemporary theories of segregation as an outcome of racialized class reproduction must also be considered with respect to the politics of class struggle. This is to say that racism, as a significant political strategy of exclusion, domination, marginalization, violence, and exploitation, cannot be separated from its underlying economic imperative. Thus, it should be no surprise that over 90 percent of segregated African American and Latino neighborhood schools are located in areas of concentrated poverty.8 In fact, students who attend segregated minority schools are 11 times more likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty, than students (of all ethnicities) who attend desegregated schools. When problems of schooling are racialized, as is often the case, deep-seated questions of economic injustice are often deeply camouflaged. For example, poor students labeled white exhibit comparatively similar social and academic difficulties as their counterparts of color. This is most visible in rural schools of the Midwest or the South, where poor white students are generally the majority. However, this phenomenon in the United States has been deceptively masked and obscured through the racialized portrayals of youth of color in the media and the social sciences. It is interesting to note that this process of youth racialization became most pronounced following the protests of African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American students of color in the 1960s and 1970s. It was at this historical juncture that the media shifted from commonplace portrayals of white hoodlum youth as juvenile delinquents to the commonplace racialized depictions of gangbangers as urban terrorists that we see so readily today. The point here is that the impoverished conditions that prevail in segregated communities are inextricably tied to the reproduction of racialized class formationsnot some biological or cultural predisposition. Hence, racism can only be ameliorated through a vision of social justice and a politics of dissent firmly rooted in the redistribution of wealth, power, and privilege. Moreover, such a political vision must be informed fundamentally by a humanizing shift in consciousness and a deep rooted commitment to liberation (Freire 1971). Although much good has been attributed to the politics of Brown v. Board of Education, we find ourselves in a new historical moment that warrants a critical rethinking of emancipatory solutions and strategies of dissent rooted in another time and place. Given the lessons of the last fifty years, many solutions anchored in the race relations paradigm of the civil rights era have been called into question by the conditions of todays world. For instance, there are researchers who contend that the race relations paradigm actually functions, unwittingly, to obscure the phenomenon of racism and, hence, the hegemonic forces at work within the sociopolitical construction of segregation. 9 As such, the racialized practices founded upon a reified commonsense notion of race inadvertently leave the fundamental structural inequalities of an internationalized capitalist mode of production unchanged. The consequence is that our contemporary society has become entrenched in the language of race as destiny, with an implicit dictum that membership in particular races enacts social processes, rather than ideologies and material conditions of survival. Today, political discourses of every kind are structured by attaching deterministic meaning to social constructs of physical and cultural characteristics, although the racialized landscape has become far more complex. Interestingly, this same myopic lens is often reflected both in liberal advocates of identity politics and in those conservatives who espouse xenophobic views of foreigners or the other. In sharp contrast, pedagogies for social justice must seek to reinforce an open-minded understanding and democratic vision of dissent, beyond dichotomies of black and white. In the absence of a more complex vision of ethnic, religious, and political differences, the outcome is an absolutizing of social and political relations, with little room for the formation of a heterogeneous national identity in the United States. Instead of waging dissent, across differences, over issues and concerns that impact all communities (i.e., health, income, education, environment, etc.), political interests are categorically racialized. As such, the notion of race becomes both absolute and instrumentalized by even well-meaning theorists and policy-makers, who seek to analyze the difficulties and concerns of racialized populations. Accordingly, the malignant ideologies of oppression that sustain necessary capitalist inequalities and result in segregation and other forms of social exclusion10 are left unattended or reputed as irrelevant. A key point to be made here is that the ideology that informs how we define a social or institutional problem will also determine our choice of political strategies and tactics, potential solutions, and ultimately the outcome. The busing solution of the 1970s is a useful example. Busing was one of the predominant integration solutions chosen to wage protest against segregationa solution anchored in a race relations paradigm. But to the chagrin of many African American and Latino communities, this solution actually functioned to destroy the strength, cohesion, and coherence of community life. Some would further argue that it was, in fact, the already more economically privileged minorities (that, incidentally, defined the problem and chose the predominant means for dissent), who made the greatest gains. And, despite the interventions of the civil rights movement, forty years later the class composition of U.S. society based on control of wealth has failed to improve, becoming, in fact, more polarized between the rich and the poor across all population groups. That is to say, members of the ruling class, of all ethnicities, are wealthier today than they were in the 1960s. Hence, the expansion of an elite, professional class of African American and Latinos ultimately failed to dismantle the oppressive economic and racialized policies and practices of the Capitalist State. Instead, hegemonic practices of economic exploitation and the hardened structures of racialized inequality became further camouflaged behind neoliberal aspirations. Such was also the fate of multiculturalism, which, falling prey to both the politics of identity and state appropriation, became an effective vehicle for further depoliticizing the remnants of political dissent rooted in the civil rights era. Notwithstanding its original emancipatory intent, the politics of multiculturalism was, from its inception, flawed by its adherence to the language of race relations and its rejection of class struggle. Moreover, the well-meaning celebrations of difference and the hard-fought battles of a variety of identity movements for representation failed to generate any real or lasting structural change, beyond liberal proposals such as affirmative action, for instance, which more often than not served the interests of the more privileged. In the final analysis, multiculturalism became an effective mechanism of the state, used to manage, preserve, and obscure racialized class divisions, while in the marketplace the new multiplicity of identities generated new products for global consumption.Pedagogy of Dissent: Beyond DomesticationOne has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. a Martin Luther KingIn the midst of empire-building abroad and the tightening of individual civil liberties at home, radical educators have attempted to make sense of the world through our practice and our theoretical reflections. It was in response to the culture of terror, along with the everyday fears and uncertainties of old, that many sought critical pedagogy as a means to provide direction and inspiration to their teaching, beyond the widening inequalities that functioned to domesticate the vitality of students lives and their dreams. Unfortunately, however, critical pedagogys promise to contend with growing oppressive conditions within schools and to develop a consistent project of dissent has often fallen short. This has been as much due to the repressive conditions within schools as due to its depthless and misguided use. In the latter instance, critical pedagogy has been reified into simplistic fetishized methods that are converted into mere rhetoric and instrumentalized formulas of intervention, discouraging dissent and leaving untouched the inequities and asymmetrical power relations in schools today. But, in truth, a critical pedagogy cannot be fully realized as merely a classroom-centered pedagogy. Instead, it must reach beyond the boundaries of the classroom, into communities, workplaces, and public arenas where people congregate, reflect, and negotiate daily survival. In the absence of such a public project, critical pedagogy can neither support dissent nor advance an emancipatory vision for the eradication of political and economic enslavement. Moreover, its revolutionary potential for contending with uncertainty and despair must be grounded in the material conditions that give rise to oppression. It is the power of this emancipatory perspectiveenacted through both political and pedagogical actions within schools and communitiesthat holds the promise for recreating a more socially just world.Many educators in poor communities express a deep sense of powerlessness in their efforts to teach marginalized students. In the midst of a vitriolic rhetoric of terrorism and deceptive justifications, this sense of powerlessness is intensified, particularly in regions where the population is increasingly poor, diverse, and immigrant. School issues related to academic failure, student delinquency, or classroom inattentiveness are generally addressed in superficial or alienating ways. The objective becomes solely to eliminate the immediate symptom, masking the underlying social malaise. Meanwhile, the deeply serious problems students face within schools and in their private lives are ignored carte blanche, swept under the carpet of institutional efficiency, meritocratic fantasies, and the politics of social containment. Still, the Jeffersonian ideal of educating citizens for participation in a democratic society continues to be expressed, even by the most conservative educators and policy-makers. Never mind that poor, working class, and racialized students are socially and politically exiled within schools, resulting in their academic demise. As teachers intentionally embrace or unintentionally internalize a belief in the neutrality and benevolence of schooling, students are simultaneously tested, labeled, sorted, and tracked to the tune of bootstrap platitudes of self-reliance, which readily warp the very human sensibilities necessary for a commitment of social justice and institutional equality. Instead, misguided notions undergird the policies and practices of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT)touted as the panacea for excellence. Rooted in traditional authoritarianism and the instrumentalization of knowledge, these evidence based policies have been translated most forcefully within public schools that serve the most disenfranchised. As such, this fragmented approach to schooling effectively trumps the development of critical consciousness, civic sensibilities, and political empowerment. Instead, students are ushered in a world of limited careerism, where college acceptance and consequent graduation are the predominant measures of academic success. In the process, students learn little about themselves as integral human beings or the motivations and sensibilities that shape their understanding of the world. Students who do not march in step with the college readiness bandwagon can find themselves shifting from one thing to another, emotionally abandoned within a school culture that pretends academic preparation is the only viable means by which human success can be measured and social well-being obtained. In the interest of capitalist accumulation, schooling in the U. S. also socializes the majority of students to accept the betrayal of their civil rights, in exchange for a fantasy of accumulation and security that can never be guaranteed. The construction and control of knowledge are at the heart of this phenomenon. Despite democratic claims, conditions within public schools reproduce inequalities and social exclusions through pedagogical relationships that reinforce repression and deny most students and faculty, for that matter, their freedom and autonomy to think and express themselves without undue fear of retaliation. Consequently, marginalized populations are tyrannized daily by policies and practices systematically designed to limit their imaginations and, thus, participation in their empowerment. Meanwhile, the dissonance between the culture of the school and students lives is often dismissed as irrelevant to their education or academic success. Unfortunately, even well-crafted programs that claim to be committed to social justice tend to sabotage student autonomy and cultural integrity, compelling them to adopt prescribed ways of knowing and manufactured identities that prove false when brushed against the conditions of their daily experience. 12 Here, well-meaning teachers use their authority and privilege to invalidate, intentionally or unintentionally, students who become involved in the construction of oppositional knowledge; thus, reinforcing students silences and self-doubt. Unfortunately, many teachers who are able to recognize the violence of injustice within other instructional settings are less willing to accept that they themselves might need to make fundamental changes in their classroom teaching, in order to support democratic practices, including political dissent.Critical ideas and practices in the interest of democratic schooling must then remain central to our efforts to confront the hidden curriculum of alienation and powerlessness so prevalent in schools and society today. To challenge repressive pedagogical tendencies, educators must stretch the boundaries of critical educational principles in order to infuse public contexts with critiques that counter the violence of both ultraconservative values and neoliberal solutions. It is a moment when emancipatory theories of schooling that challenge deficit notions and support democratic life must be put into action, in an effort to counter repressive national educational agendas that render teachers, students, parents, and communities voiceless and devoid of social agency. There is an urgent need for civic courage herethe kind that challenges the contemporary rhetoric of rugged individualism, self-reliance, and economic Darwinism, which shamelessly undermines difference, dissuades dissent, and disrupts justice. Through authoritarian educational practices and the imposition of the hidden curriculum of the market place, the ideological practices of public schooling uncritically nourish patriotic zeal, defend the violence of war as a necessity, and justify the violation of our civil rights in the name of national protection. Simultaneously, strident individualism and backlash politics destroy historical memory and impose an official public transcript (an apolitical, ahistorical, and, at moments, blatantly dishonest spin) on events, in concert with the imperatives of neoliberalism. Namely, the expansion of the free market, the deregulation of environmental policies, the corporatization of all bureaucratic institutional functions, the monopoly of the media, and the wholesale commodification and privatization of every aspect of our humanity.In response to this political climate, an important role of critical educators, then, is not only to unveil this hidden curriculum in schools and society but also to work toward the decolonization of education, in ways that support the reinstitution of a multiplicity of historical memories and epistemologies tied to the survival of historically oppressed communities (Paraskeva). For in these repressed histories is often found the collective possibility to wage protest through a courageous willingness to imagine a different world. As such, this constitutes an essential dimension in forging a critical pedagogy that can challenge civic domestication, forge the ground for political engagement, and embrace the passion of dissent so necessary to the transformation of our communities.Imagination and DissentImagine all the peopleSharing all the worldYou may say Im a dreamerBut Im not the only oneI hope someday youll join usAnd the world will live as one-John LennonA culture of fear disrupts our critical powers to imagine a different worlda world in which our shared humanity can also be central to our politics. The sensibilities of a neoliberal culture seem to thrive upon cynicism, fear, insecurity, and despair. 14 Neoliberalism renders unfettered imagination as suspicious; yet, it is precisely our ability to imagine beyond the limited boundaries of the status quo that opens the door to a new vision of politics and the world. As such, it is not surprising that the voices and participation of those who refuse to offer their consent to hegemonic structures are rendered invisible or marked for subjugation. The crack down on civil liberties, including the right to information, movement, and dissent, rapidly intensified over the last two decades; and the last seven years of the Obamas administration have done little to shift prevailing policies and practices supporting wide scale surveillance (Torres ??/).However, it is important to note that the practices of the Department for Homeland Security and other institutional mechanisms of surveillance did not materialize overnight. Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of men and women from working class and racialized communities have lost their civil rights as a consequence of felony convictions and increasing rates of incarceration. In fact, the overwhelming increase in incarceration from 1990 to 2010 constituted the most dramatic rise in the inmate population ever witnessed in the history of the nation (source?). Also dramatic was the increasing level of public surveillance within many public schools, including the use of armed personnel. In concert, it is worth noting that a plethora of federal, state, and local policies were proposed and enacted specifically to repress the movement of people (but not capital, of course) across U.S. borders.During the last twenty years, actions were also instigated against antiwar protestors, critics of globalization, and other political dissenters. In 2005, for example, a Flag Amendment was passed that made burning the American flag a felony. In 2002, Joseph Frederick unveiled a fourteen-foot paper sign declaring Bong Hits 4 Jesus. Although he was on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school, he was suspended. His civil rights case reached the Supreme Court, where the courts decision drew a fuzzy line between advocacy of illegal conduct and political dissent, ultimately limiting student rights. 15 The Democracy Now! Archive is replete with news stories of peace and antiwar dissidents who have been spied on, jailed, or fired from their workplaces, including longtime progressive columnist Robert Scheer who was fired by the L.A Times in 2005. 16 And, many know of the light of Ward Churchill, a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Bolder who was fired for his political views, despite the ostensible protection of academic freedom. Yet, private militant groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps 17 at the U.S./Mexico border and Internet terrorist hunters such as Shannon Rossmiller 18 became the new millenniums self-appointed vigilantes, drenched in the moralistic rhetoric of the Bush administration.Much of the lingering commotion was fueled by the hysteria that resulted in the passage of The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, better known as the Patriot Act. In response, Michael Steinberg, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, encouraged political dissent saying, in times of crises, it is even more important for citizens to dissent when the government is doing wrong Dissent is not antipatriotic.19 Given the repressive context illustrated by these examples, it is imperative that critical educators take on issues of social justice publicly in a serious, forthright, and sustained manner. To accomplish this requires that we remain ever cognizant of the political nature of education and its inextricable relationship to the larger societal and economic forces that govern our lives. As such, the relationship between pedagogy, politics, and dissent must intermingle with emancipatory principles of engaged public life, making it impossible to deny that dissent, though not synonymous with democracy, is an essential political ingredient for the evolution of a just and democratic society. Dissent is, in fact, absolutely necessary to the enactment of democratic principles, particularly within a nation so tremendously diverse (e.g., ethnic, gender, class, culture, language, sexuality, etc.) as the United States. Politics stripped of dissent leaves the powerful unaccountable, to run roughshod over the interests, needs and aspirations of the majority of the worlds population, irrespective of any national rhetoric proclaimed about freedom and democracy. Imagining justice demands that we also reimagine the world anew. As such, Freire often pointed to the pedagogical significance of imagination and curiosity to the process of learning, critical formation, and political development. Unfortunately, imagination and curiosity are aspects of education that seldom receive the attention they merit, particularly within this democratic society. Yet, the capacity to imagine the world beyond our current social and material conditions, with confidence in our individual and collective abilities to enact change, is central to any transformative process. It is the tremendous power of imagination that opens the field for students to simultaneously reflect on what is, as well as dream about what might be. As students are supported in their efforts to grapple with possibilities beyond their present conditions, they are midwifed, so to speak, into critical social insights that unveil the hidden ideologies and material conditions that repress their freedom. By so doing, imagination and curiosity both compel students to break through the silences of injustice, as well as to speak the unspeakable that suffocates their will to be. Once spoken, new ideas of the world can be reinvented in dialogue and critically engaged. It is through the organic regeneration of a pedagogy of imagination that teachers, students, and communities can become empowered, so that we might forge together a vision of social justice, one founded on an ethical concern for our moral responsibility as free subjects of history.In line with radical philosophical traditions of education, both Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene spoke often in their work about the importance of imagination to the forging of an emancipatory political vision. They similarly linked the notion of imagination to our capacity to step back from a set of familiar circumstances or conditions in order to enter into a more complex understanding of the world. By opening up to a variety of tested and untested possibilities of knowing and experiences of the world, we are better able to understand how students from different cultural traditions come to think or act differently in the world. Unlike the narrow rationality and ethnocentrism of a conservative identity politics, critical imagination can exist only within a realm where plurality of thought and practice resides. This is so because critical thought requires open-mindedness and expansiveness of vision, which can only be found through our willingness to confront fear as a normal aspect of everyday life. This also entails our willingness to counter, individually and collectively, those values and practices that seek to pathologize those who dissent. To nourish imagination within the classroom, then, is to fuel one of the most indispensable qualities inherent in the practice of genuine democracy and, thus, transformative dissent. For without imagination, the injustice of an exploitive status quo is rendered intractable, as is often the case in schools where bureaucratic power, in direct contradiction to democratic rights and principles, represses creativity, fosters dependency, and coerces consent.In contrast, a critical pedagogy cultivates imagination and seeks to create opportunities to insert students into new and unfamiliar contexts so they can grapple with the cognitive dissonance and ambiguity, which is intrinsic to a highly diverse society. Moreover, such imagination is important to the process of critical dissent, because it not only centers its focus on undoing but also is attentive to critically rethinking conditions of inequality and offering solutions that arise from collaboration and consensus. 20 Rather than simply entering into dissent and conflict with wholesale antagonism, critical educators recognize the complexity of both human relationships and material existence and, thus, enter into conflict with not only clear values and vision but also with a much needed sense of humility and faith in humanity. Humility, anchored in a politics of love, provides the open-mindedness to listen to an adversary without stripping the person of dignity and respect. 21 In the absence of humility and political imagination, any possibility of dialogue becomes stifled. Generally, this is so because the communication can easily become stonewalled or oppositional. Once this happens, the two sides of a conflict become mired in the ego-pursuit of winning the battle and being right, rather than remaining focused on a collective democratic intent. Righteousness and moralism seem to be by-products of such a contentious process, limiting the possibility of critical compassion and revolutionary solidarity in the course for political struggle.A critical pedagogy, through invigorating critical discourse with imagination and faith in our humanity, supports students in building sound epistemological and ontological pursuits in resonance with universal principles of emancipatory life. It is here where often there is a departure between postmodernists and those who remain committed to the belief in the salience of class struggle and an anti-capitalist project. Just as it was for Marx, the struggle against capitalism today is indeed a fiercely moral one. Undoubtedly, the ferocity of Marx was as much a part of his political convictions as it was his ability to imagine the limitless capacity of human beings to continuously make, unmake, and remake the world.As the relentless immorality of global capital threatens environmental collapse, we must work tireless to enact a critical pedagogy that is unapologetically political, ethical, and moral. To do this, we need to teach in ways that help us to unearth the virulent structures of power that limit our dreams, incarcerate our bodies, and betray our love for justice. We need a revolutionary pedagogy of love that embraces our civic responsibility as critical citizens of the world and fully authorizes our kinship as interdependent human beings. And from here, we can begin to break out of our one-dimensional egos and move, instead, toward a soulful understanding of ourselves as both collective subjects of our cultural destinies and universal beings, in a very long and bloody historical struggle for our humanity.

NOTES1. R.L. Ivie, Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America, Javnost/The Public 11, no. 2 (2004): 19-36.2. See A. Darder, Radicalizing the Immigration Debate: A Call for Open Borders and Global Human Rights, New Political Science 29, no. 2 (2007). 3. B. Braiker, Americans and Islam, Newsweek, July 20, 2007; available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19874703/site/newsweek/.4. A. J. Noury and N.C. Smith, Bye, Bye American Dream, Political Affairs (December 2004): 26. 5. See: B. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (New York: Turtleback Books, 2002).6. E. Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 256.7. See: G. Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation (Boston, MA: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2001).8. Ibid.9. See: R. Miles, Racism after Race Relations (London: Routledge, 1993); and A. Darder and R.D. Torres, After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism ( New York: University Press, 2004).10. See: P. Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Colorline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).11. N. Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (Seven Stories Press, 1998), 24.12. R. Butson, Teaching as a Practice of Social Injustice: Perspective from a Teacher, Radical Pedagogy (2003); available at: http:radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/Issue5_1/10_butson.html.13. M. Greene, Metaphors and Responsibility, On Common Ground: Partnerships and the Arts 5 (fall 1995); available at: http:// www.yale.edu/ynhti/pubs/A18/greene.html.14. H. A. Giroux, Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neoliberalism: Making the Political More Pedagogical, Policy Futures in Education 2: no. 3-4 (2004): 494.15. B. Mears, Bong Hits for Jesus Case Limits Student Rights, CNN Washington Bureau (2007); available at http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/25/free.speech/index.html.16. See Democracy Now! (November 14, 2005); available at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid+05/11/14/1447244.17. To see the Minuteman website, go to: http://www.minutemanhq.com/hq/.18. B. Harden, In Montana, Casting a Web for Terrorists, Washington Post, June 4, 2006, A03; available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/03/AR2006060300530.html.19. S. Chang, ACLU Encourages Political Dissent as a Patriotic Action, Michigan Daily, April 12, 2002.20. J. Hart, Meet the New Boss: You: How and Why the People Are Taking Charge. Utne Reader, MayJune 2007, 42.21. See: A. Darder, Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), for an extensive discussion of Paulo Freires pedagogy and the indispensable characteristics that he identifies within a revolutionary understanding of love.

Chapter 3Blurred Lines: Creating and Crossing Boundaries between Interviewer and Subject

Amanda Freeman

When I started working with low-income single mothers, I was a graduate student studying creative non-fiction writing at Columbia University. I taught GED classes for adults at a community service center and remedial writing at the City University of New York. The moms in my classes captivated me with their stories, fighting their way back to school and past bad relationships to move their families out of poverty. I recognized the way in which crafting a narrative could be empowering and help them to move forward in their own lives. A student in one of my remedial writing classes, a forty-something single mom trying to get a better job and set an example for her two young sons, lingered one day after class. Her questions were shy and halting. She wanted to write, really to write. To tell the story of her fathers abuse back in their home country when she was too young to understand. I encouraged her. Writing can help us make sense of our own experiences and connect with other women, I said. Out of my remedial classes, grew an informal writers workshop. One of the mothers wanted an outlet to talk about her husbands cheating, another about her addict father. One mom told the group about winning a college scholarship while her son climbed her back, jamming a pudgy finger into her ear. But the logistical problems were overwhelming-- conferences at school, babysitters who canceled at the last minute, pressures at work and from fathers. After a few months, meeting times became impossible to schedule.Two years later, my own story began to unravel. I was pregnant and my husband was cheating with a co-worker. I stared at the computer screen in disbelief; his username was myweakside. I assumed we would try therapy. He was my best friend. Wed been together on and off for seven years and engaged for two of them. But it quickly became clear that the marriage was over, and I had to decide whether or not to continue with the pregnancy as a single mother. I thrashed around, unable to see a future. Thats when my single mother students came back to me. Id taken a job substitute teaching in an inner city middle school after moving out of the apartment with my husband. Most days I would return home to smudges of dog crap rubbed into the carpet by our angry little dog. One afternoon I was scrubbing the carpet, tears and snot dripping into the heady cleaning potion when I sat back heavily and tore open one in a stack of boxes. Inside were black and white composition notebooks, journals from my workshop. I stayed there on the floor, amidst the fumes, and read them cover-to-cover. Their stories were my medicine. Tales thick with grammatical mistakes but honest and expressive about the endless needs and wants of children, past hurts and unfaithful men, and hard-won victories for the moms and their kids. Their struggles helped to put my own into context. Through their voices, I could see a future for my daughter and me.

A year later, watching my daughter grow into the babbling, tottering love of my life, I decided to return to school to pursue my scholarly interest in the life narratives of low-income single mothers. Becoming a single mother myself further sealed my commitment to the stories and struggles of this marginalized and often misrepresented population. I applied to PhD programs that would support my research and found a home at Boston College, working with Research Professor Lisa Dodson whose work centered on low-income single mother-headed families. As a research assistant and a poverty fellow, I was assigned to conduct annual interviews of single mother participants in an anti-poverty program in South Boston.At the same time, I enrolled in the requisite classes to complete my masters degree in sociology. Though I had plenty of experience as an interviewer not only from my non-fiction writing program but also before that working as a reporter, I was not prepared for the Research Methods version of interviewing. The seminar stressed the proper methodology of interview guide composition and coding, of maintaining appropriate distance between the subject and researcher, of not expressing overt emotion in response to answers that might indicate a certain orientation or preference. For me, interviewing had always been a natural dialogue, heavy on listening and responding, sometimes allowing for silence, to dig deeper, to understand better, to get the story. Now I was unsure. And listening back to a recording of my first interview, my self-doubt was obvious. At one point, the interviewee choked up, talking about her sons father. Why didnt I comfort her? Offer words of understanding or compassion? Instead, I stayed on my side of the table, averting my eyes, making notes, trying to create distance between researcher and subject. Thankfully, the distance dissolved quickly. Partly because Research Methods ended and partly because while transcribing the interviews I saw the missed opportunities for connection and discovery and the void where compassion and empathy belonged. But it was clear that my interviewing technique did need some adjusting to academic research. I remembered to withhold value judgments when I thought I might influence responses or to wait until the women had fully processed their thoughts about, for instance, the arcane rules and processes holding up their childcare vouchers before responding or offering affirmation. I also realized it was important to be mindful of the differences between my experience and that of the women I was interviewing. In Research Methods, we read Zavellas (1996) description of her experience interviewing Chicana women. She discusses the problematic situation of interviewing people with whom you may assume you have shared experiences. It was not until she was able to acknowledge and confront the differences between herself and the interviewees that she was able to study them with greater success. Zavella suggests that closer attention to the voice of the subject is needed, and this notion began to guide my own research. Reflexivity was essential, checking in on the ways in which my identity and experience might be influencing my data collection, analysis and interpretation. Obviously, the agency of the teller is central to composing narratives from personal experience, but so are the actions of others- listener, transcriber, analyst, and reader (Riessman, 1993, p. 15). I paid attention to the way my pre-conceived ideas affected the interview process. However, I also found that my natural tendency to make the interviews more personal and less clinical was key to full, meaty responses. The interviewees grew to know that I was the single mother of a young daughter. The more I opened up about my story, the more flowed between us about toxic men and struggles to get complaints heard by the kids teachers. They asked me questions about my situation and I answered honestly. Their gradual understanding of some of the commonalities we shared, despite obvious differences, helped me to gain their trust. We exchanged stories about our childrens fathers and girlfriends, about the blame we felt when parents at the playground asked where the kids fathers were. They called and sent messages to check in when my daughter had sinus surgery and advised me about getting extra supports from the school when she returned. The study lasted three years, and as time passed, the women confided in me more and more. They realized if they told me about a boyfriend living in their public housing unit or an unfair situation they were navigating at work or in school, I would keep the information confidential and help in any way I could. At the same time, the women also knew I was a white graduate student attending Boston College. I did not live in subsidized housing. My ex-husband was a public defender who made a decent salary and was likely to pay child support on time, visit regularly and contribute to college. This was not the case for most of them who received little or no support from the fathers of their children. Though saddled with more than a hundred fifty thousand dollars of student loan debt, I was on my way to a second masters and eventually a PhD degree. While my education set me apart, many of the women I spoke with were pursuing associates, bachelors and even masters degrees. They asked me questions about juggling my studies with single parenting. When my father struggled to find a job after a long stretch of unemployment and my parents were on the verge of losing their home where my daughter and I lived part-time, I confided in a few of the women, and they offered compassion, understanding and useful advice.So many of us are one illness, car accident, divorce or lost job away from needing government assistance to help our families to survive. There was great diversity of experiences and backgrounds of the single mothers I interviewed. I met several women whose families had lived in the same public housing development for generations as well as women who had been raised by middle and working class families, who sometimes even refused to visit them in their project apartments. Circumstances like domestic violence, abandonment, and addiction left many of the women to be labeled low-income single mothers in need of empowerment.Many of the interviewees expressed an overall lack of regard for neighbors in their public housing community and tried to differentiate themselves, probably in part because they were talking to me, a white graduate student interviewer. Jane, a single mother of a five-year-old son, moved into public housing from a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. Jane said, of her son, Im just keeping him inside until we get out of here. Have you seen this place? Drugs everywhere. Its just disgusting...the neighbor upstairs has a two year old and a five year old and the way she talks to them, youd think she was talking to an adult. Its just so horrible. My son, you know, calls her the loud lady. Its just not the way we were raised. We were raised poor, but not like that. When a person puts together a narrative of their life story, they are creating a version of their identity to represent to the listener (Riessman, 1993; Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992). Social forces, like stereotypes, might be at work under the surface of a narrative, even if they are not apparent from the actual text of the interview. Respondents narrativize particular experiences in their lives, often when there has been a breach between the ideal and real, self and society (Riessman, 1993, p. 3). As such, the narrative presented in the interview can also be seen as a counter-narrative responding to an existing cultural expectations about low-income women, like that of a neglectful, lazy welfare mother using her government issued checks for weekly pedicures. The single mothers I interviewed constructed narratives about their lives that resisted commonly held myths about low-income mothers to reclaim their own versions of their identities. All of the mothers understood the negative stereotypes associated with low-income single mothers in America. The terms single mother and welfare dependant have come to be highly intertwined, adding to the stereotype of the single mother as lazy and unmotivated, (Seecombe & Walters, 1998, p. 849), sexually irresponsible (Luker, 1996), and young (qtd. in Bock 64). This stereotype remains surprisingly powerful, despite the fact that pregnancy among unmarried teens has dropped dramatically over the last two decades while the rate for college educated, unmarried white women in their thirties has more than doubled, and for women in managerial and professional jobs, the rate has tripled (Sands & Nuccio, 1996).The single mother label weighed heavily on me, even as I resisted. Should I conceal my circumstances on fellowship applications? More than one person advised this might be a good idea, until I was able to prove that I could handle the work. I will never forget one afternoon sitting in my parents kitchen, feeding my daughter carrots. I heard my father on the phone with a friend in the other room. No, Im not sure about retirement, he said. My daughter, yes Amanda, she became, well shes a single mother now, so you know, all bets are off. These words from the man who had bragged to his friends about my grades and jobs for the last twenty-plus years. I wanted to yell at my dad, but I knew he was not alone. Conjure a single mother in your mind, Id often ask in the classes I taught. Inevitably the women they imagined were young, uneducated, welfare-dependent minorities. The stigma remains powerful despite the fact that are the fastest growing family form in this country with an estimated 11 million single moms living in the United States. My reaction to feeling stigmatized was to dive into my schoolwork. My research became my refuge and many of my interview subjects became my friends. Did I sometimes cross the boundary between interviewer and subject? Yes. I pas