Mobilizing Self as a Social Actor to Disrupt the Commonplace

The first element in the critical literacy taxonomy is the ability to mobilize the learner as a social actor with knowledge and skills to disrupt the commonplace. An implicit precursor to this study of activism was that all of the participants self-identified as activists. As such, I look not specifically at how others mobilized them, but rather how they mobilized themselves. While it is beyond the scope of this conclusion to unpack all the assumptions around the concepts of the unique learner, the parameters of the social, and what qualifies as “a disruption of the commonplace,” such queries are nonetheless important. The contested discourses around these terms must be named and explored in order to look at the divergent intentions and motivations driving the actions of the youth.

Individually, each participant is, as People’s Republic of Mars stated, a catalyst to and for change. Each tended to focus on the local with a global mindedness. Even with the stress on local action, the various discussions we had about online organizing demonstrated that this need not always be defined by physical proximity. All of the youth expressed a personal connection to the social issues around which they organized. Their most urgent concerns related to family and friends, around issues of race, immigration, gender and education. From their personal and familial histories, the participants reckoned with topics related to authoritative power structures, from access to higher education and policing in K-12 schools to the Dream Act and federal deportation policies. They pushed their personal understandings through intentionally collective

shared learning spaces. From peer education and study groups to teach-ins and rights workshops, they moved beyond isolated learning experiences, such as reading independently, to the creation and maintenance of safe spaces to share social knowledge.

Positioning themselves as activists both inside and outside of schools, the participants spoke of the limitations to critical conversations in classrooms. They raised “questions that some people prefer they not ask” (Borsheim & Petrone, 2006, p. 82) within formal learning institutions while learning to educate in self-organized contexts outside of those spaces. The participants explored the operations of language and power, questioning the textual intentions behind dominant discourse positions and unjust public policies on issues at once personal and political. They discussed social conditions around questions of identity, from race to class, immigration status and religious affiliation to gender and sexuality. In the process, the participants named shared frameworks for thinking about, talking about and organizing themselves around feminism, queerness, economic and racial justice. Their shared background as alumni of the Human Rights Activist Project provided a platform for talking about children’s rights and human rights while negotiating ideas of universality and difference. In varying ways, they articulated a collectivist approach to self-mobilization through the creation of safe spaces for anti-oppressive learning.

People’s Republic of Mars discussed the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as frameworks that are useful to him when thinking about equality of access to resources and opportunities. His argument revolved around the idea that the United States needs to “lead by example” when it comes to issues of rights, instead of hypocritically attempting to enforce policies internationally when they have not signed on to treaties and do not uphold those values domestically. Even as he identified

certain hypocritical positions of the United States of various rights-based issues on the world stage, he considered the value of using these frameworks as tools to create new platforms around public health and poverty.

Both Awesome Woman and Gentle Meadows offered perspectives on human rights cushioned in a critique of Eurocentricism. Awesome Woman talked about the challenges of Eurocentricity, pointing to the difficulties of organizing and upholding treaties with diverse cultures based on shared moral visions and unified language around human rights policy.

Despite this, she argued that human rights activists should celebrate their different politics and rich histories. She acknowledged that people separate themselves even within the most local spaces, and as such it is important to bring a sense of humility to working with others to disrupt the commonplace. Gentle Meadows called for more open-ended questions in discussions of history and written records, arguing for inquiries into the producers of official, institutional records. They point to the value of seeking out alternate histories and considering diverse perspectives on issues, practices Behrman (2006) listed as critical literacy learning categories.

Green Strawberries talked with a sense of inevitability about the splintering of the American political Left into factions of socialists, communists, anarchists, progressives, and others. She argued that there is a lack of collectivity because “we all get to revolution in a different way.” Gentle Meadows discussed such divisions, and Vaga De Franx called for non-sectarian approaches to political activism and social organizing. Of course, discussions of right in relation to social justice tend to waver between moralizing and conscientizing. As they navigated complicated ideological quagmires around ideas of activism, the participants identified important distinctions between their priorities and their approaches to mobilizing

themselves. Collectively, they negotiated between policy advocacy and direct action, between what is tactical and what is strategic in the processes of organizing.

The participants demonstrated an overt commitment and attention to the realm of the sociopolitical around issues of injustice and inequity. Despite their unique priorities and atomized experiences, it is evident that their local and immediate work was connected to other intersubjective topics. To more fully understand how the participants mobilized themselves around these topics, we must look to the processes through which they critiqued and responded to messages and actions that complicated, reified or extended their activist positioning.