OVPES Presentations for the Virtual Zoom Seminar on "Collective Action for Social Change"
Welcome to the video presentations for the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society's Virtual Seminar. Please watch this video as preparation for our online Zoom discussion on Thursday, January 21, at 3pm. All are welcome.
Please contact Aaron Schutz at schutz@uwm.edu to receive a link and password to the Zoom session if you do not have it already.
Presenters:
Aaron Schutz, "Community Organizing and/vs Civil Resistance"
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, “Local School Governance in a Populist Moment”
Clarence Joldersma and Lisa Perhamus, “What Might Sustain the Activism of This Moment? Dismantling White Supremacy, One Monument at a Time”
Presentation Summaries (full abstracts are below):
Aaron Schutz’s talk, “Community Organizing vs/and Civil Resistance,” will explore the differences and similarities between two key social action traditions/models: community organizing, which creates local power organizations, and civil resistance, which involves a wider and more diffuse social movements.
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, in “Local Governance in a Populist Moment” will discuss her experience with populism in education as a member of her local school board, exploring how to respond to leftist and rightist populist movements in the midst of a diminishing redistributive safety net and increasing need among our community’s most vulnerable members.
Clarence Joldersma and Lisa Perhamus, in “What Might Sustain the Activism of This Moment? Dismantling White Supremacy, One Monument at a Time,” will discuss the recent wave of confederate movement topplings, showing how these efforts constitute anti-racist critical public pedagogies which engage the public(s) in bold interruptions of anti-Black white supremacy and have a vision for change.
Abstracts
“Community Organizing and/vs Civil Resistance”
Aaron Schutz, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
This talk explores the core conceptual foundations of two key traditions of collective action for social change: community organizing and civil resistance. While we often hear about social movements and social action, we rarely discuss the theoretical assumptions that guide many participants. Understanding these assumptions can help us make more coherent sense out of what different efforts are trying to accomplish and why participants choose the strategies they do. The talk will focus on Black Lives Matter as a core example of a civil resistance that also involves community organizing efforts. If we want to help students collectively respond effectively to systematic oppression and power, we need to understand the “method behind the madness” involved. There are no rules for radicals, but there are principles that can help us make more thoughtful choices about how to act.
“Local School Governance in a Populist Moment”
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Miami University of Ohio
The inquiry presented here explores educational populism at a unique time in the history of public education. I will use radical democratic theories of populism (Laclau 2007) to examine, in detail, a small case concerning an organized protest in a public school district in Ohio. In the midst of the pandemic of 2020, school officials planned for re-opening schools in some form amidst extreme public health uncertainty, economic recession, and virulent political divisiveness. Schooling had resumed in August but only in remote form, and by mid-September, a local group was increasingly vocalizing their demand: “Give us a choice!” Citizens organized a campaign to push the district to re-open school buildings to give families the choice for face-to-face schooling, despite dangerous pandemic conditions in the region. Laclau’s writing on populism is used to trace the logic of this group’s demands, and the antagonistic frontier in which their protest was enacted — namely, the right-wing populism helping to weaken public education, and strengthen privatized educational institutions, in the state and nation. In a deconsolidating democracy (Mounk 2018), where democratic mechanisms, institutions, and traditions are generally weakening, public schools are caught in political cross-hairs. This inquiry sketches the quandary of how to respond to leftist and rightist populist movements in the midst of a diminishing redistributive safety net and increasing need among our community’s most vulnerable members.
“What Might Sustain the Activism of This Moment? Dismantling White Supremacy, One Monument at a Time”
Clarence Joldersma, Calvin University, and Lisa Perhamus, Grand Valley State University
Defining monuments as “ideological powerhouses,” this talk argues that the current dismantling of confederate monuments is a dismantling of white supremacy. More than symbolic destruction of representations, theses “acts of take-down” are concrete, physically manifested interruptions of systemic racism. Drawing on Black radical feminist theory, Kristen Dotson’s philosophic work on epistemologies, and current public media analyses, the presentation uses an activist-philosophy frame to discuss how the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement is shaping contemporary societal demands for racial change. It argues that today’s confederate monument topplings, which happen in the public square, constitute anti-racist critical public pedagogies which engage the public(s) in bold interruptions of anti-Black white supremacy and have a vision for change. Anti-racist critical public pedagogies (1) critique the inequities proliferated by relationships of power in the public sphere (especially racial inequities); (2) resist and interrupt these inequities through embodied practices; and (3) offer a vision for equitable racial social change. In the confederate monument protests, anti-racist critical public pedagogies leverage the “collective voice” of protestors as “public power” in public spaces and places to affect sociopolitical change. The presentation asks, “What might sustain the activism of this historical moment?” and proposes that to sustain social change, three elements need to be present: Racial Honesty; Culture of Praxis; and Radical Imagination and Love. The discussion does not aim to provide a prescriptive analysis but, rather, to engage with readers in a conversation about the kinds of questions that might keep today’s activism fueled and visionary.
Aaron Schutz’s talk, “Community Organizing vs/and Civil Resistance,” will explore the differences and similarities between two key social action traditions/models: community organizing, which creates local power organizations, and civil resistance, which involves a wider and more diffuse social movements.
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, in “Local Governance in a Populist Moment” will discuss her experience with populism in education as a member of her local school board, exploring how to respond to leftist and rightist populist movements in the midst of a diminishing redistributive safety net and increasing need among our community’s most vulnerable members.
Clarence Joldersma and Lisa Perhamus, in “What Might Sustain the Activism of This Moment? Dismantling White Supremacy, One Monument at a Time,” will discuss the recent wave of confederate movement topplings, showing how these efforts constitute anti-racist critical public pedagogies which engage the public(s) in bold interruptions of anti-Black white supremacy and have a vision for change.
Abstracts
“Community Organizing and/vs Civil Resistance”
Aaron Schutz, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
This talk explores the core conceptual foundations of two key traditions of collective action for social change: community organizing and civil resistance. While we often hear about social movements and social action, we rarely discuss the theoretical assumptions that guide many participants. Understanding these assumptions can help us make more coherent sense out of what different efforts are trying to accomplish and why participants choose the strategies they do. The talk will focus on Black Lives Matter as a core example of a civil resistance that also involves community organizing efforts. If we want to help students collectively respond effectively to systematic oppression and power, we need to understand the “method behind the madness” involved. There are no rules for radicals, but there are principles that can help us make more thoughtful choices about how to act.
“Local School Governance in a Populist Moment”
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Miami University of Ohio
The inquiry presented here explores educational populism at a unique time in the history of public education. I will use radical democratic theories of populism (Laclau 2007) to examine, in detail, a small case concerning an organized protest in a public school district in Ohio. In the midst of the pandemic of 2020, school officials planned for re-opening schools in some form amidst extreme public health uncertainty, economic recession, and virulent political divisiveness. Schooling had resumed in August but only in remote form, and by mid-September, a local group was increasingly vocalizing their demand: “Give us a choice!” Citizens organized a campaign to push the district to re-open school buildings to give families the choice for face-to-face schooling, despite dangerous pandemic conditions in the region. Laclau’s writing on populism is used to trace the logic of this group’s demands, and the antagonistic frontier in which their protest was enacted — namely, the right-wing populism helping to weaken public education, and strengthen privatized educational institutions, in the state and nation. In a deconsolidating democracy (Mounk 2018), where democratic mechanisms, institutions, and traditions are generally weakening, public schools are caught in political cross-hairs. This inquiry sketches the quandary of how to respond to leftist and rightist populist movements in the midst of a diminishing redistributive safety net and increasing need among our community’s most vulnerable members.
“What Might Sustain the Activism of This Moment? Dismantling White Supremacy, One Monument at a Time”
Clarence Joldersma, Calvin University, and Lisa Perhamus, Grand Valley State University
Defining monuments as “ideological powerhouses,” this talk argues that the current dismantling of confederate monuments is a dismantling of white supremacy. More than symbolic destruction of representations, theses “acts of take-down” are concrete, physically manifested interruptions of systemic racism. Drawing on Black radical feminist theory, Kristen Dotson’s philosophic work on epistemologies, and current public media analyses, the presentation uses an activist-philosophy frame to discuss how the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement is shaping contemporary societal demands for racial change. It argues that today’s confederate monument topplings, which happen in the public square, constitute anti-racist critical public pedagogies which engage the public(s) in bold interruptions of anti-Black white supremacy and have a vision for change. Anti-racist critical public pedagogies (1) critique the inequities proliferated by relationships of power in the public sphere (especially racial inequities); (2) resist and interrupt these inequities through embodied practices; and (3) offer a vision for equitable racial social change. In the confederate monument protests, anti-racist critical public pedagogies leverage the “collective voice” of protestors as “public power” in public spaces and places to affect sociopolitical change. The presentation asks, “What might sustain the activism of this historical moment?” and proposes that to sustain social change, three elements need to be present: Racial Honesty; Culture of Praxis; and Radical Imagination and Love. The discussion does not aim to provide a prescriptive analysis but, rather, to engage with readers in a conversation about the kinds of questions that might keep today’s activism fueled and visionary.