Issue 39

The Paradox of Educational Silences and Cacophonies in Liquid Modernity

Critical and de-/post-/anti-colonial scholars of education have long pointed out that silence within a field of inquiry is rarely a naturally occurring absence; it is rather a product of socially sanctioned discourses and practices that actively create and reproduce this silence.  When she published ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ over 35 years ago, Gayatri Spivak (1988) compellingly argued that colonialism’s material, epistemic, and relational violences are not reproduced because the subaltern cannot or does not speak against these violences.  Instead, these violences are reproduced because those of us who hold systemic power – including critical education scholars like myself located in the global North – refuse to actually hear and be moved by what the subaltern is saying.  Even when we claim to be listening, we often unconsciously edit out what is unfamiliar or inconvenient, most of all that which implicates us in the violence that produces the divide between the powerful and the subaltern in the first place.

This issue (39) of Policy and Practice offers a rich contribution to ongoing dialogues about how silences are reproduced and naturalised in global and development education, and how we might not only make this silencing visible but also expand our collective response-ability – that is, our ability to respond to what is being silenced – in more accountable ways.  The level of interest in these matters is evident in the significant number of article submissions received.  Yet, as I read through each of this issue’s thoughtful contributions on silences in education, I was reminded that, paradoxically, we also find ourselves in a moment of increasing cacophony, where polarised perspectives compete for platform and audience.  In one sense, ‘difficult knowledges’ continue to be ignored; in another sense, we are inhabiting an era of significant noise, rather than silence per se.  One way of thinking about this is as a characteristic of our wider context of ‘liquid modernity’, as theorised by Zygmunt Bauman (2000).

Silence in solid versus liquid modernity

Liquid modernity is characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.  Compared to the ‘solid modernity’ that preceded it, in liquid modernity established institutions are unstable, intergenerational contracts are broken, information technologies change much faster than people can keep up or cope with, and the future is highly uncertain.  Thanks to social media, we are overwhelmed by a constant stream of (mis-/dis-) information and intense emotions that are nearly impossible to meaningfully process, metabolise, and make sense of.  It is, therefore, no surprise that many young people feel overwhelmed by grief, pain, anger, betrayal, and powerlessness, particularly when the immense suffering from wildfires, famines, and genocides being live-streamed to their smartphones is met with systemic indifference.

In our liquid context, there are also few compelling meta-narratives or stable epistemic authorities, and little possibility for enduring consensus, shared sensemaking, or even shared understandings of the meaning of a single word.  On the one hand, this makes it more difficult to sustain the ‘silences’ that were common in solid modernity, as there is more epistemic space for alternative perspectives.  However, liquid modernity has also fostered a condition in which everyone is encouraged to speak, and partly as a result, no one is listening to each other.  While cacophony might be understood as the opposite of silence, the overall impact may be similar.

It is important to note that both solid and liquid modernity rest on a basic foundation of systemic colonial violence and unsustainability.  This includes the extractive violence of global capital, the political violence of the nation-state, the epistemic violence of supposedly universal (Eurocentric) reason, and most foundationally, the relational violence of separating humans from nature, which has led to the naturalisation and normalisation of hierarchies and separations between species, human cultures, and knowledge systems (Stein et al., 2017).  Yet despite a plethora of critical scholarship documenting these realities, modernity’s constitutive social and ecological violences continue to be systemically denied.  Thus, while ‘speaking truth to power’ about this violence remains necessary, it is likely insufficient for the tasks of interrupting it and healing its enduring impacts.  It is in this context that we see the waning relevance of the educational frames crafted in and for a different era, which includes not only mainstream educational frames but also the critical educational frames that many of us hold dear.