Power and Privilege

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Significant research and literature has helped us understand power and privilege and how to better address them in our work. We list these pieces immediately below and offer article abstracts farther down the page. Every effort is made to list the abstracts in the same order as the pieces are listed above (generally by most recent publication). The list developed here is listed chronologically in reverse-order, to show the conceptual development and research foundation in this growing field. We kindly request that any individuals interested in adding to this wiki do so by following the guidelines we have established.

Peer Reviewed Articles:

 

Books:

Chapters:

  • Hart, M. (2001). Transforming boundaries of power in the classroom: Learning from LaMestiza. In R. Cervero, A. L. Wilson, & Associates, Power in practice (pp. 164-184). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Tisdell, E. (2001). The politics of positionality: Teaching for social change in higher education. In R. Cervero, A. L. Wilson, & Associates, Power in practice (pp. 145-163). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Evans, R. (1987). Education for emancipation: Movement toward transformation. In A. Evans, R. Evans, & W. Kennedy (Eds.), Pedagogies of the Non-Poor (pp. 257-284). Merryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
  • Evans, R., & Hajak, N. (1987). Traveling for transformation. In A. Evans, R. Evans, & W. Kennedy (Eds.), Pedagogies of the Non-Poor (pp. 162-175). Merryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Dissertations, Theses, and Other Works:

 

Articles in Major Newspapers and Periodicals:

 

Websites:

 

Article Abstracts:

Buch, K. & Harden, S. (2011). The impact of a service-learning project on student awareness of homelessness, civic attitudes, and stereotypes toward the homeless. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 15(3), 45-61.

In 2008, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) joined in a community initiative with the Urban Ministry Center to provide shelter to the homeless during the winter months. A student organization was formed to sustain university support. The author created a service-learning project as part of a Citizenship and Service Practicum course. Three semesters of end-of-course student evaluations indicate that the service-learning experience had an impact on the students in three ways. It raised awareness of homelessness; helped dispel negative stereotypes and foster more positive attitudes; and promoted positive civic attitudes and desire to “make a difference.”

 

Catlett, B.S., & Proweller, A. (2011). College students’ negotiation of privilege in a community-based violence prevention project. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 18(1), 34-48.

Recent scholarship on service-learning has departed from examination of more traditional models and outcomes to explore how service-learning shapes students’ understanding of social change. This study builds on existing research to further interrogate the ways in which service-learning relates to power and privilege, specifically exploring how college students in a service-learning experience reflect on notions of privilege and how this informs their work with urban youth. Data was collected from 15 undergraduate student participants in a violence prevention program. Findings point to the potential that lies within change models of service-learning for students to reflect on the complex relationship among service-learning, power, and privilege, and to see themselves engaged in impactful, transformative, and sustainable service work.

 

Steinman, E. (2011). Making space: Lessons from collaborations with tribal nations. Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning, 18(1), 5 – 18.

In light of critiques regarding the concept of service, and after highlighting limits of critical service-learning and “authentic” relationship approaches, this article presents “making space” for marginalized community perspectives as an alternative metaphor for conceptualizing university-community relationships. Drawing upon multiple experiences with American Indian tribal nations, the article identifies deeply intercultural, counterhegemonic, and decolonizing dynamics enacted through making space, and which produce a discomforting reversal of the common analytic focus on community service recipients. Making space also enables university-community alignment, the generation of projects truly based in community interests, and facilitates interactions outside and disruptive of hegemonic power/knowledge regimes and discourses.

 

Prins, E., & Webster, N. (2010). Student identities and the tourist gaze in international service-learning: A university project in Belize. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 14(5), 5-32.

This qualitative study explores how 11 university students in a U.S. service-learning course in Belize understood and represented their identities during the project, particularly their use of “the tourist” as a construct to interpret their experiences. Drawing on literature in international service-learning (ISL) and tourism studies, the article explores how students in this outreach project positioned themselves in relation to tourists and rejected this label for themselves, the ways in which they both exhibited and departed from the “tourist gaze,” and the conditions that fostered a more or less tourist-like stance. The article argues that the tourist gaze counteracts core goals of ISL and university engagement; however, such projects can also provide students with opportunities to develop a more conscious perspective of others and themselves. Findings suggest the need to identify and nurture programmatic practices that enable students to move away from a tourist gaze, especially in short-term projects.

Thering, S. (2010). Loose lug nuts, lobbed beer bottles, and buckets of crawdads: Reflecting on questions of race and class uncovered through cross-cultural transdisciplinary action-research partnerships. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 14(1), 65-79.

This essay is a compilation of vignettes and reflections that illustrate the author’s ongoing journey from a vague detached historical awareness to a more nuanced understanding of the multiple and intersecting dimensions of race and class. The vignettes flash forward and back, recalling events that took place over years of coordinating transdisciplinary action-research partnerships. The conclusion includes reflections with implications for university outreach.

 

d’Arlach, L., Sanchez, B. & Feuer, R. (2009). Voice from the community: A case for reciprocity in service-learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 16(1), 5-16.

Few studies have directly examined how recipients of service view the service. This qualitative study presents the results of interviews and observations of nine community members who participated in a service-learning, language exchange program, Intercambio, in which Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants were paired with English-speaking university students to teach each other their native language and culture. The development and study of Intercambio was informed by Freire’s theory of critical consciousness and results supported his assumptions. Findings include: community members changing views of university students (i.e., from admiring them to seeing them as imperfect equals), changing views of themselves (i.e., from feeling helpless to finding a voice), as well as changing views of social issues (i.e., from impossible to solvable). Results favor a service-learning class format where community recipients can have expert roles (i.e., teach Spanish, too, rather than only being tutored), knowledge is assumed to be co-created and multi-directional, and ample time is devoted to dialogue about current social issues.

 

Rabin, L.M. (2009). Language ideologies and the settlement house movement: A new history for service learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 15(2), 48-55.

A significant number of community service-learning projects in higher education involve the teaching or tutoring of immigrants in English. As in related service-learning scholarship, these projects are commonly informed by perspectives on cultural difference, social justice, and power relations in U.S. society. Yet while faculty pair their students’ work in immigrant literacy programs with the classroom examination of issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, very little of the scholarship suggests that these students are led to critique the role of language ideologies in U.S. society. In this article I urge that institutionalized notions of English in the U.S.—such as the putative role of English in social mobility and the widespread belief that English was always voluntarily adopted by immigrants—be considered closely in our community literacy projects. My argument calls upon sociolinguistic and historical studies of the Progressive period and examines most closely language ideologies in the settlement house movement, an important origin for historians of community service-learning.

 

Tilley-Lubbs, G.A. (2009). Good intentions pave the way to hierarchy: A retrospective autoethnographic approach. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 16(1), 59-68.

I explore certain complexities of partnering university students with members of the Mexican and Honduran immigrant community1 through service-learning. I reveal how my “good intentions” inadvertently created social hierarchy and deficit notions of the community, establishing the students as “haves” and community members as “have-nots.” Critically examining my practices, I reflect on the service-learning instructor’s role in fostering reciprocal relationships based on non-hierarchical constructs when bringing seemingly disparate groups together in service-learning partnerships.

 

Mitchell, T. (2008). Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning, 14(2), 50 – 65.

There is an emerging body of literature advocating a “critical” approach to community service learning with an explicit social justice aim. A social change orientation, working to redistribute power, and developing authentic relationships are most often cited in the literature as points of departure from traditional service-learning. This literature review unpacks these distinguishing elements.

 

Woolf, Michael. (2008). Not Serious Stuff? Service-Learning in Context: An International Perspective. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 17, 21-32.

There has been recent development on the enthusiasm towards service-learning in institutions in United States, however we must turn our attention towards important questions regarding service learning. Questions such as whether service-learning is just “good works,” is it a form of community volunteerism or is it more of an academic program with “action research” through engagement with the community? As a result of these unanswered questions, service-learning is not a common activity found in college campuses. The author examines definitions and characteristics of service-learning and argues for it to be recognized as a valid pedagogy in higher education.

 

Dunlap, M., Scoggin, J., Green, P., & Davi, A. (2007). White students’ experiences of privilege and socioeconomic disparities: Toward a theoretical model. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 13(2), 19-30.

A theoretical model is developed for the process relatively privileged white students go through as they become more aware of their own socioeconomic and other advantages and come to terms with these within their community service learning placements. The model is supported with journal reflections from service learners placed in inner-city homeless shelters to highlight stages of the proposed model. Resources for assisting students through the privilege awareness process and future research directions are identified.

Barbour, J. (2006). The Moral Ambiguity of Study Abroad. Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(7).

It is hard to avoid moral guilt when you travel outside the United States today. Simply by crossing an ocean, you have spent more money than most people in the world will earn in a year — more than some will earn in a lifetime. Being a tourist can mean not only pleasure, freedom, and extravagance, but also ethical dilemmas. And sometimes when you think you are connecting one-on-one with another person, you discover that a third element is involved: money.

Butin, D. (2006). The limits of service-learning in higher education. The Review of Higher Education, 29(4), 473-498.

This article takes a critical look at the attempted institutionalization of service-learning in higher education. It asks whether service-learning can become deeply embedded within the academy; and if so, what exactly is becoming embedded. Specifically, this article suggests that there are substantial pedagogical, political, and institutional limits to service-learning across the academy. These limits, moreover, are shown to be inherent to the service-learning movement as contemporarily theorized and enacted. The article concludes by reframing some of the grounding assumptions of service-learning to position it as a disciplinary field more suited for becoming genuinely embedded within higher education.

Keith, N.V. (2005). Community service learning in the face of globalization: Rethinking theory and practice. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Spring, 5-24.

Globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon that does not yield easy definitions. The author examines three of its interconnected faces—neoliberalism, time-space compression, and globalism—to trace their implications for two principles of service-learning practice: reciprocity and meeting community needs. The article reconceptualizes these two principles, concluding that interdependence is a better fit with the values and practices of the field than reciprocity; conceptions of community should emphasize difference and intersection of public and private spaces; and community needs should be defined to support citizenship action, public work, and social justice.

 

Madsen Camacho, M. (2004). Power and privilege: Community Service Learning in Tijuana. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 10(3), 31-42.

As social scientists engage their own subjectivity, there is greater awareness of their own touristic “gaze,”or at least the power relations that are evoked in the researcher-subject interaction. In teaching students involved in community service learning, the challenge is to provide a learning experience that addresses power inequities between student and served. How do we teach students to recognize axes of privilege, be critical of their roles, and be sensitive to the multiple dimensions of power relations among and between server and served? This article proposes to examine how service-learning can be a catalyst for examining the important issue of subjectivity. Drawing from qualitative data of students working in migrant labor camps and community development projects in the context of Tijuana, I discuss how students viewed power differentials and came to consider their relative social class and racialized differences in the context of the Mexican border zone.

 

McCabe, M. (2004). Strengthening pedadgogy and praxis in cultural anthropology and service-learning: Insights from postcolonialism. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 10(3), 16-30.

This article argues cultural anthropology would make a good partner to service-learning pedagogy because it offers students a theoretical approach for understanding community life and its power structures. Anthropologists have been dealing with power vis-à-vis the people they study using concepts relevant to the reflection process in service-learning. A liaison between anthropology and service-learning would help orient students toward systemic change in society. This responds to a desire among service- learning educators to prevent perpetuation of power imbalances and social injustices. The rich experience of service-learning would help anthropology further its interest in praxis.

 

Green, A.E. (2001). “But you aren’t white:” Racial perceptions and service-learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 8(1), 18-26.

This article argues that teaching the implications of white privilege is crucial in service-learning courses, particularly when most of the students are white and most of those being served are of color. It also considers the ethical implications of race in service-learning.

 

Book Summaries:

Cervero, R.M., Wilson, A.L., & Associates. (2001). Power in practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Adult educators know that they can no longer focus solely on the needs of learners without responsibly addressing the political and ethical consequences of their work. Power in Practice examines how certain adult education programs, practices, and policies can become a subtle part of power relationships in wider society. It provides a rich array of real-world cases that highlight the pivotal role of adult educators as “knowledge and power brokers” in the conflict between learners and the social forces surrounding them. The authors discuss how to teach responsibly, develop effective adult education programs, and provide exemplary leadership in complex political contexts, including the workplace and higher education. Educators in the middle of power struggles will learn how to become more politically aware while actively shaping their enterprises to meet important social needs.

Hart, M. (2001). Transforming boundaries of power in the classroom: Learning from LaMestiza. In R. Cervero, A. L. Wilson, & Associates, Power in practice (pp. 164-184). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Adult educators know that they can no longer focus solely on the needs of learners without responsibly addressing the political and ethical consequences of their work. Power in Practice examines how certain adult education programs, practices, and policies can become a subtle part of power relationships in wider society. It provides a rich array of real-world cases that highlight the pivotal role of adult educators as “knowledge and power brokers” in the conflict between learners and the social forces surrounding them. The authors discuss how to teach responsibly, develop effective adult education programs, and provide exemplary leadership in complex political contexts, including the workplace and higher education. Educators in the middle of power struggles will learn how to become more politically aware while actively shaping their enterprises to meet important social needs.

Rahnema, M. & Bawtree, V., eds., (1997). The post-development reader. New York: Zed Books.

Most scholars and practitioners are now agreed that the world is on the threshold of a completely new era in the history of development. This Reader brings together in a powerfully diverse, but ultimately coherent, statement some of the very best thinking on the subject by scholars and activists from both North and South. They provide a devastating critique of what the mainstream paradigm has in practice done to the peoples of the world and to their richly diverse and sustainable ways of living. They also present some of the essential ideas out of which the victims of development are now constructing new, humane, culturally and ecologically respectful modes of development.
McLaren, P. (1995). Critical pedagogy and predatory culture. NY: Routledge.

This book is a principled, accessible and highly stimulating discussion of a politics of resistance for today. Ranging widely over issues of identity, representation, culture and schooling, it will be required reading for students of radical pedagogy, sociology and political science.

 

Escobar, A. (1994). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. “Development” was not even partially “deconstructed” until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific “Third World” cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era.

Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse-his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the “gaze of experts.”

 

Galeano, E. (1992). The book of embraces.W. W. Norton & Company.
Parable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility.

The concept of border and border crossing has important implications for how we theorize cultural politics, power, ideology, pedagogy and critical intellectual work. This completely revised and updated edition takes these areas and draws new connections between postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Highly relevant to the times which we currently live, Giroux reflects on the limits and possibilities of border crossings in the twenty-first century and argues that in the post-9/11 world, borders have not been collapsing but vigorously rebuilt. The author identifies the most pressing issues facing critical educators at the turn of the century and discusses topics such as the struggle over the academic canon; the role of popular culture in the curriculum; and the cultural war the New Right has waged on schools. New sections deal with militarization in public spaces, empire building, and the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Those interested in cultural studies, critical race theory, education, sociology and speech communication will find this a valuable source of information.

 

This text presents an alternative view of adult education. Approaching the issues of work from a critical, theoretical and feminist perspective, the book is based on the premise that our views of work, productivity, progress and economic growth are ultimately destructive to people and the environment. Mechthild Hart looks at the link between the international and sexual division of labour, and at the relationship between work, nature, and technology. She moves the analysis from the usual focus in adult education literature on skills and skill deficits, concentrating instead on the educational potential of work itself. By linking issues of gender and Third World development, an alternative concept of work and productivity is developed, serving as the basis for new approaches and paradigms in adult education. The author draws on over 20 years of studying critical social, political and economic, educational and feminist theory, as well as issues related to Third World development. This work should be useful to adult educators.

Anzaldua, G. (1990). La consciencia de la mestiza: Towards a new consciousness. In G. Anzaldua (Ed.), Making face, making soul. Haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by women of color (pp. 377-389). San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

A bold collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color. New thought and new dialogue: a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of that word: a book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Belenky, M.J., Clinchy, B.M., Goldberger, N.R. & Tarule, J.M. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing: The Development of self, mind, and voice. New York: Basic Books.
Despite the progress of the women’s movement, many women still feel silenced in their families and schools. This moving and insightful bestseller, based on in-depth interviews with 135 women, explains why they feel this way. Updated with a new preface exploring how the authors’ collaboration and research developed, this tenth anniversary edition addresses many of the questions that the authors have been asked repeatedly in the years since Women’s Ways of Knowing was originally published.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

This is the little book that started a revolution, making women’s voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than 700,000 copies sold around the world, In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate—and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.

Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women—their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology’s misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.

Rodney, W. (1981). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP.
Few books have been as influential in understanding African impoverishment as this groundbreaking analysis. Rodney shows how the imperial countries of Europe, and subsequently the US, bear major responsibility for impoverishing Africa. They have been joined in this exploitation by agents or unwitting accomplices both in the North and in Africa.With oppression and liberation his main concern, he ‘delves into the past’, as he says in his preface, ‘only because otherwise it would be impossible to understand how the present came into being … In the search for an understanding of what is now called “underdevelopment” in Africa, the limits of inquiry have had to be fixed as far apart as the fifteenth century, on the one hand, and the end of the colonial period, on the other hand.’ He argues that ‘African development is possible only on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system, which has been the principal agency of underdevelopment of Africa over the last five centuries’.

His Marxist analysis went far beyond previously accepted approaches and changed the way both third world development and colonial history are studied.

Although first published in 1972, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an essential introduction to understanding the dynamics of Africa’s contemporary relations with the West and is a powerful legacy of a committed thinker.

Fanon, Frantz. (1952). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove.
Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon’s masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.
A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.