Centering the Subaltern Voice

• In Event: 34.082 - Decolonizing Interpretive Research: A Subaltern Methodology for Social Change

Abstract

The notion of service has enjoyed historical longevity—rooted deeply within our institutions (i.e., churches, schools, government, military, etc.), reminiscent of indentured servitude, and rarely questioned as a colonizing practice that upholds and produces oppression. As a result, the sacrosanctity awarded and commonsensically given to service must be challenged and understood within its colonial, historical, philosophical, and ideological machinations. Service and by extension its contemporary counterpart—service learning, lives in, moves in, and embeds itself within disenfranchised bicultural communities. It does not live in, move in, or even visit spaces of affluence. This leads to the recognition that service is predicated upon the possession of an inferiorized group. Accordingly, the recent emergences of critical forms of service learning fall short as they uphold the structure of a one-sided, unidirectional practice that does not question why those that are privileged are never the recipients of “service” or in need of “help”.

According to Darder (2015), a decolonizing interpretive research process forthrightly links the politics of voice to the “authority of our lived experience” (hooks, 1994) rooted in epistemological expressions of subaltern lives. In contrast, what generally currently exists within the research generated by the service learning movement is a staunch affirmation and privileging of Western epistemology. Wherein, the voices of Eurocentric philosophers and scholars are given space within the canon to speak; and it is through this space that they, deliberately or inadvertently, repress or silence critical bicultural voices, so that the subaltern are rendered voiceless and disposable. Strategies that have been leveled against bicultural voices, such as the distorting discourse of political correctness, work further against the inclusion of decolonized voices.

Thus, affirmation of the bicultural voice (Darder, 2012) and the social agency associated with a politics of voice is much needed, within the hegemonic constraints of service learning that thwarts the knowledge and power of subaltern voices. Deceptive notions of benevolent intentions and well-meaning discourse only serve to camouflage the colonizing inequalities that permeate the neoliberal arena of service learning—inequalities fueled by greed, exploitation, and practices
of cultural invasion that strip the subaltern of their humanity. A decolonizing interpretive analysis supports a genuine, concerted effort to awaken the bicultural voice of communities and workers in a way that “cultivates their critical participation as active social agents in the world” (Darder, 2012a, p. 44). As such, it is crucial to examine what a decolonizing biculturation process entails, in an earnest attempt to place bicultural voices at the center of this decolonizing research praxis.

Author

• Kortney Hernandez, California State University - Los Angeles