Oct 28, 2017 | 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM | Main Loft

Roberta Lexier, PhD

Resisting the Ivory Tower: Universities and Social Change

In 1960, sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that “intellectuals [are] a possible, immediate, radical agency of change.” A decade later, an introduction to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed insisted that: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” According to both, education should be used to effect social change. However, universities in North America are facing attacks from all sides of the political spectrum. In the United States, a conservative youth group has created a “Professor Watchlist” to document faculty members who “advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.” Similarly, the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente complains that “the radicals have taken over” universities in Canada. So-called radicals, though, complain that developments within higher education, including corporatization, have threatened the ability of universities to effectively critique the world and act as a force for social change. The future of higher education is unclear.

This presentation will examine ways that liberal education can contribute to social change, including the integration of politically-driven academic disciplines, high impact pedagogies such as Community Service Learning and experiential education, and interdisciplinary approaches to social issues and problems. It will also explore the numerous limits created by institutional and societal realities to this potential role, such as safe spaces and trigger warnings, codes of conduct, casualization of the workforce, and increasing administrative surveillance. This presentation will offer important insights into how liberal education can be used to effect social change as well as some of the important limits placed on the ability of faculty, students, and administrators to press for change.

Charlotte Lake

The Destruction of Meaning

Language holds the capacity for violence. Meaning is largely a function of use, so when the meaning of political language is exploited it can restrict agency and viscerally realise that violent potential. My paper will examine how meaning is used and distorted with regards to the modern co-option of activist language — feminist, social justice warrior, Black Lives Matter — by the reactionary right and the easing the cognitive dissonance tied to the realities of bigotry and intolerance it allows. While language and its link to political violence has been explored, this has not been sufficiently applied to this contemporary context. Once internalised by the neo-reactionary, this ideology enables a total separation and indeed contradiction between moral attachments and their desired political ends of normalising oppression. If social justice means injustice, to create a just world one must oppose social justice and its proponents, no matter how contradictory such a conclusion is. One particularly effective means of oppression internalises in the subject their own marginalised status: they police and monitor themselves, reducing the resources and power needed to maintain and develop control. I advance that this form of domination in language occurs when the labels and terminology adopted by oppressed parties is distorted to the point it undermines itself and its own meaning in the public eye, building on Fricker’s conception of epistemic injustice. The social justice warrior is thereby discursively contained as an enemy of social justice, and the perpetrators of oppression its supporters. I will argue in my paper that the response to this must be a similarly violent tying together of these concepts: there are no people who are not-people, anti-sexism is not sexism, antiracism is not racism, and the label of social justice warrior is one which ought to be flocked to, its pejorative definition met with refusal.

Worokya Duncan

The Legacy of Liberal as Profane

Hostility between progressive and repressive politics is as old as the debate concerning in which region of The United States slavery was worse. In the latter, some argue the nature of Northern Slavery was that of a kinder, more gentle form of chattel slavery that enabled the enslaved to learn a trade, and sometimes, become literate. The argument employs language suggesting the lack of freedom of movement, enforcement of slave codes, disenfranchisement, disconnect from stable and consistent family ties was a negligible component of the lives of the enslaved in the North. Similarly, proponents of progressive and repressive politics fail to appreciate the common ancestry of beliefs concerning the agency, intelligence, abilities, beauty, and resilience of oppressed people, all while offering policies that on the surface appear different, but may end up with the same long-term result of segregation, academic and wealth gaps, and unequal protection under the law. The goal of social justice, as in the term coined and used in 1840 has never been equity or equality. It can be argued, in fact, that often, the leadership of social justice movements have continued to operate in racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic, thereby relinquishing their rights to a moral high ground. Inasmuch as there is sentiment that “actions and speech are being policed,” there exists a reality that the policing of said actions and speech may be due to the hypocrisy of the ideologies undergirding the movements, as evident in the leadership that too often has been too White, too male, too heteronormative, and too American Christian. Perhaps the attack should be reframed as a call to more clearly define how progressive politics’ objective of equity works to honor the dignity and value of all in ways that highlight how repressive politics often hurts those who support it.