Illuminating the Fine Line Between Radicalization and Transformative Learning: Case Studies From Auto/Biographical Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

There is a fine normative line separating transformative learning and radicalization processes. Using in-depth auto/biographical narrative inquiry, the paper illuminates the importance of self-recognition in both: of feeling seen, understood and validated. But radicalization is ultimately about closure to the other and otherness, and fundamentalist acceptance of one truth and nothing but that truth. Transformative learning, on the other hand, requires an openness to doubt, uncertainty and willingness, forged in relationship, to recognize the other – symbolic and actual – in processes of lifelong and lifewide learning. Recognition too that there can be more than one victim, and that the other suffers and has the right to live and share valued space.

The call for papers for this special edition states that ‘Radicalization – ideological, behavioural and emotional adoption of a rigid position and aversion to alternatives—has emerged as a prominent issue in political, policy and scholarly debates globally’. It is a critical issue for our times: radicalization and related forms of violence are phenomena desperately requiring in-depth study, including within adult education, encompassing transformative, informal, incidental and experiential learning. What distinguishes radicalization from transformation, and from transformative learning itself? I suggest there is a fine line that distinguishes the fundamentalisms of radicalization from a continuing openness to learning from experience, which is essential to transformative learning. This includes openness of heart, spirit as well as mind to the other and otherness. I offer two case studies from my work in distressed urban communities in the United Kingdom, as well as a brief reflection on similar research among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. How and why do forms of radicalized fundamentalism hold sway, for example, in Hamas or among some ‘settler’ Jewish communities on the West Bank? The roots of fundamentalism, I suggest, lie in unresolved trauma, at an individual and collective level while the impetus for transformative learning, as well as in radicalization, lies in psychosocial processes of recognition; or its converse: disrespect, abuse and, at an extreme, trauma transcending generations.

The call invited us to consider emerging phenomena of radicalization in workplaces and everyday life. And to draw on eclectic research methodologies in investigating transformative learning/transformation in radicalization/deradicalization processes. The role of lived experience too, of storytelling, empathy and exposure to violence. My own research focuses on understanding the dynamics of lived experience – lifelong and lifewide – in transformations, for good and ill, drawing on the stories people tell (Formenti & West, 2018; Merrill & West, 2009; West, 2021). I use the descriptor ‘auto/biographical narrative research’ to describe the methodology. This helps illuminate the nuance of lives, including situations of distress and trauma. And it addresses the question as to why ‘transformation’ for some leads to experiential and narrative closure (including Islamist and Fascist); while for others it evokes relatively open and fulsome engagement with others and otherness. The ‘auto’ signifies the researcher’s presence in the process. We too, as researchers and educators, can become more reflexively aware of the self-same dynamics in our own lives, to greater or lesser extents, for better or worse.

I wrote a paper for the International Transformative Learning Conference in Tacoma in 2016 (West, 2016a) where I suggested there was a fine line separating roads to violence and rejection of the other, and more life enhancing processes of self/other recognition in building new forms of social solidarity. Drawing on auto/biographical narrative inquiry, I sought to interrogate transformative processes for ‘good’ as well as dangerous ends and concluded that we should seek to refine and develop Honneth’s (2007; 2009) essentially philosophical concept of self/other recognition when thinking about transformative learning or its antithesis (West, 2016a). Recognition, I suggested, can lead to destructive, fundamentalist ends, as illustrated below. It requires a clearly identified normative framing as well as relational interpretation. I drew on Dewey (1969) ideas in observing that the good citizen, and how, in effect, processes of transformative learning, require forms of democratic association to realize more of a shared humanity. We find ourselves by participating in family life, the economy and various artistic, cultural, educational and political activities, in which we learn a kind of playful, emotionally open give and take. This fosters a mutual feeling of being understood and meaning making in the company of others, and otherness. Adult education could have a central role in creatively and dialogically building, in effect, stronger social solidarities.

Auto/Biographical Narrative Research

Auto/biographical and autoethnographic scholarship matter profoundly (Formenti & West, 2018). ‘Auto’ here focuses on how the researcher’s (or narrator’s) life and experience shape, often unconsciously, perceptions of the other. Biography is a research methodology that focuses on the study of lives, or more especially the stories we tell about them; and the interplay of macro-level process – like the power of neo-liberal ideology, racist or colonialist ideas – with the meso and micro dimensions of communities, work, families, schooling and intimate relationships (Stanley, 1992; Chamberlayne et al., 2000). Crucially, the interplay of the micro level of intimate relationships and inner worlds with the meso and macro holds the key, as American sociologist Wright Mills (1959) taught, to creating more satisfying psychosocial analysis. We are encouraged, within this, towards a psychoanalytically informed focus on the relational shaping of intimate life. And towards the dynamics of relationships here and now – including in research – as well as the there and then of a life story’s focus. Meanings, in these terms, are co-created and negotiated: researcher and researched, teachers and students, become, potentially and reflexively, learners together in charting the shadows and light of intimate hinterlands shaped by the dynamics of class, gender, race, sexuality and family. What matters for good enough research is authentic, psychosocially integrated, culturally aware and aesthetically satisfying encounters (Formenti & West, 2018; Merrill & West, 2009).

Context, Precarity and Intersectionality

I have spent the last few years researching in ‘post-industrial’ communities, characterized by the rise of overly rapid deindustrialization, the marginalization of working-class self-help traditions, neo-liberal ideology, populist politics, fascism and Islamism. Here is a political economy in which doctrines of neo-liberalism came to hold sway: the belief in small government, minimal social welfare, the cult of markets, individualism and de-regulation, alongside the celebration of capital accumulation (‘greed is good’) and its uninhibited global compass. Here is the new right’s religion, a form of worship combined with antipathy towards the older liberal and or social democratic post–Second World War Keynesian consensus (McCarraher, 2019). It includes antagonism towards organized labour. The story of social or liberal democratic progress after the trauma of two world wars was rudely interrupted, including the idea of using the state and redistributive economics as well as collectivist traditions in economic, cultural and political life. Adult or workers education in the United Kingdom was once enmeshed in this, but the relationship shattered (West, 2017; Williams, 1989). Moreover, a new politics of diversity and identity emerged which often excluded class and economic precarity from the progressive, cultural domain (Chan, 2023; West, 2024). A heavy price, I suggest, has been paid.

The exclusion matters as people seek stability, meaning and hope in a world of precarity and social as well as cultural fracture. They wonder why the world is riddled with inequality and injustice; and why judgementalism exists among political, economic and cultural elites towards peoples like themselves. Right-wing populist politics, fascism and Islamic fundamentalism all play on this, and offer to fill the void left by deindustrialization and the decline of organized working-class power. And in the continuing trauma of racism and or disrespect towards whole categories of people and their cultures. Islamophobia is a poignant example. One way of thinking about this – in fascism and Islamism – is that they offer stories to explain, however perversely, oppression, disrespect and how things can be put to right.

Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (2018, 2022) describes how neo-liberal individualism, and its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, evoked a fantasized judgementalism towards working-class people and their communities. All embellished by new right political influences in parts of the mass media. Blame was ladled on working-class individuals for their condition in television programmes like Benefit Cheats and Benefit Streets: ‘they’ should learn to budget properly, and not depend on foodbanks; or must become more adaptable and get themselves properly retrained for work – however short-term and alienating. Benjamin, drawing on clinical vignettes, creates a more clinically grounded account of how difficult recognition can be, complementing Honneth’s philosophical perspectives. She provides a telling phrase to capture the consequences of new fragmented, judgemental politics: ‘there is only room for one victim’; ‘only room for one of us to live’: the Islamist, perhaps, or ‘native’ peoples. Only room for ‘us’. ‘They’ the other, the Asylum seeker, the Muslim or the irreligious white infidel, are the problem to be eradicated.

While doing the research in the formerly industrial city of Stoke-on-Trent in the United Kingdom, where I was born, I read in a local newspaper how a mosque was pipe-bombed and a shop, near to where I once lived – owned by South Asians – torched. There was a murder of a South Asian taxi driver on a street nearby. I read of the rise of the British National Party (BNP), Fascist and aggressively racist. Only one group could live in the city, in their view, ‘white natives’ in the BNP’s version of the great replacement theory. By 2010, it looked as if the BNP would take control of the City Council, as social democratic Labour imploded (West, 2016b). The fact that the BNP fractured does not disguise the strength of racist politics and parties: the English Defence League, Ukip and bodies like Patriotic Alternative all reinforce the idea that the other is the problem and there is only room for ‘us’ to live; room only for one victim. There were stories of local Jihadists in working-class South Asian communities in the city travelling to Syria to fight for Islamic State, and of generational fractures in particular Mosques. Some of the early Imams in these communities came from poor, rural communities in Bangladesh and Kashmir, barely speaking English. For older generations, the Imams represented reassuring continuity between past and present, and a direct link back home. For some of the younger people educated in Britain, over time, the Imams with their stuttering English were not to be taken seriously. I chronicled, auto/biographically, stories from various people living in predominantly white or South Asian working-class communities (West, 2016b).

Two brief narratives illuminate the pain and possibility of these processes: of the qualities of learning and education that can make a good enough difference to lives. Carol (a pseudonym) was a 70-year-old working-class woman living on a predominantly ethnically white housing estate. She was attracted to the fascist BNP because she felt they cared. Her feelings of loss, precarity and nostalgia were intense in the death of a husband who lost his job when the last coalmine closed. There were powerful feelings of loss too in the decline of the quality of life on the estate as neo-liberal politics and austerity bit hard. Carol suffered from mental distress and was hospitalized for a time. Talking cures were absent and there was disturbance on her hospital ward as various male patients came to pee, because the space was once theirs. A fire-bombing of a South Asian shop and a death were witnessed, directly opposite Carol’s house. ‘Druggies’ on the corner disturbed her too. She was distressed at the loss of community, of streets unsafe for children; and of how her son, with a family, could no longer find work, or at best only minimum wage precarity in a distribution centre. He was advised to leave the area and find work in a place like Manchester. Carol was attracted to the BNP because they sorted out the druggies, and a broken gate. She felt recognized by them, unlike the defunct social democratic Labour Party. But the BNP’s rhetoric soon turned to undeserving asylum seekers, as they put it, getting houses and taking ‘our’ jobs in the city. When an asylum seeker moved close by, ‘the problem’ felt too close to home. Fascism mines psychic, social and cultural precarity in depth. Think too of Trump and the alt-right in the rust-belt communities of the United States.

In Burnley, in the North of England, a similar post-industrial town to Stoke, Makin-Waite (2021) has written of how the loss of social solidarities evokes deep divisions; you come to believe that your community suffers because someone else is getting the resources. There was envy at another’s community – South Asian – where neighbours, so it was imagined, still chatted over garden fences and extended families lived cheek by jowl. The way it used to be for ‘us’ in a politics of nostalgia. Younger people in more cosmopolitan, relatively economically prosperous areas of larger cities like Manchester might stay loyal to the Labour Party.

But Burnley is similar to Stoke in its disenchantment and Fascism finding purchase (West, 2016b). Verhaeghe (2014), a psychoanalyst, like Benjamin, brings clinical sensibilities to his interpretation of the effects of neo-liberalism in communities like Carol’s. His insights derive from many years of practice. He has chronicled and theorized the effects of the present political economy on psychic health. He suggests a profound relationship between the neo-liberal experiment of the small state, unfettered market forces, privatization, fetishized individualism and constant economic precarity on mental health. In the neo-liberal form of thinking, anyone who does not succeed must have something wrong with them. The pressure to achieve and be happy takes a heavy toll. It includes a warped view of the self, disorientation and despair. People are lonelier than ever before, he insists. From his clinical experience Verhaeghe sketches out the impact of social change on the nature of the disorders from which we suffer. Like excessive narcissism and a feverish cult of self-reliance. Individualism and the disintegration of collective notions of well-being and hope in ‘post-industrial’ communities bring a terrible toll. Carol knows this too well. So, where might we find resources of hope, including in education? (West, 2016b).

Carol eventually found hope, she said, in the devotion of a loving friend and neighbour. They formed an alliance, the two of them, to walk, arm in arm, one lamppost further each day. Love and basic recognition Honneth would call it. Carol found self-respect in the intimacy, storytelling and conviviality of a sewing class as well as in the loving appreciation of a child reading to her as a volunteer in a local primary school. A process of recognition that includes a capacity to bear fulsome witness to the other, like a child, and to be witnessed by them too. Later she became a community activist, energized by developing self-esteem and mutual recognition. There are clear fragments of this in her story: in loving encounters, in a co-creation of self-respect and mutual esteem in adult education. It includes the narrative and creative richness of the sewing class. Such spaces for learning and agency in fractured working-class communities are priceless. Makin-Waite (2021) notes how workers from Mediation Northern Ireland were brought to Burnley by the local Council in the hope of creating space for dialogue and mutual learning. He mentions his own initial scepticism (he was employed by the Council), thinking that dialogical processes would do little to address underlying economic and political weakness. He changed his mind as BNP voters and people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin shared stories, often in common, of domestic life, religious beliefs, food and the performance of Burnley Football Club. Potentially precious dialectical fragments creating some mutual understanding and social solidarity where the other can be reimagined as a fellow, vulnerable human being. But the initiative ended prematurely, Makin-Waite observes. Notwithstanding, space was created, for a while, where ‘we’ could begin to learn and live together with ‘them’, creating an ‘us’. This is a territory of transformative learning.

Contrariwise, what characterizes the territory of continuing radicalization? A 30 something working-class British Asian man, who I called Raafe (meaning companion in Arabic), lived in another part of the city. (For ethical reasons, Raafe is a composite of various stories.) His narrative can simply be read by reference to race and religion, but class, cultural and economic precarity existed too. Family history was troubled, and he sought escape from distress via drugs. His relationship with his father fractured as the opportunity structures of traditional working-class life shattered and formerly ritualized father/son transitional spaces provided by work in the pottery industry – once strong in this city – disappeared. Class and the precariousness of relationships in the harsh processes of deindustrialization are part of the shredded fabric. Benjamin (2022) has written that the neo-liberal denial of the need for social solidarity, as defined by Thatcher and Reagan, plays on a deep psychic fear of being discarded. An anxiety that we do not count, we are not cared for, we do not matter. That only one can matter, and the other does not. Benjamin applies this to the largely unconscious fears of whole peoples – in her case, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians – but it equally applies to working-class communities in the United Kingdom like Raafe’s (or Carol’s). Class, at an intersection with race, can evoke an especially visceral precarity, which can become a fundamental driver of inter-community strife.

Class in these terms fuelled Raafe’s other insecurities, including strong reactions to the racist other on the street, and, as he saw it, the persecution of his religion. After all he said the slaughter at Srebrenica, where the Bosnian victims were white, taught him that disrespect was not wholly about race at all – although it was that too – but religion. A disrespect working internationally in the lawlessness of Srebrenica and the post-9/11 wars. Only one matters in this world, he thought – the white, imperialist, colonizing other – and people like him do not. Class – in terms of cultural, material and relational precarity – pervaded the toxic mix.

Raafe went to prison for a while because of drugs and street violence and found a quality of ‘education’, as he perceived it, there. He learned of the first Crusades, and how the Muslim religion had been threatened over centuries by the armies of Rome, as he called them. He believed the new Crusades of the willing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan were a continuation of the same infidel aggression to be defeated by heroic sacrifice, similar to Islamic 12^th Century victories against Christian Kings in Jerusalem. He found a group of the like-minded and eventually took on a leadership role, and almost certainly went to Syria. ‘A gang of his own’, in Adam Phillips’s (2013) provocative phrasing, offering powerful forms of recognition. But only one story counted in this space, a fundamentalist version of history and narrative truth. Nothing else, in the final resort, was countenanced. In this respect, such groups were anti-educational, narratively emasculated cults of death. Learning from experience was aborted, as the other became a projection of unwanted parts of self.

When Only One Can Live

Similar processes can be observed in the Jewish Israeli and Palestinian conflict. A colleague and I conducted in-depth interviews with various Jewish and Palestinian participants in a project devoted to encouraging democratic values in Israeli teacher education (Bainbridge & West, 2021). It encompassed Palestinian educators living in Israel as well as Jewish Israelis. We encountered, in the project, deeply defended responses, not least within the Project’s leadership. The Palestinian tragedy of Al Nakba had little purchase among Jewish participants; and the continuing resonance of the Shoah was difficult for Palestinian colleagues to acknowledge, given what they perceived to be asymmetries of power in life and death (Al Nakba, or the Catastrophe in English, is the name given by Palestinians to the 1948 War and the subsequent history of colonialist oppression as well as the present conflict).

I came across Benjamin’s work on recognition theory in the Acknowledgement Project in Gaza (Benjamin, 2018, 2022). She illuminates how difficult it is to acknowledge the other as a victim, for fear of losing one’s own special victim status. After all, nothing compares to the horror of the Holocaust in many Jewish eyes; or for that matter October 7. The harm Israeli Jews have done to Palestinians in Al Nakba, the West Bank and colonialist violence shrinks into insignificance. Benjamin takes us into a troubled, scarcely beating heart of struggles for dialogue: beyond slogans, rigid identities, privileged victimhood and narrative atrophy.

We tried to encourage colleagues in our project to consider how dialogue might be nurtured in their own classrooms, especially in institutions with large numbers of Palestinian as well as Jewish students. We only succeeded to an extent, generating one small, fragile yet significant case study, using auto/biographical methods. Here was a process, drawing on Paulo Freire’s liberation theology, of annunciation – of the birth of new relational life – in forms of dialogical transformative learning. This encompasses heart, body, mind and soul, and recognition of shared vulnerable other in a kind of mutual humanization Freire thought essential (Tisdell & West, 2024; West, 2023). ‘Hannah’, a Palestinian educator, told stories of her family fleeing Haifa post-1948, and harsh treatment at the hands of Israeli forces. ‘Elie’, who had served in the IDF, talked of the trauma of abuse by his father as well as in the military. As they listened to each other’s stories, precious moments of mutual recognition and hope were born. But some Palestinian colleagues took us aside, angrily on occasions, to remind us that their situation as citizens was precarious (maybe now impossible in the light of the post-October 7^th world and war). And Jewish Israelis resisted talk of the Nakba, which, in their eyes, shrivelled into insignificance compared to the Shoah. Making too much fuss about Al Nakba, in response, for particular Palestinians, risked deep trouble and labelling as trouble makers in the Israeli institutions where they worked. It is easy to imagine how organizations like Hamas, or ultra-defensive right-wing Zionist politics – deeply colonialist in assumptions (think the Jewish Settlers in the West Bank) – mine this territory. There can only be room for one to live.

Conclusion

John Dewey suggested that good and intelligent solutions for society as a whole stem from open, inclusive and democratic types of association. In scientific research, for instance, the more scientists freely introduce their own hypotheses, beliefs and intuitions, the better the eventual outcome. Dewey (1969) applied this idea to social, transformative learning as a whole: intelligent solutions are the result of the degree to which all those involved in groups participate fully without constraint and with equal rights. It is only when openly and publicly debating issues, in inclusive ways, that societies or educational groups thrive (Honneth, 2007, pp. 218–39). Radicalization illuminates quite different processes: of stories speaking to the depth of people’s precarity but offering perverted resources of hope: fuelled by psychosocial rupture, and classed, raced, gendered and historical rigidity. There is a profound failure to recognize the other’s trauma, and the pervasive insecurity underlying the dynamics of only one can live: he/she/they or them must be annihilated, rather than learned from in the difficult but essential process of mutual recognition and transformative learning.