Consciousness-Raising

Critical Pedagogy and Practice for Social Change

Nilan Yu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589233
• eBook ISBN: 9781351608312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Almost everywhere across the world, economic inequality has been rising within and across national borders. The vision of a fairer world embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is being assailed by the advance of conservative ideology aided by vitriolic right-wing populism sweeping across the globe. Neoliberal ideology has had a profound impact in the shaping social work and human services at the frontlines.

This book contributes to scholarship in critical practice and theory. It does so by exploring a practice approach steeped in the critical tradition that has hitherto received inordinately nominal attention in social work literature. The book features accounts of consciousness-raising in a variety of contexts – caste relations, race and religion, gender and sexuality, disability and social class. The narratives are meant to tease out conceptions and potential applications of consciousness-raising as an approach for critical practice. It will be of interest to practitioners, educators and students of social work, community development, social development and social pedagogy as well as those engaged in the promotion of human rights and social justice.

1 Consciousness-raising and critical practice

Nilan Yu

Introduction

This book is about consciousness-raising—the awakening of the mind and body to what is often referred to as, for lack of a better term, social reality. It features accounts of people’s experiences in transcending dominant ways of thinking so as to be able to recognize and resist discrimination, disadvantage and oppression. Social workers speak of promoting “social change and development,” “the empowerment and liberation of people” and “social justice” in partnership with disadvantaged populations (International Federation of Social Workers, 2014). For the disadvantaged, an important step toward empowerment and liberation is the achievement of critical consciousness: the recognition of the inequality and oppression that shape their lived experience. Thus, there has been occasional mention of “developing a consciousness” (Corrigan and Leonard, 1978: 122) or “consciousness-raising” (Dominelli, 2009: 52; Moreau, 1990: 53) and the “use of critical consciousness” (see, for example, Sakamoto & Pitner, 2005: 435) in social work texts throughout the decades. However, there is a notable dearth of literature on practical ways by which critical consciousness can be developed (Barak, 2016). This book is a contribution toward filling this gap by way of offering accounts of the application of consciousness-raising in various contexts. It is intended for students, practitioners and educators of social work, community development, social pedagogy and other forms of critical practice aimed at changing the world by addressing structural inequality and exclusion, whether it be on the bases of gender, class, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, sexual orientation or other social lines. While the accounts featured here are of particular groups of people situated in specific parts of the world at certain points in time, the stories of awakening, empowerment and resistance featured can hopefully provide readers with insights and inspiration in grappling with the challenges they face in their part of the world today.

There are different ways in which the term “consciousness-raising” is used. In popular literature, the raising of consciousness is sometimes thought of in terms of being present in the moment, communing with nature and connecting with one’s inner self through meditation as ways of promoting health and well-being. The term is used in this book in relation to understandings of the human condition and social issues. Within this context, a generic use of the term is reflected in many definitions offered by popular references. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, for example, defines consciousness-raising as “an increasing of concerned awareness especially of some social or political issue.” These definitions commonly point to a rise in knowledge and/or interest. Applied in everyday language as well as professional practice, such definitions can equate the raising of consciousness with the raising of concern over an issue. Ife (1995: 162), for example, mentioned in passing the value of consciousness-raising in creating “public awareness” in the context of community development work. While the raising of public awareness over an issue has a place, such conception of consciousness-raising does not reflect the breadth and depth of the use of the term in critical practice. The next section outlines what is meant here by the term “critical practice.” This is followed by a brief discussion of critical theory as a basis for such practice as well as the notion of consciousness-raising and how it relates to critical theory and practice.

Critical practice

Critical practice comes with the recognition that the difficulties experienced by individuals and groups cannot be adequately addressed independent of any structural disadvantage they are subjected to, including racism, sexism, social exclusion and institutionalized discrimination (Baines, 2011; Mullaly, 2007). There are countless forms of critical practices out there informed by various philosophical traditions, but a book about consciousness-raising in the context of critical practice would be incomplete without a discussion of the work of Paulo Freire. Freire’s (1972) seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides a very strong foundation for discussions about critical practice in the way it synthesizes theory and action. At the heart of Freire’s (1972: 15) critical practice was conscientização (Portuguese; roughly translated to “conscientization” or “consciousness-raising”), which refers to the process of “learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.” Reflecting on his life’s work in what was his last public interview in the year before he died, Freire remarked, “My philosophical conviction is that we did not come [into this world] to keep the world as it is. We came [in]to the world to remake the world. We have to change reality.” Although he recognized that his thinking had evolved over the years, this conviction was as resolute as it was when his most famous work was published almost three decades earlier. Rather than seeing the world as a fixed, static order that human beings needed to conform to and live with, Freire’s philosophy required viewing the world as an object of change, as a problem to be solved.

The critical practice of Freire involved the act of changing the world with the aim of exploring possibilities for a fuller life for individuals and for the collective. But what did Freire mean by remaking the world? What reality needed changing? The reality that Freire was grappling with when he developed his critical approach to pedagogy was the oppression and dehumanization of the poor masses in Brazil’s countryside. The peasants he was working with were disempowered within a society dominated by the landed class. His immediate task as an educator was the promotion of literacy, but he realized how closely bound literacy and learning were to people’s lived reality. It was inconceivable for him to speak of promoting literacy without acknowledging the peasants’ oppression and linking their learning to their liberation. Literacy had no significance when people were denied the ability to think, dream, hope and live life to the fullest. The people he was working with were immersed in a “culture of silence” and stripped of their being (Freire, 1972: 10). Freire viewed their state of oppression as patently irreconcilable with what it meant to be human. This was the reality that he sought to change through his critical pedagogy. Freire’s (1972) critical understanding of the role of traditional education in the subjugation of oppressed peoples led to a pedagogy aimed at subverting the culture of silence and despair, and equipping the oppressed with the analytical capacity to recognize and struggle against injustice. He used literacy training as a vehicle to enable the poor to read their social reality and write their own future. The aim was to enable the oppressed to recognize their oppression, understand the structural arrangements that generate such oppression and transform their social reality. Freire’s educational praxis went on to influence liberation theology movements across the world in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Freire was heavily influenced by Karl Marx (Steiner, Krank, McLaren & Bahruth, 2000). Marx’s life’s work was dedicated to the advancement of the working class. He dreamed of a mass movement that would bring about a revolution, leading to a radical change of society. The change Marx sought was the realization of his communist vision of a classless society. The opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, his most famous work with lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, laid down a key tenet of Marxism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For Marx, the vital struggle of his time was between the wealthy capitalist class and the working class. Marx saw the exploitation of the labor of the working class under capitalism as a fatal contradiction that would inevitably lead to a revolutionary uprising. His practice centered on the strengthening of the working-class movement and the propagation of communist ideals.

A key figure in social work was Jane Addams, who is best known for her work in the settlement house movement. The Hull House, the settlement house she co-founded with Ellen Gates Starr, supported newly arrived European immigrants in the ghettos of Chicago. Their work in the settlement house movement was groundbreaking in terms of the advancement of human rights and social policy, but Addams’s critical practice went far beyond this. Addams, the first female American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, authored books about democracy and social ethics, education, prostitution and human trafficking, and peace, among other issues (Staub-Bernasconi, 2017). She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union and was at the forefront in the struggle for women’s suffrage, world peace and civil liberties in the early 1900s (Knight, 2010). She is regarded by many as one of the founders of social work in the USA (Johnson, 2004).

A discussion of critical practice must go beyond personalities. The work of Freire and Marx formed part of broader social movements seeking to advance the rights of landless peasants and workers. There have been countless efforts throughout history in various parts of the world toward the remaking of social reality anchored on an array of philosophical perspectives. Over the last century, feminist movements, especially in the Western world, have had broad-ranging and far-reaching effects in the reshaping of society, centered on but extending well beyond gender equality. The civil rights movement in the USA and anti-racist movements around the world have relentlessly hacked away at the scourge of racial inequality wherever it is found. Indigenous peoples in many countries have been engaged in decades of struggle to assert their rights, place and freedom within state systems imposed upon them. Anti-imperialist struggles in various countries saw the withering away of colonial power. Disability rights movements have been persistent in confronting the exclusionary environments, policies and practices that define and confine the lives of people with disabilities. Activists from the ranks of sexual minorities are actively engaged in identity politics to challenge the preponderant influence of cisgender thinking and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Certain strands of social work, variously referred to as critical social work, radical social work, structural social work, feminist social work, anti-oppressive social work, anti-discriminatory social work and Marxist social work, espouse a critical conception of practice oriented toward challenging structural oppression and the promotion of social justice (Barak, 2016; Dominelli, 2009; Fook, 2015; Mullaly, 2010). Freire’s philosophy and approach form part of such conceptions of social work (Fook, 1993; Mullaly, 2010; Reed, Newman, Suarez & Lewis, 2011). All these forms of critical practice (that is, practice meant to reshape the world) are informed by a critical understanding—a critical theory, if you will—of social life.

Critical theory

Plato’s allegory of the cave illustrated how people’s understandings of the world can be shaped by the limits of their lived experiences and senses, and how such understandings can potently bind them in place. People can thus end up as prisoners of their perceived reality. Unaware or resistant of other possibilities, they can become instruments of their own enslavement. A “critical theory” is a way of understanding social reality that unmasks dominant ideology—systems of ideas that legitimize and are legitimized within unequal social milieus—which, in the process, enables people to challenge the abuse, exploitation and oppression that disadvantaged members are subjected to. The insight offered by a critical theory is itself emancipatory for the disadvantaged in the way that the recognition of their suffering as being structurally rooted frees them from self-blame and opens them up to other possibilities.

The work of Karl Marx is arguably the foundation of modern critical theory. Marx’s key paradigmatic contribution was the recognition of the exploitative relations between social classes as the material foundation of capitalist societies. In the place of homogeneity and commonality of interests as propounded by a functionalist conception of society embedded in dominant ideology, he saw irreconcilable conflicts of interests. He advanced the revolutionary proposition that societies are made up of different social classes in which the advancement of the interests of dominant groups is contingent on the economic exploitation and repression of subjugated social classes sustained through laws, culture, institutions, political systems and various dimensions of social life. This occurs as the material (economic) base brings forth legitimized ideas, institutions, systems and processes while systematically marginalizing others. Gramsci (1971), bearing heavy influence from Marx, saw the social, political, cultural, ideological and economic influence of dominant classes in society as hegemonic control. In his philosophy of praxis, such hegemonic power exercised through various means, including culture, is to be critically interrogated and challenged. The so-called Frankfurt School of social research, following Marx but critical of orthodox Marxism, was instrumental in establishing critical theory as a discrete discipline and expanding its application beyond the bounds of classical Marxism (McLaughlin, 1999). The philosophy and practice of Paulo Freire bear the unmistakable imprints of Marx’s and the Frankfurt School’s influence (Gur-Ze’ev, 1998).

While closely associated with Marx and the Frankfurt School, modern critical theory forms part of a long tradition of thought around the gaining of an understanding of the social world beyond what is immediately apparent. The ancient Greeks recognized the significance of critical consciousness—conceived in terms of the capacity to “stand back from humanity and nature, [and] to make them objects of thought and criticism” rather than allow oneself to be “enslaved to custom, tradition, superstition, nature, or the brute force of political or priestly elites” (Thornton, 2006: 3–4). Critical theory links what C. Wright Mills (1970) called private troubles with public issues. This seemingly simple proposition was a radical idea. In suggesting that the personal difficulties experienced by individuals are intrinsically linked to society and the social order (thus the notion of public issues), critical theory renders political what may be thought of as personal, which opens up what could be thought of as private issues to critical interrogation. Marx’s analytical breakthrough created avenues for critically thinking about many other dimensions of social life, such as gender and race relations. The word critical describes a process of inquiry that lays bare doctrinal assumptions in challenging dominant systems of ideas and ways of thinking (Agger, 2013). These include patriarchy, white privilege, ableism and cisgender heteronormativity. Critical theory requires the active questioning of knowledge by identifying and problematizing those that gloss over differences in and conflicts of interests. It mandates the interrogation of handed-down knowledge in line with its emancipatory agenda. The goal is to emancipate people from the shackles of dominant ideology.

Dominant systems of thinking promote representations of social reality that hide from view differences in and conflicts of interests, and nurture a mass consciousness that is oblivious to or ignorant of disadvantage and exploitation. Dominant ideology promotes the idea that inequality is a natural part of life. The fact that some are rich while others are poor is seen as normal. A widely held assumption is that economic advancement can be achieved by anyone by virtue of luck, divine will, talent and/or hard work. Poverty arises from the absence of any of these factors. An implied and often uninterrogated assumption is the inherent fairness of the system; hard work and perhaps a bit of luck will give everyone a chance to get ahead in life. Marxists speak of this as false consciousness—understandings of society blind to the structural inequality that characterizes social relations. In the context of capitalism, such so-called false consciousness ignores how class-based exploitation serves as a vital element of capitalist political economies. The preponderance of this worldview helps sustain the subjugation and exploitation of the working class by capitalists and the ruling class. It was in this light that Marx spoke of the significance of class consciousness—the recognition by members of the working class of their exploited and oppressed condition, their collective position within society and the common interests that they hold as a group. Such recognition of class identity and interest enables exploited classes to engage as a collective in a struggle against their oppression. It is only through class struggle that the working class can emancipate themselves from the unequal and exploitative relationships that define their being. Relevant to this, Freire (1972: 15) spoke of the development of “critical consciousness,” which refers to the capacity to understand as well as the understanding of social reality that recognizes the inequality and oppression that governs social relationships.

Consciousness-raising

In the context of critical practice and theory, the term consciousness-raising refers to the development of critical consciousness. Lundy (2011: 172) characterized consciousness-raising as a process that “involves both reflection on and an understanding of dehumanizing social structures and includes action directed at changing societal conditions.” The development of critical consciousness involves the “unmasking” of oppressive structures to emancipate those who experience disadvantage and oppression (Barak, 2016: 1779). Critical consciousness represents the ability to pierce through the veil of dominant ideology that shapes widely held understandings of the world, society and the human condition. Links between individual difficulties and societal structures are recognized. The personal is linked to the political. The role of the political economic environment—how power, r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Consciousness-raising and critical practice
• 2 Touching the untouchable: Dalit empowerment through consciousness-raising in an Indian village
• 3 Critical consciousness-raising amongst poor Rakhine villages in rural Myanmar
• 4 Consciousness-raising among rural women in Bangladesh: A study of the BRAC’s Microfinance Program participants
• 5 Gendered violence in the Australian context: Feminist consciousness-raising
• 6 Colliding identities: Gay Muslim men in a liberal secular society
• 7 “We could have, you know, a revolution”: Consciousness-raising and self-advocacy for people with intellectual disability in 1980s Victoria
• 8 Paulo Freire and education for liberation: The case of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST)
• 9 “From the river to the sea”—promoting Palestinian resistance through praxis
• 10 Critical consciousness and social change
• Index