Policy & Practice - A Development Education Review

 

 

The Paradox of Educational Silences and Cacophonies in Liquid Modernity

issue39
Development Education Silences
Autumn 2024

Sharon Stein

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.

Educational responses to the polycrisis

Despite the many enduring silences around the harms of modernity’s colonial foundations, they are becoming harder and harder to deny.  In the shift from solid to liquid modernity, the grounds beneath these foundations are shifting, becoming more like a swamp than solid earth.  This destabilisation is amplified by overlapping social, political, ecological, financial, and psychological crises – what some call the ‘polycrisis’.  Arguably, this destabilisation not only threatens the continuity of modernity but has also been caused by modernity itself and its inherently violent and unsustainable foundations.  We are reaching both the limits of our finite planet and of a system that could never fulfil the shiny promises it offered except for a small portion of the Earth’s inhabitants at the expense of all other living beings.  This means that our role as educators might be less about revealing difficult truths and more about supporting people to face, filter, and process the difficult truths that are presenting themselves, without becoming overwhelmed, immobilised, or seeking quick fixes, solutions, or alternatives.

If we consider the polycrisis alongside the current liquid iteration of modernity, the collapse of shared common sense and a sense of guaranteed futurity has created a vacuum that offers both significant risk and precarious possibility.  The risk arises because those who are overwhelmed by these multiple moving layers of complexity and uncertainty may be desperate to hold on to anything that feels solid and secure, flattening reality into a more neat, coherent, and manageable narrative about what is and should be, and then vehemently defending that narrative against perceived threats.  Yet generative possibility also arises in such moments because often it is only once we can no longer feasibly continue with ‘business as usual’ that we open ourselves up to genuinely different possibilities.

As the articles in this issue make clear, it is evident to most critical scholars and practitioners working in the realm of global and development education that the prevailing social and economic system offers little possibility for a more equitable and ecologically balanced future – and from the perspective of some, perhaps little possibility of a future at all.  Both silences about the inherent violence of this system and silences about this system’s inherent limits on a finite planet are the focus of the contributions to this special issue.

Educational silences and the war on Gaza

Many of the contributors draw particular attention to the systemic silencing of educational conversations about Israel’s ongoing and unrelenting military assault on the people of Gaza and about the longer history of overlapping imperialisms in the region.  Su-ming Khoo notes that ‘silence is an outcome, a symptom, as well as a root cause of oppression and injustice’, pointing to the silences around intensifying threats to the autonomy and fiscal health of public higher education and its service to the public good.  More specifically, she critiques the sanctioned institutional silences around the ongoing attacks on Palestinians and the destruction of their schools and universities.  In response to these silences, Khoo calls for an approach to education that supports learners to make sense of the connections between various dimensions of our current polycrisis and interrupts fatalistic narratives that foreclose upon the desirability and viability of other possibilities for education and existence.

Barbara O’Toole observes that as development education became a more formal element of initial teacher education, it was reframed as global citizenship education.  She reflects on the paradoxes of this shift, arguing that radical ideas were incorporated into institutions in depoliticised ways.  In particular, she notes that despite growing engagement with decolonial theories, the practical implications of these theories largely remain sidelined.  O’Toole questions why many global citizenship/development educators have remained silent about the war on Gaza and suggests that in doing so, they have abdicated their educational responsibilities.  Henry Giroux, too, connects the theme of this issue to Gaza, critically examining universities’ responses to student solidarity encampments.  He links many of these responses to larger historical, political, economic, and cultural contexts, specifically the enduring racial politics of disposability and police violence, and the intensified militarisation of society and neoliberal corporatisation of higher education over the past several decades.  Giroux argues that the student protests are not only an articulation of support for Palestine, they are also an effort:

“to reclaim higher education as a site of democratisation, a public good, and a crucial civic institution where student voices can be heard, and where the dynamics of critical thinking, dialogue, informed judgment and dissent can take place without fear of repression”.

Finally, Caroline Murphy observes that watching the ‘non-response’ of the development education sector to the war on Gaza has deepened her sense that existing systems and institutions are not broken but rather inherently violent and unsustainable, and therefore ‘beyond reform’ (Andreotti et al., 2015).  She suggests development educators must be attentive to these difficult truths, and rethink our pedagogies in ways that ‘ensure we are equipped with affective, relational, and critical capacities to confront our own complicity in systems of harm’.  Despite the strong desire of many students to talk about and try to make sense of the violence currently unfolding in Palestine and Israel, many educators feel unprepared to address this violence or the intensity of complex emotions surrounding it.  In this moment, as the brokenness of our relationships is laid so clearly bare, educators have a responsibility to support learners to process the grief, dread and despair that many are holding, and to approach education with an intention to interrupt the cycles of violence we have inherited. 

Educational silences and enduring inequities

Several contributors to this issue address how global and development education can address the root causes and contemporary drivers of inequity, linking this in varied ways to the reproduction of systemic silences.  Mostafa Gamal, Simon Hoult, and Kieran Taylor go to the heart of the matter, identifying how education continues to presume all global citizens are White, Western, and liberal, thereby silencing those who do not fit these categories and naturalising their subjugation.  Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s work, they note that this figure of the global citizen aligns with a particular ‘genre’ of being human (‘Man’), which positions itself as universal and by implication, positions those outside of this genre as either sub- or non-human.  The authors map the discourses and absences of global citizenship education, observing how the prevalence of celebratory narratives curtails engagement with the systemic inequities that shape global social relations.  To interrupt these silences and violences, they call on educators to reckon with ‘our collective implication in buttressing whiteness and the ensuing silences and erasures of the Other’.

Like O’Toole, Jen Simpson examines the implications of the mainstreaming of critical discourses in education, in her case, social justice.  Simpson concludes, ‘We need educators to be braver, to face and explore their vulnerabilities and have agency and criticality to initiate change’.  Specifically, she suggests that for pedagogies of discomfort to be transformative, there must be ‘a balance between constructive emotional engagement and critical thinking’.

Stephen McCloskey approaches educational inequity by analysing resurgent interest in the novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.  The book, now reaching its 110-year anniversary, is about the systemic causes of poverty among the working class in Edwardian England.  McCloskey makes a call for development education to address enduring silences around ‘the violent social and economic relations created by capitalism’, specifically class inequity.  He also draws attention to the scapegoat narratives that tend to proliferate when poverty and austerity rise and their systemic causes are invisibilised and attributed to racialised ‘others’.

In their article, Ivan Tokheim, Espen Søreide Dyngeland, Solvejg Jobst, and Jan Skrobanek focus more broadly on the enduring inequities of education related to access, uptake and completion in the European context.  Based on their study of the challenges of implementing more equitable educational practices, they argue for a need to foster more ‘participation, self-determination and solidarity in both formal and non-formal educational environments’. Meanwhile, Ricardo Römhild reflects on the new national educational standards in Germany, identifying them as a missed opportunity to institutionalise social and ecological justice in foreign language education.  He questions the purpose of standards that reaffirm more functional approaches to education and prioritise the imparting of skills that are not accompanied by deeper engagement with questions of equity, ethics, and global responsibility.

Focusing on the Irish context, Eilish Dillon examines the extent to which critical global education and education for sustainable development are (or are not) being deeply integrated into higher education (HE) policy, instruction, research, institutional culture, and more.  Drawing on conversations with other educators in Ireland, she observes that ‘broader neoliberal, business-driven and skills-oriented HE policies’ limit the space for critical perspectives.  She advocates for a more comprehensive critical mapping of current practices and initiatives in the sector.

Simon Eten Angyagre brings critical attention to how unequal power, extractive relations, and colonial politics of knowledge are reproduced through teaching and research partnerships between Western universities and those in the global South. Drawing on a review of research projects at University College London, he concludes that most efforts to interrupt these power relations and decolonise international partnerships are driven by individual academics rather than by the transformation of the institutional structures and processes that reproduce inequity.

In their piece, Brighid Golden and Vicky Donnelly address the psychological implications of teaching ‘difficult knowledge’ through global education.  They also consider the contradiction embedded in the assumption that teachers will help students transform an unequal, unsustainable world despite having limited social power and resources to support this work.  While wary of naïve calls for hope, they find inspiration in examples of educational experiments that ‘require educators to commit to being open to discomfort, to imagine alternatives, to embrace uncomfortable and strong emotional responses, and to consider responsibility and proximity to justice issues’.

Finally, Karl Wheatley focuses on the failure of development education to critically address the limits of the planet.  He notes that for centuries, the dominant form of development has been focused on the expansion of industrialised capitalism, which is premised on ‘exploiting people, exploiting nature, and looting from the future’.  In the face of the growing realities of ecological breakdown, Wheatly laments that:

“because [development education] still embodies so much of the worldview of the society it critiques (i.e., anthropocentrism, the myth of sustainable growth), development educators generally stop short of calling for the fundamental transformation of modern civilisation that is needed for humans to have any decent future at all”.

Each of these pieces reminds us that, despite the lofty aspirations and admirable ethical principles of challenging inequity that drive many of us to work in the field of development and global education, realising these aspirations and principles in practice is exceedingly challenging and complex.  This is not only because we occupy institutional contexts characterised by political polarisation, economic neoliberalisation, and enduring racialisation, but also because the field of development/global education has been shaped by the same systems that reproduce inequity.

Education Beyond Description and Prescription

At this moment of increasing ecological destabilisation, intensifying political conflict, and growing social inequality, educators face a difficult question: what kind of education could break through both the enduring sanctioned silences around systemic violence and the intensifying cacophony of competing perspectives seeking epistemic and moral authority?

There are many possible answers to this question, but it is increasingly clear that the kind of education we previously had is losing its relevance and impact in the context of both liquid modernity and our current polycrisis.  Filling silences with our critiques may also no longer be sufficient in a moment characterised by significant noise.  It is unlikely we will all collectively agree about the nature of the problems we face, let alone how we might address them. Thus, we might need to move beyond the common critical formula of offering a universalising and totalising description of reality (including describing what is absent or being silenced), and an accompanying prescription for what should be done.  This is not to say that these kinds of critiques are unimportant as one element of the wider process of social and systemic change, but rather to ask what other kinds of critiques and educational interventions are needed.

We will likely need to experiment with modes of educational critique and practice that can prepare people to navigate hyper-complexity, polysemy, polarisation, and constantly shifting social and epistemic landscapes with emotional steadiness, intellectual discernment, and relational rigour.  This is not about telling people what to do or how to think, but rather creating the conditions through which they can experience an uncoercive rearrangement of harmful desires (Spivak, 2004) and the activation of intergenerational and interspecies responsibility.

Finally, as several authors in this issue observe, as educators we should approach our critical work in ways that also implicate ourselves in the critique.  Even the most critical corners of global and development education are shaped by modernity and its colonial foundations.  When we only direct our critiques outward and externalise the challenges we face, attributing them to bad actors or the abstract system ‘out there’, we silence how this system also lives inside of us and our scholarship.  If we do not turn the critical gaze inward, we will likely overlook how we are also contributing to the very challenges we seek to address (GTDF, 2022).

References

Andreotti, V D O, Stein, S, Ahenakew, C and Hunt, D (2015) ‘Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 21-40.

Bauman, Z (2000) Liquid modernity, Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons.

GTDF (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures) (2021) ‘The gifts of failure’, available: https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/the-gifts-of-failure/ (accessed 17 September 2024).

Spivak, G (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C Nelson and L Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the interpretation of culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-313.

Spivak, G C (2004) ‘Righting wrongs’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, No. 2, pp. 523-581.

Stein, S, Hunt, D, Suša, R and Andreotti, V D O (2017) ‘The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security’, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 69-79.

Sharon Stein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia and holds a Professorship in Climate Complexity and Coloniality in Higher Education. She is also a Visiting Professor in Critical Studies in Higher Education and Transformation at Nelson Mandela University.  She is the author of Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (JHU Press, 2022), founder of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network (criticalinternationalization.net), and a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (decolonialfutures.net) and the Critically Engaged Climate Education Hub (https://blogs.ubc.ca/climateeducation/). E-mail: sharon.stein@ubc.ca.

Citation: 
Stein, S (2024) ‘The Paradox of Educational Silences and Cacophonies in Liquid Modernity’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 39, Autumn, pp. 1-10.