Solidarity Service-Learning: Educator-Scholar Activism in the Context of Racial Neoliberal Higher Education

• In Event: School Partnerships for Racial Equity: Case Studies of Engaged Scholarship in Educational Studies

Abstract

This paper is a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of doing engaged scholarship (Hale, 2008) within the context of a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in this period of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983). Identifying as a parent-educator-scholar-activist-[cis]male of Color, the author places the cultural and political economic conditions that shape SLACs, PreK-16 education, and his own work in community-university partnerships into conversation with one another. The purposes of this conversation are to think about the conditions in which these partnerships are taking shape and to document ways that engaged scholars can navigate and co-design community-university partnerships.

This study is couched in a Latinx-centered cultural political economic framework that works in both political economy and a cultural politics of race. Central to this framework is a practice of mapping institutional processes of dominance, and documenting modes of individual and collective survivance (Vizenor, 2008). The author uses critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013) and auto-political-ethnography (Denzin, 2015) to gather and analyze extant literature on community-university partnerships and publicity materials produced by the author’s institution to promote engagement with surrounding communities. Auto-political-ethnographic data consist of field notes and reflections written by the author through two research projects: a youth participatory action research (PAR) collaborative and a school-university partnership project at a local urban school.

There are three primary arguments made in this paper. First, the author points to ways that racial capitalism always, already, limits the transformative potential of the “engaged university” (Ellison & Eatman, 2008). These conditions create what might be better understood as a “racial neoliberal university.” Second, given the characteristics of the racial neoliberal university, the author concurs with Harney and Moten’s (2013) argument that, “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.” Finally, given these conditions, the author makes a case for moving away from service learning approaches to partnerships, and moving instead toward a solidarity learning approach that is premised on stealing from the university, collaboratively dismantling oppressive structures both within the university and communities, and imagining more just relationships.

Higher education’s growing interest in community service and community-university partnership appear to be well-intentioned, constructive agendas, but it is important to remain vigilant of the ways good intentions are mediated by racial capitalist conditions. Through this paper the author contributes to critical understandings of these intentions and constructing more just alternatives.

Author

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College