Community-based Learning and Social Movements: Popular Education in a Populist Age

218 Pages·2020·2.583 MB·English

by  Marjorie Mayo

COMMUNITY-BASED LEARNING
AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Popular Education in a Populist Age
Marjorie Mayo
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by
Policy Press North America offi ce:
University of Bristol Policy Press
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To my family and to the memory of Simon

Contents
List of figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Popular education in a populist age 1
2 Popular education and its roots 19
3 Spaces and places for popular education and participatory 41
action research
4 Principles and practice 57
5 Sharing understandings of varying histories and cultures 77
6 Making connections: linking issues and struggles across 95
space and time
7 Power and power analysis 117
8 Community–university partnerships 137
9 Taking emotions into account 155
10 Looking backwards, looking forwards 175
References 187
Index 201
v
List of figures
3.1 The economy, civil society and the state as separate spheres 46
3.2 The economy, civil society and the state in the context of 46
increasing marketisation
7.1 The power cube 124
7.2 Competing interests for the Holloway site (1) 127
7.3 Competing interests for the Holloway site (2) 128
7.4 Power and sympathy mapping grid 129
vi
Acknowledgements
My appreciations and thanks to all those who have contributed in their
varying ways, as family, friends, former colleagues and fellow activists.
You have continued to provide – and challenge – so many of the ideas
that are included here, contributing such a range of information and
advice. Thank you all so much.
I should like to add very particular thanks to the following: Andy
Bain, Charlie Clarke, John Gaventa, Morag Gillie, Emma Jackson,
Meirian Jump, Budd Hall, Paul Hoggett, Susan Kelly, Roger
McKenzie, Zoraida Mendiwelso-Bendek, Juliet Merrifield, John Page
and Rajesh Tandon. Ines Newman read through earlier drafts in their
entirety, providing extremely valuable, detailed feedback. My special
thanks to her, as always, my frankest and most valued critic.
My thanks and appreciations to the Institute of Development Studies
for permission to reproduce the power cube, in Chapter 7.
Colleagues at Policy Press have been unfailingly supportive, as
always, too. My thanks to you all and to your readers for your very
helpful feedback and suggestions. Any remaining errors are, of course,
down to me, alone.
vii

1
Popular education in a populist age
Inescapably we live in both interesting and disturbing times.
(Boffo et al. 2019: 247)
‘Inequality is maintained by misleading the public’, Danny Dorling has
argued, with governments blaming their predecessors for the 2007–
08 financial crisis (Dorling, 2018: 5). Adding insult to injury, he has
continued, British governments have been attempting to justify the
policies of austerity that have followed, shifting the costs onto the
poorest and most deprived in contemporary Britain. It has been
these most vulnerable groups who have then been held to blame,
the so-called benefit scroungers, the immigrants, the refugees, the
Muslims – anyone other than those who had actually caused and then
benefited from the crisis in the first place. Symptomatically the Oxford
dictionaries selected ‘post-truth’ as word of the year in 2016, defining
this as shorthand for circumstances in which objective facts are less
influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and
personal belief. This has been about promoting the politics of misplaced
blame and fear rather than the politics of reasoned democratic debate.
The UK is becoming increasingly polarised, not only economically,
but also politically. Far Right politicians have been exploiting people’s
anxieties in this precarious climate, playing on popular feelings of
alienation and distrust. This has been causing growing concern, both
in Britain and elsewhere, with the rise of xenophobia (Fekete, 2009)
and of White Supremacist movements in different contexts. The
media – including social media – have the capacity to exacerbate such
emotions, re-enforcing feelings of anxiety and resentment.
Meanwhile authoritarian populist governments have been coming
to power, from Europe to Latin America and beyond, including India,
where Far Right politicians have been associated with violent attacks
on minority communities in the recent past. Such violent episodes
characterise the behaviour of those at the most extreme end of the
Far Right spectrum. But they serve as warnings about the possible
outcomes of the politics of hatred.
While the Far Right has been spreading these toxic messages, others
have been responding to the challenges of neoliberal austerity in very
different ways, offering very different explanations of the causes of
1