Schools Will Not Save Our Lives, and Participatory Action Research Is Not Utopia for Dystopian Times

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Living the Dystopian-Utopian Tension as Praxis: Transformative Dreaming With/in/for Education and Educational Research

Abstract

The current state of the world, a disaster to be sure, is not imaginary. Much the same as utopia is an imaginary ideal state of perfection, dystopia defines itself in an imaginary space-place of dehumanization and awfulness. Yet times we are living in are not imaginary: the terror and dehumanization of today’s world, for people and the environment alike, is real. Nor is an imagined future the same as the imaginary. The rise of “dystopia” in pedagogical discourses about the purpose of education does not acknowledge that centering on states of the imaginary and idealism manipulate the already precarious lifeworlds of students attending public schools, and their imagined futures. To what extent are discussions of dystopia and utopia today extensions of neoliberalism, rooted in the white settler colonial past of capitalism?
What education scholars now refer to as ‘dystopia’, Black critical historian Cedric Robinson has called “the brutal degradations of life and the most acute violations of human destiny” (1983, p. 308). Public schools are complicit in stunting individual growth and political movements, submitting marginalized peoples to social control and containment, and reproducing knowledge systems that embrace the status quo based on Western, Eurocentric standards of what it means to be human (Wynter, 2003).

In this paper, we will be in dialogue with each other, framed by our own experiences of conducting participatory action research (PAR) for the past decade, and as educators before that, on what brought us to conduct PAR, why we engage in PAR, and our conceptions of PAR as a form of resistance to both utopian and dystopian visions of public schooling. We will discuss our own perspectives on PAR as a radical act of humanity: a direct response to the very real dehumanization of youth in public schools. As a radical act of critical and feminist pedagogies, PAR privileges relationships and shared knowledge creations as strategies for transforming the world in which we live: in other words, reality. PAR is not an act of imagination, it is an act of reclaiming reality, of disrupting reality. In addition to personal perspectives and experiences from a number of youth participatory action research projects (YPAR), we draw on interviews with participants of a 2013 PAR Institute we co-directed. Conducted years after the PAR Institute, these interviews explore the ways in which PAR is taken up in - and transforms - the lives, bodies and thinking of PAR scholars. It is this notion, PAR as an act of transformation, that fractures the dystopia/utopia dialectic and which positions horror and hope in the material, real world. Interviewees name destructive social forces in everyday lives, and it is through and with participant narratives that we frame PAR as an epistemological alternative to Western, Eurocentric standardized and normalized human conduct: conduct rooted in historical and ongoing violence. PAR as a radical “not this bad place” vision is a possibility to be ourselves in this world, with each other, resisting and rejecting the nastiness of the world while not waiting for utopia.

Authors

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston

• Jessica Ruglis, McGill University