After the party: In the luminous residuals, finding ourselves anew

On illumination

Re-reading the special issue (SI)’s articles as a collection—over two years since the call for papers—the interconnected themes of anti-nostalgia and first-person narrative as a thinking device (Hardwick in Pinckney, 2022) began to glow. MacLure (2010, p. 282) describes glow: ‘some detail—a fieldnote fragment or video image—starts to glimmer, gathering our attention.’ Pitt and Moss (2019, p. 712) further elucidate:

We have included episodes that glowed, drawing on MacLure’s (2010, 282) notion that certain data fragments catch the researcher’s embodied attention and affectively engage the researcher, sparking the making of connections between the data fragment and a range of other multimodal texts and personal experiences.

For me, the glow was meta: the idea of glowing itself began to glow. I frantically searched Endnote for these references to glow that had stuck with me, or perhaps, better said, had caught my embodied attention and affectively engaged the researcher—me. I knew overlaying this methodology onto this reflection on the SI wouldn’t be able to be true to this methodology, but I have proceeded in hopes that my reflection could at least be glow-inspired.

The following analysis of these glimmering details—a think piece of sorts—doesn’t summarize the articles; it isn’t representative of their central ideas. It simply offers different entry points for the reader to find their own glow.

On anti-nostalgia

Some anniversaries bring happiness and celebration, some quiet introspection, some sorrow, private or public. In what ways do anniversaries, such as this centennial, not serve us, and how can they be reconceptualized to do so? The last few years have marked 100 years since Freire’s birth, 50 years since Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and anniversaries of respective Paulo Freire Institutes. They have opened up important spaces to facilitate new reinventions of the Freirean project, such as this SI. In the midst of these milestones, the sensation of the residuals of these celebrations began to glow: what would conceptualizing these moments as an anti-anniversary mean for the Freirean project? In what ways would an anti-anniversary be more Freirean?

Sondra Hale—who has made important contributions to Freirean studies (Hale, 2007, Hale, 2019)—calls for self-subversion, for being ‘on guard against oneself’ (Hale, 2014):

And here is where I return to the main point of this Afterword, the importance of uncertainty and making creative ventures out of mistakes or failures… ‘Courage…required the willingness ‘to always be on guard against oneself’’(75¹). I am exactly that—on guard against myself. I do not view this as a negative, however, but as an exciting, ongoing challenge.

I find the kind of propensity for self-subversion that Hirschman mentions to be more comfortable than to be at peace with myself.

I have drawn on Hale to explore relationship between this vigilance and concrete possibilities to expand inclusion within the Freirean studies (Misiaszek, 2019). As Freirean studies moves into a phase less marked by major anniversary labels, ‘the importance of uncertainty’ and ‘making creative ventures out of mistakes and failures’ feel like important values to cultivate inclusion and growth. It requires work to find a balance between historical and institutional memory and space for uncertainty and creativity. Without it, Freirean studies runs the risk of a perpetual, and unhealthy nostalgia:

Nostalgia was considered a medical disease and a psychiatric disorder until the early nineteenth century. Today, researchers describe nostalgia as a frequent, primarily positive, context-specific bittersweet emotion that combines elements of happiness and sadness with a sense of yearning and loss. The researchers also tell us that feeling nostalgic involves putting ourselves at the center of a story in which we’re reminiscing about people we are close to or about important events in our lives. Interestingly, nostalgia is more likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives….

Across our research, nostalgia emerged as a double-edged sword, a tool for both connection and disconnection. It can be an imaginary refuge from a world we don’t understand and a dog whistle used to resist important growth in families, organizations, and the broader culture and to protect power, including white supremacy. (Brown, 2021, pp. 78–79)

An anniversary, particularly in times when ‘imaginary refuge’ can be an attractive antidote to another looming anniversary—three years since the beginning of COVID —it seems worth reflecting on how Freirean scholars can be ‘on guard against themselves,’ on the nuance of ‘connection and disconnection,’ and the need to not ‘resist important growth’ within Freirean spaces.

I consider all of the articles, in their own ways, to be anti-nostalgic: they concretely, and self-reflectively, engage in Freirean praxis. Considering my own praxis and reflecting on writing as a pedagogical methodology (Burke, 2018; Burke et al., 2017; Burke & Lumb, 2017), I end the two-year process of preparing this special issue with refined clarity of my own shifting priorities within various Freirean spaces.

In the SI, mantras of Freirean studies are put up for examination: Viola (2022, p. 2192) asks, ‘If Paulo Freire is indeed correct that we “make the road by walking” we must also ask ourselves: Where is it that we seek to go? What are the persistent roadblocks that obstruct our path forward? Who are our fellow travelers?’

While frequently overused, the SI’s offering of truly ‘understudied’ disciplinary and geographical contexts further offers important growth in Freirean studies; for example, Ho and Tseng (2022) offer a comparison with the Chinese philosophical thought of Mohism, and Viola (2022) of that of Cedric Robinson, US theorist of racial capitalism and a key architect of the Black Radical Tradition (BRT). Rauf and Shareef (2022) explore Freire within architectural education in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Freirean thought can be seen as disruptive to any conservativism; here I particularly focus on it in the sense of ‘resistant to change’ and ‘unimaginatively conventional.’² In the special issue, authors challenge conservativism for example, within refugee education (Yeo & Yoo, 2022), environmental education (Misiaszek, 2022a), digital education (Farag et al., 2022), and adult education (Suoranta et al., 2022). Yeo and Yoo (2022, p. 2203) point out that ‘the dominant themes and discourses of the literature in refugee education tend to overly highlight the interventions organized and provided by the global actors.’ Misiaszek (2022a, p. 2300) calls for ‘decoding the SDGs’ language, and language used in the name of the ‘SDGs’, to disrupt the politics for Development.’ Farag et al. (2022, p. 2214) argue that ‘digital learning undoubtedly increases access to education globally, but also can intensify some of the worst problems described in Freire’s banking model.’ Suoranta et al. (2022, p. 2233) question the usual distinction ‘between education as an inherently enriching process that is partly under learners’ control and training as the narrow inculcation of predetermined skills by an authoritarian figure’ (Brookfield & Holst, 2011, p. 64). There is no space or time for conservative, growth-resistant, power-protective nostalgia.

I turn now to glimmering details of how the authors have used the first-person narrative in anti-nostalgic ways.

On thinking with first-person narrative

In the end, [writer Elizabeth Hardwick] decided to use the first person after all. ‘You can think with it,’ she said. (Pinckney, 2022)

In what ways does the use of first-person narrative ‘after all’ allow the authors to think?

Authors in this special issue use the first-person to cross timescapes (Adam, 1998). Torres shares their forward-looking, ‘direct,’ ‘even laconic’ final conversation with Freire (Torres, 2017, 2022, p. 2177). I offer an epilogue in letter form written to a reader at the next centennial (Misiaszek, 2022b). Abdi (2022, p. 2287) takes the reader from ‘…my reading in graduate school few decades ago and since then,’ bringing the reader into ‘my 30-year reading and teaching of Freire’s work.’ In their conclusion, Viola (2022, p. 2199) reminds the reader, ‘I have written this essay to initiate a generative dialogue between Paulo Freire, Cedric Robinson, and a BRT.’

They use it to narrow scope, both historically and thematically. At the outset of their historical analysis, Mayo clarifies, ‘I will abstain from rehearsing the vast literature on Freire’s basic concepts,’ I shall restrict myself, in this paper, to the following…’(Mayo, 2022, p. 2275). Abdi (2022, p. 2287) recognizes their view of ‘context-shifting works (via my biased topical lenses, of course).’

They use it for un-nostalgic historical clarity. Gerhardt inserts themself exactly once: ‘I have already indicated that the SEC/UR did not carry out any independent research, apart from preliminary studies within the framework of the literacy projects’ (Gerhardt, 2022).

These pauses in the SI allow the author to insert themself, however briefly, into the text, into their reading of the world, which evokes a sense of Freirean historicity (Freire, 1998; Zanini Moretti, 2012):

The teacher who thinks ‘correctly’ transmits to the students the beauty of our way of existing in the world as historical beings, capable of intervening in and knowing this world. Historical as we are, our knowledge of the world has historicity. It transmits, in addition, that our knowing and our knowledge are the fruit of historicity (Freire, 1998, p. 35)

The history brought to life on the pages of the SI, and the people, spaces, and objects within it, glows as spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007, 2015), a possible meeting of Freirean studies, now seen as foundational, with post-foundational studies.

On new ways

Finally, de Sousa Santos (2014, p. 5), a timely and seemingly timeless piece that perpetually glows for me, did so again as I thought about the issue as a whole:

Before us there are more ruins than well-defined plans. But ruins may be creative too. Starting anew means rendering creativity and interruption possible under conditions that promote reproduction and repetition. The point is not so much to imagine new theories, new practices, and new relations among them. The point is mainly to imagine new ways of theorizing and of generating transformative collection action. (my emphasis)

Re-reading de Sousa Santos, echos of Hale’s reflection on creativity and uncertainty, Brown’s analysis of resistance of important growth, and the intertwined image of residuals and ruins glowed.

And are still glowing.

Lauren Ila Misiaszek
Institute of International and Comparative Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
[email protected]

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank all of the authors and the EPAT team for their ceaseless efforts and Dr. Samson Maekele Tsegay, Special Issue Assistant Editor, for his important contributions throughout the life of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jeremy Adelman’s Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton: Princeton University, 2012.

2 Collins dictionary.