Politicization as Identity Transformation

• In Event: 43.052 - Politics in the Foreground and Background of Learning: Analyses of Power and Learning Across Settings

Abstract

In this paper, we explore what it means to become politicized. We frame this conversation in the context of learning sciences research that increasingly looks to social movements as sites of learning, which share attention to dynamics of politicization without sharing a framework for theorizing the process. We argue that politicization is a sociocultural learning process, not merely a process of conceptual development or cognitive change, but a simultaneous process of developing concepts, practices, epistemologies, and identities. We analyze longitudinal video data from the student group Fossil Free UofT to describe and theorize the process of politicization. Our study uses learning sciences theories of identity development (Lave, 1996; Nasir, 2011) to theorize the process of identity development for activists engaged in the fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Our research site, Fossil Free UofT, was a student-run campaign aiming to convince the University of Toronto to divest from fossil fuels. From September 2014 to April 2016, Fossil Free UofT met weekly to plan events and coordinate strategy. Meetings lasted two to three hours, with facilitation responsibilities rotating between members. The group included undergraduate, masters, and PhD students. Through analysis of over 7000 minutes of multi camera video data (Heath, Hindmarsh & Luff, 2010) and Stimulated Recall Interviews (Lyle, 2003), we analyzed how some participants came to understand themselves as radical activists.

We show how this process of identity development was continually reinforced through epistemological shifts in the community of practice that embraced Indigenous and feminist ways of knowing, cognitive shifts toward particular political analyses, and changes in the modes of participation taken up by politicized members. We argue that these processes worked together to shift the identities of many members so that they came to see themselves as radical environmentalists committed to climate justice activism and dedicated to working in decolonial ways. Their process centred anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and feminist concepts, practices, ways of knowing, and identities.

Across our data, we tracked the polarization of political identities between mainstream environmentalists and decolonial climate justice activists. We found that politicized students felt a strong sense of accountability and responsibility to the other social justice campaigns and the larger political project. As a matter of ethics and identity, they fought to support their allies on campus. Because the debate over solidarity was contentious, it gave radical members opposition against which they could mobilize and practice critiquing the problematic assumptions within liberal environmentalist logics. This contentious process contributed to students’ understandings of radical political concepts, encouraged more equitable modes of participation, and supported experiential and relational epistemologies, all of which dialectically reinforced their emergent radical identities. Drawing on other recent work in the learning sciences, this work stresses the significance of politics and ideology in shaping what and how our participants learn and become particular kinds of people.

Authors

• Joe Curnow, University of Manitoba

• Sinead Dunphy, University of Toronto

• Amil Davis, University of Toronto

• Lila Asher, University of Toronto