Abstract
This essay explores recent trends in contemporary educational studies that have focused on developing closer partnerships between university-based scholars and school practitioners and community-based organizers. With a focus on the antidote, as seen in the 2016 American Educational Research Association’s conference theme to recalibrate university-based education scholars as professional educational researchers in the service of the public, the author exposes how the contemporary trend, although running counter to, cannot be extricated from the Marxian problematic concerning the subject of history.
Introduction
A preoccupation of many educators and school leaders is how to bridge university education research and scholarship with community needs. A popular reform trend attracting renewed attention is to develop closer partnerships with schools and communities. In general, those who have written on the issue and how it might be best addressed have ranged from a critique of an institutional-instrumental-mindset that lacks an “incentive structure” by rewarding “scholarship over community engagement” (see Nelson, London and Strobel, 2015), to a more historicized and politicized viewpoint that is attuned to the inherent discrepancy of power and knowledge production in such a distribution (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). The former would like to install a new paradigm by reevaluating the institutional constraints that privileged the one (i.e., scholarship) over the other (i.e., community engagement), while the latter would like to set and control the terms of the university and community partner relationship so that the knowledge produced will actually benefit those that have been the objects of research studies and the targets of government and corporate funding streams.
But there is a more important tension underlying the division and the attempts by both educationists and want-to-be educationists (i.e., industry-backed philanthropists and non-profits pushing for changes in education policy) to collaborate and develop a tighter and more salutary relationship between education research and community needs. A commonplace assumption that emerges about the two spaces is the fundamental distinction that is made between the individuals associated with each setting. The education researcher–scholar is located inside the institutional space of the university while the classroom teacher or community practitioner is placed outside in the community. Though this inside/outside bifurcation of the two spaces may be a simplification and admittedly lacks contextual nuance and specificity, what gives the representation credibility is the frequency of its repetition. The representation carries with it an unfavorable and reductive stereotype associated with those situated inside the university as disaffected “ivory-towered thinkers” and their unusable and impractical knowledge production (Said, 1994). It insinuates a disconnection and an estrangement with the real world.
Yet the discursive repetition of out-of-touch academic intellectuals living in their own little universe overlooks a very long history of social and scientific expertise in the service of the state. Are these spaces so unambiguously opposed to one another and can the divide be sustained? In the American context, university research units and academic disciplines and their band of all-knowing professionals and wise benevolent experts have contributed to, if not enhanced,
The recurring representation and the assumptions made about the two signifying spaces have not been immune to criticism. The idea of partnership initiatives is a case in point. In an important book published over a decade ago— the most recent version of a longstanding effort of liberal governments to recalibrate the relationship of governing [my emphasis] through the overlapping practices that link civil society and the state. The changes occurring are not merely a recurrent historical pattern, but involve particular sets of relations that require systematic examination [my emphasis] (2003: 2).
The purpose of the present essay is concerned with several interrelated issues: To explore this impelling need for action in education and the subjective transformation of education scholars to public scholars; to ask under what norms and set of rules is the word “public” in the phrase “public scholar” linked, since it is far from self-evident what it might signify; and to draw out the unstated assumptions that underlie the distinction of the supposedly separate and diametrically opposed relations associated with each space, including the logic of the indictment attributed to education scholars, such as myself, as being out-of-touch with the real world and its problems. In short, what I offer in this essay is not another lament about the divide or to ridicule academic intellectuals; rather, the aim is to reconsider how to think about these spaces and relations in a fresh and productive way. To this end, I draw upon earlier work describing my collaboration with a community-based organization of women in the county of Hawaiʻi. Much of the following discussion is a continuation of the arguments presented in a previous publication that dealt with how two seemingly divergent communities and their presumably distinct practices and linguistic registers came together to create a community education conference (Tavares, 2016). In that publication, the focus was to draw out the entangled multilayered and multitemporal dimensions of association and the productive tensions that arise. Here, the focus is placed on the temporal politics of education by way of thinking through the subject of history problematic. I offer a different grid of interpretation that can be considered against the common presuppositions that limit our thinking about the work we do and its translation for other audiences and contexts.
Recalibrating education researchers as public scholars?
Kelly Walker’s essay Historically, the idea of a subject of history was advanced by traditional Marxism, which posits structural contradictions within capitalism that create a class of people occupying a position in society from which they might see their subjugation and how it is in their interest to dismantle capitalism. Initially, traditional Marxism conceived the industrial working class as the subject of history. However, with the failure of the working class to become a revolutionary subject of history, the search was on for a successor. Was it Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s marginalized intellectuals? Maybe it was women, third-world people, and radical intellectuals resisting at the margins of Herbert Marcuse’s one-dimensional society? Perhaps it was black women occupying a “position at the bottom” of society from which they might “leap into revolutionary action” – the Combahee River Collective argument that has become the locus classicus of identity politics (2011: 261–262).
These questions are meant to foreground some of the unaddressed assumptions that seem to support the renewed attention given to developing closer partnerships with schools and communities that are reflected in, among other things, the theme of the 2016 AERA conference. The theme’s logic rests on a false temporal-spatial unity amongst the vast field of education research and scholarship. It implies that civic life and public conflicts remain outside the profession of education and university life. Historically this has not been the case.
Public legitimation in entrepreneurial times
As someone who teaches in a social foundations department I am not immune to the weight of a recurrent charge concerning the relevance of my work or the value of intellectual culture. It is a force that comes from a variety of angles—within the profession, by rival fields, from university administration, government, private, and corporate funders, to name a few—requiring both institutional and public legitimation which has intensified in the midst of our “entrepreneurial times” (Donald, 2007: 290). The intellectual history of social foundations in the United States was constituted in the 1930s as a space of culture and mind studies and both were seen as interdependent foundations of human learning (Tozer and Butts, 2011). Since its founding, the field of social foundations of education has changed dramatically. Initially “grounded in long-established disciplines,” taught by disciplinary specialists, social foundations now comprises theoretical perspectives and methodologies that reflect the numerous directions that the field has taken (Tozer, 2011: 1-2). But it is a field that is also subject to various external and internal constraints and criticisms. For example, the disciplines and sub-disciplines that comprise social foundations is often made to answer to its social usefulness to both the profession of education in promoting professional teacher knowledge and to life outside of the university. The point I want to make here is the legitimating preoccupation that is at work both within the profession of education
The criticism of the immediate “utility” of education research that stems largely from an assumption of the worthlessness of what the foundations scholar produces for the outside of academia (in community), where the public and societal problems purportedly are located, is suspect. I now want to make a detour and describe how theoretic practice was enacted in a space deemed non-academic. What follows is an analysis of my involvement with a community organization of women that serve a predominantly immigrant and diasporic Filipino community in the county of Hawaiʻi. As noted earlier, the subject of this association was presented in a previous publication. I return to it here because the joint effort interrelates to many of the issues that have been raised at the outset of this essay, including what might be required to rework or resist a set of dominant space-bounded binaries such as university/community, intellectual/practitioner, private/public, and theory/practice that are invoked quite comfortably in both contemporary mainstream and progressive education scholarship. Second, having some time to think about the profession of education’s struggle to renegotiate its relation to the public, I want to keep near and to the surface the “paradoxes” of partnerships that have the effect of reinforcing and creating what Franklin, Bloch, and Popkewitz call “systems of exclusion” or enhancing even further the “regulative power of the state” (2003: 3). Their analysis brings to the surface the less obvious senses of partnerships including a recurring civilizing genre that is preserved within the professional practice of education that often goes unchecked. More significant though is their understanding that “the stakes of educational research are social and political as well as epistemological” (Popkewitz, 1997: 18).
In thinking about how to represent my relationship with a community organization, I found inadequate to the task conventional educational discourse on the concept of community. The way community is often conceptualized assumes a false unity of a bounded space. What I sought was both a perspective and language that might convey the social relations and affects that are generated from association and mediated in complicated ways by various histories, epistemologies, and social-cultural norms—in short, a way of thinking and enacting community that might appreciate the different structurations of time on bodies and actions. The inspiration, therefore, for conceptualizing and analyzing what took place between two purportedly incongruent spaces comes primarily from the conceptual work of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) on community, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (2014) on relationality, and the late social theorist Gillian Rose (1997) on feminist research.
But before turning to that experience, I first want to make a gesture toward the approach I take here. I aim to construct the objects of my analysis in a similar manner to postcolonial writer and filmmaker Trinh T Minh-ha, who does so deliberately. I move toward them with an assemblage of analytical and historical strategies, voices, affects, viewpoints, thoughts, associations, attachments, and memories that orients and at times disorients my thinking and writing. And while writing within the professional field of education often privileges recognizable questions and conclusions and often aims toward what Trinh T Minh-ha calls “information retrieval” or “administrative inquisition” (1996: 6), it need not be constrained by them. Indeed, Minha-ha speaks of her own writing as a process of creating and invoking resonance. Writing that is resonant is less inclined to report, survey, or synthesize. Rather, the writing strategy attempts to create resonances with its readers that might compel them to move away from the disciplinary restrictions and policing of what is possible to explore. It is to this I now turn.
Rethinking community
To think of community as a dynamic mobile arrangement of mediated relations rather than an enclosed location or fixed place is to reconsider its common usage and assumptions. Within the contours of what is called an experimental community are two ideas related to time and space. The temporal in an experimental community draws attention to duration and intensity. Duration conveys the length or period of time when groups or individuals come together for a specific situation. Intensities refer to the noise that shape subjectivities and what is integral to political life (Berlant and Edelman, 2014). Though noise is often construed as barriers to overcome or negativities to manage and contain, within an experimental community these social and psychic dimensions are taken as generative. It reminds us that to be in association with others is to be in a site of relations that is invested with desires, hopes, expectations, and fears. Whereas the conventional construct of community tends toward wholeness and identification for its members, the noise of an experimental community troubles any single totalizing instance or fixity of identity and highlights the complexities of association (Berlant and Edelman, 2014: vii–viii).
Turning to the spatial dimension, the emphasis is placed on the distribution of social relations. That distribution might be experienced in terms of proximity-in-distance, connecting, separating, appearing, and disappearing with one another. In the case of an experimental community, social relations are not aimed toward a relation of appropriation or fusion or hierarchical order often found in modernist agendas (Nancy, 1991; McMahon, 2011). Attending to the distribution of social relations attempts to illuminate and account for the way in which individuals in their association experience their connectedness, or lack thereof, to one another.
Apart from its distinctly corporeal dimension of space—by that I mean the sensations that arise when bodies are placed in association—there is an implicit political dimension to an experimental community. The boundaries that define the rules and habits of an experimental community are not determined in advance, that is, according to some preconceived conceptual notion of
Importantly, an experimental community differs from John Dewey’s (1927) formulation of community inasmuch as it reticulates what is deemed “negative” forces such as discord, uncertainty, disagreement, and dissention as potentially “productive” forces integral to human association and to the enactment of community. The themes of social cooperation, rational procedures of problem-solving, and integration of all human lives into a self-organizing community that are the substratum of Dewey’s (via Hegel) formulation of community and his notion of democracy, contrasts with Nancy’s (via Heidegger) formulation for which community is not obliged to have communion, totality, false unity, or complete immanence in order to engage in action.
Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga provide a description of experimental communities that is useful here. They characterize an experimental community as “durable associations of individuals who explore anomalous forms of being together while addressing a problem in a certain locality” (2009: 199). Community is not conceptualized as a fixed communion based on identitarian politics, but one that is
Although Basualdo and Laddaga’s discussion relies on examples from contemporary art practices, their conceptualization of an experimental community is instructive. I propose that an experimental community enlarges our repertoire of community sense-making. We are asked to extend how we might imagine what a community can become and the kinds of engagements it might enable and the expectations to which it can aspire. In general, an experimental community helps to foreground what they call the “redistribution of positions and of roles in the site in which it takes place” (2009: 206). An experimental community brings to the surface the spacing of relations, which can sensitize its participants to pedagogical possibilities that are reciprocal and relational, thus creating the opportunity for speakers and their right to produce discourse—what the linguist Emile Benveniste terms subjects of
Finally, the appeal of an experimental community may have to do with my own hybrid (Bhabha and Camaroff, 2002) positionality and my preoccupation with racial subjection (Tavares, 2008; 2009; 2011). Working with visual archives, and in particular photographs (Tavares, 2016), was largely motivated by a concern to articulate the complicatedness of identity formations and in some sense validate the shifting, messy, contingent, historical, and contemporary strains upon their making against dehistoricized, purist, and essentialist accounts (Butler, 1993; Collins, 1991; Gilroy, 1993, 2005). As I have noted elsewhere, there is a peculiar temporality to identity formations, whether pinned on to individuals by institutions (US racial categories not only change but are assumed to be mutually exclusive) or self-selected by the individual herself (self-identification tends to underestimate the fundamental disunity of the self and its constitution by and through processes which are only partially accessible) (Alcoff, 2002).
Feminist research
Like many writers influenced by academic feminisms, I too desire that the scholarship produced will have resonances with feminist education research. And we know that doing feminist work is neither a self-evident nor a transparent set of conceptual moves or actions as the parameters of what constitutes such work are “continually contested” (Mohanty, 2003: 46). Donna Haraway (1991) and Sandra Harding (1991) argued that knowledge is always situated and produced in specific conditions and circumstances. Their argument applies to the production of feminist epistemologies, which make no claims to have universal meaning and applicability to all things, times, and contexts. In fact the knowledge produced and the knowledge studied is treated as specific, partial, and open to different translations, routes of circulation, and political investment. To this I would add, it is always imperfect and without teleological certainty (see Walker, 2011: 263). The aim to “situate academic knowledge reflexively” as Gillian Rose (1997) had put it, “is to produce non-overgeneralizing knowledges that learn from other kinds of knowledges, and
These views contrast with the production of knowledge that legislates itself under the pretense of universality, that is to say, disembodied, unattached, value-free, and timeless. What these writers place at the forefront of their work is the way in which academic research and scholarship participate in producing their objects of study (or subjects of research) and legitimize a particular perspective. Yet they also hold out the prospect that a critical-reflexive approach can bring new ways of seeing and relating or expose the exclusions that are often disguised in academic knowledge production. While these are not entirely novel points they are worth restating here because they underscore some of the substantive
Unbinding boundaries
I was introduced to the members of the organization
I left Honolulu and flew to Hilo to meet with the members of
Our first meeting took place early on a Saturday morning on December 15, 2012. My recollection of that morning is one of vulnerability. How would the group receive me? What will my body signify to them? Such questions are inseparable from particular relations of social power. The hierarchical spacing of relations manifested in institutional and discursive networks that separate the academic and non-academic, the formal from the informal, the university from the community, and the insider from the outsider. These are distinctions that also carry and reflect value. Welcoming each other, we settled at a large table outside of the immigration office—in retrospect, a fitting place.
We began with introductions. Each member of the group described her social background, professional and/or activist work, interest, skill, and vision for change in their community. The women that comprise As I listened and looked around me, I found it hard to hold in mind that we were a singular anything. People began their sentences with ‘We this’ and ‘We that,’ speaking of the need for unity, while the participants, it seemed to me, kept dissolving into their constituent parts. There were tweed jackets and flack jackets. Gold wire-rimmed glasses and dark shades. Jeans and tailored pants. Some people took the microphone and spoke as if they were only days from becoming a professor. Others were already politicians, fiery, and pithy, peppering their speech with phrases that sang. Some slouched against the wall as they spoke, keeping their dark glasses on, punching the air with their fists. Others accused and assailed. That we looked like a cornucopia of all the world’s people, in a blizzard of shades and tones, didn’t surprise me. I was accustomed to that. But the fact that there was almost no single experience that could be said to represent everyone’s was surprising indeed (1997: 105).
When I began to describe my research and scholarship on family photographs, I became very self-conscious of the academic tone in my voice and what seemed like difficult ideas and concepts for thinking about the genre of family pictures, the method of “memory work” (Kuhn, 1995) and the problem of the “familial gaze” (Hirsh, 1999). In this space represented as non-academic “difficult knowledge” as a certain form of speech seemed too much almost unintelligible, yet in an academic setting it would have felt conceptually anemic. Similar to the experience described by Parker, the differential spacing of our culturally constituted social relations asserted itself. Berlant and Edelman have a way of acknowledging what could be described as failed identifications when they say, “Being in relation invariably involves the animation of distance and closeness; in that sense even direct address can be felt as indirect and acknowledgement can seem like misrecognition” (2014: xi). Their observation understands difference and makes no apology for the messy, even confusing work of translation in processes of meaning making.
Eventually we discovered themes from my work that resonated with their interests and the work they wanted to do. Our conversation led to us thinking about Filipino immigrant and diasporic histories, cultural memories, patriarchal institutions, social traumas, and forms of resilience. Some of these topics came from my work and some from the work they were doing. Our conversation came back to the community conference, specifically to the theme, purpose, program, audience, and the intended outcome. Through sustained exchange (a full day’s work) marked more often by uncertainty than linearity, we were able to conjoin our ideas around them. Two purposes emerged related to the conference theme: create new narratives and highlight resilience. We then began to outline the details of the community education conference. I would provide research on the topic of historical trauma that would become part of the conference program. I was also asked and respectfully accepted the invitation to present my work at the conference.
Two months later, in February 2013, I left Honolulu and took a flight back to Hilo. We met at the same place. At this meeting we gave updates on our specific tasks and worked at connecting them to the purpose of the conference. The scholarly research on historical trauma draws from ethnic minority psychology, social work, and mental health. Within educational studies there is a rich body of scholarship that draws from psychoanalytics. Because the members of the group were most drawn to the literature that focused on micro-aggressions, healing, and resilience, it seemed appropriate to emphasize these aspects of the literature for the conference program. This was an intentional decision that was based on recognizing and respecting the conceptual work the group had done prior to me coming on board.
Two of us brought published scholarly articles that were relevant to the theme and we spent a good amount of time discussing whether any of them should be included in the conference folders. The articles were organized around frames of interrupting the naturalization of what I call “regime-made traumatic experiences”; that is, traumatic experiences produced by democratic regimes (such as nuclear weapons testing, illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, racist laws of exclusion). 2 Three in particular dealt with the Pacific context and nuclear weapons testing. All the members of the group agreed that the articles should be included which illustrated their desire to provide a forum that might speak to the structural resonances between regime-made trauma and broader community issues. We discussed in detail what the program would look like.
While there are significant differences in feminist epistemologies and no “coherent metanarrative” on the production of knowledge (Lemesianou and Grinberg, 2006: 217), what is significant about this rich archive of feminist inquiry is the view that “all knowledge is situated” (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991). With this in mind, a range of contexts and voices has been legitimated from which questions can emerge, knowledge can be generated, and reality can be transformed. Along these lines, the members of the group began to envision how their translations of historical trauma would take form. With varying degrees of political consciousness, their strategy was to enact the idea of “memory work,” a concept that Annette Kuhn in
Sensible pedagogy sensible politics
When I arrived in Hilo on 21 March 2013 at the conference center, I could immediately sense what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” This relates to the notion that aesthetic techniques can extend our narrow notions of public life and politics. Each of the members of the organization had brought a family photograph that had been blown up to the size of a small poster and they were placed around the conference room transforming another mundane conference room to a sensory site. The visual effect was powerful, an affectual address that drew conference participants in as they entered the room. The number of conference participants was about 30, comprising county officials, community leaders, students, and teachers from the College and University. The morning session began with addresses welcoming county officials and thanking supporters of the conference, followed by opening remarks by a member of the organization and then by the county prosecuting attorney. An overview of data and systems response to domestic violence was presented followed by the presentation on historical trauma.
The morning session ended with a moving live performance, “Blanket of Shame,” that dealt with the silences around intimate partner violence performed by the members of
There was critical engagement from the conference participants. Several perspectives stand out. A transgender participant told their story about intimate partner violence and in doing so raised the issue of hetero-normative assumptions that frame domestic violence discourse. An East African participant spoke about experiences growing up in her prior home and how those experiences had cultural resonances with many of the issues related to the theme of the conference, particularly resilience. The connections drawn between her prior home with Hawaiʻi helps to illustrate how the Geertzian concept of culture as contained in a single location or attached to a particular group is increasingly anachronistic (Ortner, 1997). A small group of college students were captivated by the delivery of the topics and expressed their interest in having classes and teachers that would let them experiment with other genre forms to approach historical material. Their observation, in effect, was a not-so-subtle critique of the disembodied knowledge that forms so much of the modern heritage of the contemporary curriculum. After the participant discussion the conference closed with a
A provisional conclusion
It is a privilege to be able to think, reflect, and act upon my interests as a social foundations scholar with the needs of a community-based organization. The form of our association had many features of an experimental community. Thinking about our association as an experimental community can enlarge and extend the prevailing common view of community, which tends toward a single identity. Our collaborative exchanges made possible the organization of a community education conference and dialogue and discussion across different linguistic registers. As an experimental space of pedagogy, it enabled new forms of relation to be experienced. But it was also risky inasmuch as the fruition of our collaborative work, in the form of an actionable project, arose from our exchanges with each other and the provocations of our ideas. Even in the best, self-reflexive traditions of feminist praxis, these relations are never smooth and predictable. There are blockages, misunderstandings, and shifts in perspectives to name a few. There are references that are often taken for granted and historical contexts that are never fully shared. Yet such interactions are not failures that need to be overcome or resolved or managed. Rather, they were central to our engagement with each other. Berlant and Edelman, who have theorized these kinds of exchanges which are often construed as negative, propose that they are generative and indispensable to relationality. As they have put it, “conversation complicates the prestige of autonomy and the fiction of authorial sovereignty by introducing unpredictability of moving in relation to another” (p. x).
Of course a question that haunts our experimental community, at least for me, is whether our work and the frameworks and media forms we experimented with actually achieve transformative effects. After all, isn’t the point of feminist praxis to fundamentally challenge or change herself or the culture? (hooks, 2015: 6) There are small indications that our experimental community might have had some effect on the participants. After I returned to my campus I received an e-mail message from a volunteer in the Prosecuting Attorney Office requesting a copy of the presentation on historical trauma. “It was nice being part of your presentation on Historical Trauma … Is it possible to get a copy of your presentation via e-mail? I also look forward to future engagements and dialogue with you” (personal e-mail correspondence dated 21 March 2013).
Reflecting on the open discussion and reviewing some of the comments on the conference evaluations do suggest something transformative might have happened for at least one of the participants. As one conference attendee wrote to the question, “What information was most helpful or important to you?”: “Understanding the work ‘Historical Trauma, Memory [Work]’ and the relation of our everyday events from the past and present.” Yet I also believe that the expectation that the “value” of theoretic practice can only be measured in terms of its immediate “utility” or how it transforms oppressive social structures or produces deliverables may be a bit too pretentious. This faith in education professionalism fails to notice or give credit to the ways that subordinated persons resist in a variety of ways the conditions of their “devaluation” (Berlant and Edelman, 2014). As I tried to illustrate through the example of the specific work of
Now I want to return to some of the issues that were raised at the beginning of this essay, particularly the idea of recalibrating education scholars as public scholars that is implied in the research association’s conference theme, and the pressure to bridge education research with community needs. It wouldn’t hurt to heed Walker’s important observation: We assume that, through left theory and practice, we can right an imperfect world. As such, we tend to assume that the theories and praxis through which we change the world are somehow not part of the world we’re acting on. But our theories and praxis are part of that imperfect world; thus, our theories and praxis are Radical educators and Marxists have been reluctant to accept the view of power as exercised and productive, as not coming from one source, because it rejects the view of the individual (or social groups) as a fully autonomous subject. Consequently, they are not likely to examine their own involvement in producing the web of discursive themes—legitimating principles—in which they nevertheless are caught (1998: 305).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.