Abstract
Adult education has a long history of people coming together to struggle toward a more equitable society—from Highlander Folk School in Appalachia to the Occupy Movement to Fees Must Fall to the Landless Workers’ Movement to Prison Abolition (and countless other movements nationally and globally). Now is the time for adult education scholars and activists to stand up and speak out about emerging challenges due to increasingly rapid erosion of human rights. Adult educators have an important role to play in resisting this erosion, and in doing so, to reclaim their roots. Documenting the narratives of struggle is critical in a moment when the erasure of racial and social justice is all around us.
Currently, there is a significant backlash against racial justice, attacks on critical race theory, retrenchment of affirmative action, bans on books, and pressure against any minute steps toward equity, racial/social justice work. Racialized scholars and activists are encountering ever more hostility as punishment for raising issues through scholarship, public forums, curricula, or in other venues. One recent example is Kathleen McElroy, a Black journalist who was offered tenure at Texas A&M only to have it rescinded. In 2021, a similar debacle involved Nikole Hannah-Jones. There are countless other cases of institutions that have walked back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) commitments. Many of those same institutions who had previously rushed to declare their commitments to racial and social justice are now noticeably silent.
The adult education field desperately needs allies, advocates, and accomplices (Isaac-Savage & Merriweather, 2021) to stand up and speak out publicly. One way to do that is to use research to chronicle struggles occurring on the ground. Publishing research that is grounded in social and racial justice is both urgent and necessary to counter the attacks on democratic ideals and commitments.
In 2020, with worldwide protests in defense of Black and Brown lives, countless institutions (including higher education institutions) were eager to display their own social justice street cred. Forming yet more DEI committees, inviting speakers on racial justice, and acknowledging “a problem” meant there was a significant amount of performativity on display but there were only tiny spaces of possibility with potential for real change. Since then, we have witnessed a kind of hysteria against terms like DEI or affirmative action. We have also witnessed that nothing substantive has really changed for Black and Brown communities. These performative actions amounted to little more than exercises in branding.
As a field, we need to recognize that this is not a safe time, and we must work collectively. Under our tenure, the co-editors of AEQ are committed to publishing research grounded in social and racial justice. We have repeatedly stated that adult education research that shines a spotlight on structural inequities is urgently needed and, under our tenure, AEQ will be a receptive space for this work.
It is a critically important time for our field to stay true to its roots and history, working as a community and lifting each other up. Three of the editors are racialized women whose research is grounded in highlighting the struggles of marginalized populations and interrogating structural inequities. As racialized scholars, we have written about the love that Black and Brown people have for each other that emerges from shared lived experiences of being in bodies that struggle to survive systemic oppression, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. We, as racialized scholars, understand the importance of mutual care (Garcia Pena, 2022). Making space for research that centers the work of marginalized scholars that is social/racial justice driven is one way to make this possible. As racialized scholars committed to social change, we understand the importance of collective victories and of accomplices. We understand that resistance is both our heritage and our healing (Kelley, 2021).