In and against global injustice: Decolonising popular education on global development

Abstract

This article builds on a classroom study and interviews with facilitators and students on a travelling Folk High School course on global justice and development, an education that raises awareness about colonial history and contemporality. The study explores how the concept of being ‘in and against’ presents itself in the narratives of the research participants, and what those narratives can say about institutional and global conditions for transnational popular educational engagement. The results mirror the ambiguities of criticising the global, structural, and institutional conditions, while also relying on the same prerequisites, to conduct the course. It shows how working in and against the classroom, as expressed from the differentperspectives of the students and the facilitators, entails countering both global and institutional material orders as well as prevailing hegemonic knowledge, and working in and against a gendered, classed, and racialized classroom.

Keywords:

• In and against
• global justice
• transnational popular education
• decolonisation of education
• Folk High School

Introduction

In the late 1970s, adult education intellectuals put on the agenda the contradictions of welfare practitioners operating in the state, while at the same time—as socialist activists—working against the (capitalist) state and the social relationships it created (LEWRG 1979). This is an ongoing, and as yet changing, ambiguity in adult educational activism for social justice (see e.g. Mueller 1988, Mayo 2005, Crowther and Martin 2009, Von Kotze and Walters 2017). Situated in ‘the intersection between the state and social movements’ (Laginder et al. 2013, p. 4), popular education, and here more specifically institutionalised Swedish Folk High Schools (hereinafter abbreviated as FHS) and emancipatory social movements, are complexly immersed in those paradoxical dynamics. Historically, Swedish institutionalised popular education has functioned both as control of the population through education ‘from above’ and as a platform for emancipatory endeavours ‘from below’ (Sundgren 2002). Moreover, popular education cannot be said to merely be located within the nation-state; globalisation makes popular educational spaces transnational, and thus places its emancipatory struggles in and against, not only the state, but also global and transnational power dynamics (cf. Crowther and Martin 2009, Çagatay 2018), and its ‘prevailing racialized colonial constructions’ (Von Kotze and Walters 2017, p. 27).

This study takes its starting point in a specific transnational popular educational space, constituted by grassroots organisations of the Global South, and institutionalised FHS and grassroots organisations of the Global North. The article builds on a classroom study and interviews with facilitators and students on an FHS travelling course on global justice that teachesabout the impacts of colonialism, and calls for action for global justice. The study explores how tensions of challenging dominant knowledges, as well as navigating between the contradictory ideals of a complex educational organisation, are negotiated in this particular transnational popular educational setting. I seek to examine specifically how being ‘in and against’ presents itself in the narratives of the research participants; what is worked in and what is worked against, and how is it done? How can the classroom, and its institutional and structural prerequisites the research participants are positioned in, be reinterpreted according to the narratives? Ultimately, what can those narratives tell us about institutional and global conditions for transnational popular educational engagement?

In this article, I contribute to the discussions about in-and-againstness within the research field on adult and popular education, joining the discussion of feminist and decolonial outlooks on transnational adult teaching and learning spaces (cf. Manicom and Walters 2012). As a site of popular education, the classroom reflects the paradoxes and difficulties of popular educational solidarity work that is made possible by the same world order that is being criticised (cf. Berg 2007, Dahlstedt and Nordvall 2011). Previous research on adult and popular education highlight feminist decolonising solidarity (Von Kotze and Walters 2017), ‘critical settler education’ (Johnson 2016), learning towards a ‘decolonising relationality’ and solidarity (Kluttz et al. 2020; 2021) ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (Kepkiewicz 2015, Walker and Palacios 2016), ‘pedagogies of place’ (Kapoor 2011), and ‘critical cultural pedagogy’ (Clover and Sanford 2016) as well as disempowerment in social movement learning (Zielińska et al. 2011) and other processes in feminist teaching (Yang 2010, 2016) as dimensions of feminist, anti-racist and decolonial perspectives within the field of adult and popular education.

Moreover, adult education researchers have highlighted the possibilities of critical pedagogy to become ‘co-opted’ to the state, and may unintentionally serve to defend it (McLaren et al. 2004, p. 141). Previous research has highlighted ‘affective dissonance’ (Von Kotze and Walters 2017) and difficulties of bringing up subjects of anti-colonialism and/or race and racism in adult education, due to the ideological functions of suppressing such discussions. Adult learners’ resistance to anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogical endeavours have been explored in a variety of research fields (see e.g. hooks 1994, Essed 1996, Srivastava 2005, Heron 2007, DiAngelo 2011, Ahmed 2012, Habel 2012, Yancy and Davidson 2014). In feminist social movement learning (Srivastava 2005), as well as volunteer work (Heron 2007), previous research illustrates resistance to anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogy, primarily among white adult learners, as ways of protecting a sense of moral self and status quo. They conceptualise this as rooted in an ideological construction of white, bourgeois femininity, and the need to remain innocent and good in relation to colonialism and racism. This mechanism prevents activists from moving towards accountability of one’s own involvement in structural racism.

Previous research highlights postcolonial conditions for pedagogical practices within adult education, as well as ways of grappling with it. This article contributes to the research field by bringing into the discussions how discourses of Swedish colonial innocence as well as democracy and humanitarianism, as crucial in international relations and aid, are immanent also in transnational popular education, and how this is played out in and against classroom dynamics. In the following sections, I will first situate the study’s transnational space in its institutional and political landscape, as well as describing the theory and methodology of the research. Secondly, I will present the analysis. Finally, I will summarise the findings in a concluding discussion.

The studied classroom

The classroom studied here is a transnational, multi-sited, and mobile teaching and learning space, organised by a Swedish Folk High School, grassroots organisations in the Global North, and grassroots organisations in the Andean region. It is structured as a ‘Folk High School travelling course on global development’, and adheres to a tradition of travelling courses that date back to both missionary and progressive movements in the 1960s ( Hyldgaard Nankler, 2018). In general, the courses share many traits with social movements’ programmes of international volunteer work but distinguish themselves in their belonging to the Swedish state-anchored and social movement-affiliated popular educational system (folkbildning) and the educational system of the Folk High School, as well as their affiliations to different social movements around the world.

With 154 schools located all around Sweden, the FHS constitute an important part of the institutionalised folkbildning. Folkbildning has an exceptional status in Swedish society as a ‘highly state-integrated phenomenon and a mainstream activity’ (Laginder et al. 2013, p. 4). The majority of the schools belong to social movements, NGOs, or other foundations, and the education is free of charge and eligible for study support and state study loans. Travelling courses on global justice are only a small part of the FHS courses offered; the FHS also provide qualifying courses for university studies as well as specialist courses on arts, music, or vocational training. The socio-economic status of the students is diverse but is often segregated between courses. The FHS has a history of both providing education for marginalised groups without access to higher education, as well as running high-status courses for high-performing students. Being rooted in Swedish welfare and democratic national projects, the schools have a symbolic status in Swedish cultural and political life. Many courses on global development and justice relate to this category of high-status courses, attracting relatively resourceful young students, often women, providing a way of either acquiring or refining cultural and symbolic capital (Österborg Wiklund 2019a). Historically, there is a strong relationship between folkbildning and Swedish international development cooperation, as many of the courses have a history of being supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida (Nylander et al. 2011, Hyldgaard Nankler 2018).

This particular course both mimics and differs from the regular range of courses on global development at the FHS. It is structured according to common arrangements for FHS travelling courses, as a one-year, full-time course for Swedish students, based at a Folk High School in Sweden and with a couple of months located in the host country. The travelling courses, as in this case, generally offer boarding school-style accommodation in Sweden, and while abroad, the students live with host families or in accommodation connected to the local cooperating organisation. In the host country, a local organisation hosts the students and lets them participate as volunteers in the activities of the organisation. The students also take part in study trips and work on projects on thematic topics connected to the location in question. After returning to Sweden, the students often carry out informatory work about their chosen thematic issues within their local communities in Sweden, such as schools, organisations, and forums.

The host organisations are social movements that generally work with social or environmental issues, and often provide supervision and teaching on the FHS courses when the students carry out their internship within their organisations. The social movements that collaborate with Swedish FHS have been located all over the world, but most commonly in Tanzania, followed by India and various Latin American countries ( et al., 2011). A large amount of the courses have been located in the Andean region (Ehn and Österborg Wiklund 2015). Most often, and also, in this case, the courses are not structured as exchange programmes. Rather, student and teacher mobility are one-way, even though there are some exceptions. This generally enables Swedish students and teachers to go abroad, and the collaborating organisation hosts them without being able to send an equal number of students and teachers to Sweden.

In this case, the Andean organisations involved are non-governmental, social movements focussing on community struggles for local as well as global, social and environmental justice. They can be said to use popular educational methods to ‘create the conditions for participants to critique and act upon relations of dispossessions’ (Jaramillo and Carreon 2014, p 395). They work in collaboration with other grassroots organisations and local communities in the area, some of them also collaborating with other international NGOs, eco-tourism, and volunteer organisations. One of the organisations has a long history of working with Swedish FHS travelling courses, both in its current organisational forms and also according to previous ways of working. The latter was formed more like an internship, and thus provided the organisation with an appreciated workforce, rather than, as today, receiving a fairly large student group on a study trip with educational purposes.

Parts of the FHS international engagement have, to varying extents, historically been influenced by postcolonial and anti-imperialist thoughts and curricula. This is also the case for this particular course, characterised by the Andean and social movement contexts in which it is embedded. Teaching about colonialismand globalization and its expressions in the contemporary world is a vital part of the curriculum, as is exploring struggles against it. It differs from the missions of some of the other courses and affiliated organisations, which could have more developmental, aid-related, or missionary emphases.

To conclude, while the facilitators and the local organisations are free to draw up the curricula, they are still dependent on the politics of the local organisations, but are also dependent on global structures of power, as well as the power dynamics surrounding the organisations involved, and the Swedish economic politics of popular education and development cooperation (or the absence thereof).

Theory, methodology, and material

My overarching approach is to study the institutional conditions for popular educational engagement for global justice. Hence, I am studying discourses about the structural prerequisites surrounding the engagement, rather than individual persons. To explore those issues, I have conducted fieldwork and interviews with students and facilitators in a Folk High School course on global development and justice, inspired by a reflexive ethnographic approach (Davies 2008), bearing in mind the continuous co-construction of knowledge between researchers, informants and in the context of the field.

The data have been collected over a total of 14 days (and nights) during a period of one academic year. We have been in both Sweden and the Andes; in some of the host organisations (which, due to research ethics, are anonymized). In-depth interviews (1–2 per person) with nine students and three facilitators, of whom one isa teacher of the course and two are from the host organisations, have been conducted over the year. The fieldwork and interviews have been carried out according to good research practice and the ethical codex for research provided by the Swedish Research Council, and according to the rules that applied at the time of the study.¹

Generally, both students and teachers had previously been engaged in any of the issues dealt with by the course. The students identified as female or non-male and were from Sweden, with no previous connection to the visited region, whereas the teachers and supervisors were from and/or had a background in the region. The teachers had studied at the university level and were primarily from working-class or rural farming backgrounds, whereas the students were primarily from upper-middle-class, urban backgrounds with a few exceptions of students from rural areas and/or with working-class upbringings. Even though most of the students were in their early 20’s, some of them already had studied university courses.

Initially, the study circulated around general questions of learning and social processes. With time, issues that were important to the research participants came to concentrate on questions of power structures and injustices. This also led me to study discourses of those issues more closely. The theoretical-analytical choices of understanding the classroom as a postcolonial contact zone are thus influenced by the empirical data and the patterns of continuously expressed quandaries of the research participants. The analytical process has, accordingly, developed in dialogue with the field, intrinsic to all stages of the research. From there, the themes presented in the article have derived from a formalised analysis of the gathered research material (cf. Davies 2008).

My main theoretical framework is the concept of ‘in and against’, as described by e.g. Mayo (2005), Crowther and Martin (2009), and Von Kotze and Walters (2017). In this specific context, it entails the paradoxes and dilemmas of working against global injustice, but within institutions and societies that are inevitably governed by the same logic. In my understanding of the institutional prerequisites for the transnational learning space (as well as the research setting), I am inspired by Mählck and Fellesson’s (2016) reading of Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991) concept of the postcolonial ‘contact zone’ as implicated in educational settings. Contact zones are ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ ( Pratt, 1991, p. 34). It here merges with Sara Ahmed’s (2007, 2010, 2012) concept of institutions implicated in historical whiteness. The classroom (and the research setting) can thus be interpreted as an educational ‘contact zone’, entangled in (post)colonial history and contemporality.

To this assumption of the classroom (and research field) as a postcolonial contact zone, I add an understanding of it as embedded in, on the one hand, the decolonial struggles of social movements of the Andean region, and on the other hand the endeavours of the Swedish counterparts, as well as a mix of both. Bearing in mind that both popular education and aid historically have a crucial part of Swedish self-image as a humanitarian and democratic nation in international relations (cf. Osman 1999, Öhman 2008, Engh 2009, Österborg Wiklund 2018, 2019a, 2019b), I understand the postcolonial contact zone as being immersed in discourses of Swedish innocence and perceived distance from the European colonial project (cf. De los Reyes et al. 2002, Ipsen and Fur 2009, Keskinen et. al. 2009,, Habel 2012; Hübinette & Lundström, 2014). This in turn has an impact on the grappling of asymmetrical power relationships in the classroom.

Tensions of in and against

Considering the classroom as the scene where the study takes place, it is characterised by a rather independent educational freedom of teaching about decolonial, anti-racist and feminist endeavours, and thus counteracting hegemonic worldviews in more general educational curricula. Students, teachers, and other engaged actors can be considered immersed in an ‘in and against’ paradox of education; negotiating the conditions of global injustices while at the same time relying on the same unequal world order that is being criticised.

In the following section, I have divided the analysis into two subdivisions, exploring in and againstness on a global and institutional level in section one, and a micro, classroom level in section two. In the analysis, I try to grasp what is being worked against and how, connecting those discourses to a wider understanding of the institutional and global conditions for such a transnational classroom.

In and against global and institutional injustice

The first tension of working in and against transnational learning and teaching space, such as this FHS travelling course I want to illustrate is how global and institutional relations of power of other/close societal spheres are prevalent in the discourses about the course. As appearing in the depictions of the research participants, these often adhere to tourism and development aid, but also educational institutions and curricula.

Vilma and Natalia, the two teachers who work most closely with the students as facilitators, express their experiences of teaching on the course. In their descriptions from the classroom, I interpret that different dimensions of in and againstness inform both their mission and their practical, pedagogical work. Natalia is a practitioner in a collaborating organisation, with extensive experience of working with the reception and guidance of FHS students in the organisation. They have worked according to both another system, where the FHS course was arranged as an internship, and the current arrangements, where the course is arranged as a course in its traditional sense, with shorter study visits instead of integral work within the organisations. According to Natalia, this limited time and space in the latter arrangements leave little scope for the organisations to concentrate on transformational education. At the same time, it changes the power relationships from the organisations being the ones setting the agenda and asking for certain profiles of co-workers, to instead being providers of a service. Additionally, they are limited to being receivers of Swedish students instead of also being senders of an equal number of their own members to Sweden.

Natalia explains how they have noticed a shift towards a more consumer-oriented disposition of the courses, instead of solidarity and activism. This, in turn, affects the whole mission of the collaboration and forces them towards meeting the logic of experienced-based tourism.

And from there, we are not doing popular education. We are doing eco-tourism. If someone comes with a Folk High School and (…) (stays a short time), then it is tourism. Eco-tourism, right? In a way it is learning, but what does it leave for us? I would like, even if this person stays for three weeks, that she leaves me with something.

As Natalia expresses, this tendency does not promote the mutual benefits of collaboration; instead, the collaborating organisation is placed in a position of merely providing knowledge to the Global North. Natalia relates this to institutional and discoursal legacies of Swedish politics:

One thing that I’ve always criticized the Swedish (solidarity) movement for in some way is that Sweden somehow always had that image of international solidarity; there is a moment when it turns around, solidarity turns around and becomes help. And people want to go and help those who have less. But lately I have seen beyond what coming to help is… because they are middle-class companions, young middle-class, with a lot of privileges in Swedish society and a lot of privileges in the society of the world, they come with this perception… not of solidarity, of the building of solidarity, but of the purchasing of a service, purchasing knowledge of (the continent). And that scares me a lot. Because what we want to build (…) is not that. We want to build the solidarity of the world to change this world. (…) And it’s not even the young Swedish people who are to blame… for how Swedish society and Swedish politics are built.

Natalia’s systemic analysis of the conditions for attempting popular educational learning with Swedish FHS has many layers. In the quotation, Natalia expresses criticism towards how the collaborative work will fall into not only being eco-tourism, but also being characterised by, what I interpret as, a philanthropic ‘helping’. I understand this as both the institutional and discoursal conditions of traditional aid, and its immanent power relationships between the aid donor and receiver, characterising the conditions for the FHS collaboration that Natalia describes (cf. Eriksson Baaz 2002). Institutionally, the FHS has the most state funding, often from both institutionalised popular education and development cooperation of the Global North, and thus also in a powerful donor position. The inherited relationships of power in such an arrangement are here described as being further reinforced when the collaboration goes from being characterised by the organisation as a director, and the volunteers as ‘employees’ in the organisation, towards organising the collaboration as a course, where the employees become students and the directors become teachers.

However, this is taken even further when the knowledge appropriated during the course, and the relationships between students and facilitators, are described as moving towards the ‘purchase of a service’—a commodification of solidarity. Accordingly, in an examination of the origins of Swedish international aid work, Jonsson (2012) describes how ‘the story of international aid work’ has branched into something that has become a saleable product under the name of ‘voluntourism’. Hence, what originated from value-based social movement engagement has now been subjected to increased commercialisation. In relation to the FHS, voluntourism might challenge work in social movements and the FHS, competing for students to enroll and also influencing the discourses about volunteer work in general. On the other hand, Natalia’s criticism of ‘knowledge about the continent’ can be understood as both a commercialisation of volunteer work, but also as being immanent in the nature of volunteer work itself. The international experience here becomes attractive commodities in the making of (middle-class) cosmopolitan subjectivities of the Swedish (and global northern) population (cf. Jonsson 2012, Vrasti 2010, 2013). In this particular setting, it is given manifold meanings, since it not only impacts the practical work but also further puts into play the historical and global power relationships between the people involved. Ultimately, it is described as conditioning the possibilities of undertaking the original mission to carry out popular education and solidarity work to change the world.

Natalia is not the only research participant to raise the ambiguity of in and againstness in connection to tourism and international development aid. The main teacher and the students also refer to this. However, they refer to tourism more in terms of identity and as something they do not want to be associated with. They constantly return to the unavoidability of relying on the conditions for (unequal) global mobility (e.g. tourism, professional work, and aid) to participate in the course. They are using touristic infrastructure, such as flights, restaurants, and hostels, and the students are bothered by being read as affluent tourists in the host country. At the same time, they express a yearning for subjectivity beyond that of a tourist. For both the main facilitator and many of the students, the unresolvable paradox of working against climate change, but at the same time flying by airplane to learn about it, is present in their expressions of being in and against. As engaged in environmental issues, Vilma questions whether she can really live with herself when encouraging young people to fly and whether the course is trustworthy when being against environmental exploitation while at the same time contributing to it. The students also express this ambiguity, and for many of them, the outcome of this ongoing reflection keeps culminating in how the most ethical thing to do is to not travel, or even to drop out of the school (at the end of the day, none of them did). This relates to what in the previous section is referred to as working in and against global infrastructures of e.g. tourism; structures that enable the course to be the inherited ‘transnational’ but that are also regarded as highly problematic.

However, this moral preoccupation is mostly reserved for the students and teachers based in Sweden—and not the informants in the collaborating organisation, since their positions are not mobile in the same way. Neither is the depiction of tourism as something inherently bad one-sided; the practitioners from another collaborating organisation describe the kind of community tourism they are working with as, for the local communities involved, an interesting foundation for intercultural exchange as well as extra resources for coping with political difficulties. They express a will to assist the participants in problematising globalisation and individualisation, and in turn, the participants can function as extra voices for the political struggles of the communities involved.

I interpret that both traditional development aid and tourism, informed by different positionalities, are prevalent in the depiction of in and againstness of the research participants. This adheres both to how the course is institutionally structured and the conditions for its implementation, and to discourses about solidarity and the aim and purpose of the course. I interpret this as meaning that even though this course expresses a mission that is far from traditional development aid and tourism, the course must still relate to them through in and againstness, on both material and discoursal levels.

Another way in which in and againstness is expressed is through the course curricula and the aims of the teaching and learning achievements, as expressed by the facilitators. The teacher, Vilma, describes the mission as follows:

(…) it’s important that the participants, beyond getting here and getting to know (the continent) and either liking it or not liking it, get deeper insights into the impact of colonialism than what can be achieved theoretically. To understand that global injustice has its roots in colonialism. The real economic, political exploitation that has existed for five centuries. But even how, just like the patriarchy, it is embedded in all sorts of aspects of society, and it is, not least in our minds, both in the colonialized and in those who come from the colonizing countries. (...)You should be able to see it in Swedish society as well, how it affects (…) That you also learn about the different forms of colonialism. In us, in our actions, in our self-image, and so on.

Hence, Vilma expresses a disclosure of power relationships as a crucial endeavour of the course. This endeavour is performed both through being part of theoretical teaching about it and through raising awareness about its practical manifestations in everyday life. Vilma explains:

I think it’s hard to decolonize others. What I can do is to help them to get such insights that they can see their actions and that they see (the continent) a bit through such eyes and so that their travels do not help to consolidate power structures. Problematize. And they are the ones who can decolonize themselves, as far as they want to or not. I can only help them to open their eyes.

(…) and it is important to point out that it’s not about blaming anybody, but to understand how one is part of a structure. And hopefully (…) how to contribute both here and there, especially over there in Sweden. It’s not here that they will work wonders.

Here, the objective is pointing towards a long-term goal in the hope of integral learning that will have a political effect in the long run and throughout the lives of the students. The students are considered as rather resourceful and as being able to, in the future, influence different institutions and organisations. As described by Vilma, it comprises a slow process of awareness-raising, initiated in the course and, as expressed, hopefully maturing over the years. This, in turn, is meant to have a structural and societal impact in the long run, with many approaches, and from various positions.

Achieving this requires the formation and education of the students, who are considered to be soaked in their privileges, and also of the painful individualist society they are part of. It requires a ‘deprivilegization’, as expressed by Natalia. The double-edged tradition of Swedish popular education moving between the poles of community efforts and personal development (cf. Sundgren 1999), towards the latter, is addressed by Vilma:

I was probably quite unsympathetic many times, towards… this more, what can I say, this more ‘personal development’ thing. Fiddlesticks! (laughs) (…) I come from such a collectivist tradition, and a movement tradition (…) Before, I kind of thought that if we open the door to the continent for them, then they should do something for it! (laughter) (…) But then I have understood that, because society seems to be so hard now, maybe too hard, that for many it is more an escape from that. (…) Harmed people can’t help in the struggle, either, in the long run.

In the case here, the endeavours of personal development appear as a pre-requisite for learning, to achieve the originally formulated goals of solidarity and collectively arranged political transformation. Also, deprivilegization must happen for solidarity and societal change to occur. Personal development, along with deprivilegization, is seen as an educational strategy for achieving the real undertakings of changing the world, rather than a goal in itself. ‘Opening the door to the continent’ is conditioned by a commitment to solidarity efforts.

To summarise, the institutional, global, and historical conditions that govern the course, and the engagement, are manifested in different ways through the narratives of the informants. Here, it occurs through the ways in which consumer-oriented influences affect the original endeavours of transformation as well as the power relationships between the groups involved. Working in the breach of organisational dilemmas of solidarity and state policy, governed by coloniality and capitalism (Österborg Wiklund 2019a), challenge a logic that traditionally has also emphasised personal development at the expense of community work and solidarity. Working within the system requires highlighting the effects of the system, even though this is not the aim, to begin with. The social effects of individualism here seem to hinder the collective struggle and are addressed as a pedagogical target to facilitate the more urgent issues. This results in a pedagogy of facilitating and fostering towards societal transformation.

In and against the classroom

Departing from the above-initiated discussions about how and what to work against, I will now shift focus to the in and againstness in the social and pedagogical dynamics of the classroom, repeating my initial questions: how is ‘in and againstness’ depicted, what is worked against and how, and how can we further understand the courses, and here more specifically the classroom, according to these narratives? As mentioned before, in and against is expressed, lived, and experienced from different positionalities in the transnational and postcolonial contact zone that constitutes the classroom. In this section, I will highlight how this is prevalent (a) through the classroom encounters, and (b) through inconveniences regarding the classroom as a teaching and learning space. Finally, I will analyse how we can understand the classroom as an institution to work in, but also against, according to these discourses.

As described in the previous section, the tasks of teaching on the course involves facilitating knowledge and awareness about inequalities, through theory and practice, as well as encouraging an unlearning of colonial, racist, and sexist patterns of thoughts and actions. The facilitator’s task is to call for a structural understanding of the issues and, as illustrated by Vilma, a recognition of how this is played out ‘in us, in our actions, in our self-image and so on’. This could, for example, entail facilitators problematizing certain colonial and racist behaviours and thoughtforms, correcting students who complain about food and accommodation or who do not show enough politeness and gratitude towards their hosts and facilitators, etcetera. Vilma says that such small but powerful forms of interaction could either enhance or counteract the reproduction of unequal power relationships. She says:

I want to facilitate encounters with people over there. (…) It is a power relationship. For over 500 years, the encounter hasn’t gone well. But can’t we try again? Can’t we just recreate the history in those small encounters? In them, we can contribute to rewriting history. And then it’s not enough to know about theory or history, but the small things…

Many of these students, on the other hand, are bothered by the facilitators’ attempts to change their behaviour; issues that are considered as crossings of boundaries of personal integrity. Also, they express that there are generalised assumptions about them, based on what previous students or other people had done, rather than what they had done themselves. The uttered pedagogical endeavours of not ‘blaming’ anybody on an individual basis, but still being able to facilitate in the comprehension of one’s ‘part of a structure’, here becomes a site of confusion, struggle, and transformation in the classroom.

The students are generally very reflexive and deeply engaged in the subjects of the course. In their studies, a crucial learning endeavour for them is to reflect on and revise their intersectional positionalities and ways of being in the world. At the same time, there are also resistances, anxieties and inconveniences played out. As highlighted in previous research on anti-racist and postcolonialteaching in predominantly white classrooms (cf. e.g. Srivastava 2005, DiAngelo 2011, Ahmed 2012, Habel 2012, Yancy and Davidson 2014), introducing decolonial and anti-racist thoughts in itself seems to become a clash between paradigms, which alter worldviews and self-images of the students.

In the classroom, the dynamics of teaching and learning about structural racism and colonialism are sometimes played out as defensiveness among the students. In general, defensiveness has an impact on the work of the facilitator, who addresses the stress of navigating and expecting, such dynamics in every new student group. As a way of working in and against, and through, this, the facilitators use certain tactics. For example, Vilma returns to how it is necessary for her to, in every new course, address issues of e.g. colonialism, structural racism, or whiteness in a certain way to ease the teaching as well as the learning process. Examples could be working out a plan for how and when such issues are presented during the course, to try to prevent others—especially former students who want to share their processes of ‘awakening’ with the current students—from interfering in this plan, as well as respecting ‘different rhythms’ of learning:

I have been much more into shock pedagogy in the past. (…) But over the years I have understood that I should change that. It’s about being (pragmatic) as well. (…) Just that I have my (…) strategies, that they get insights into colonialism. But to get it, it’s better to (…) respect different rhythms. Just because there are very different backgrounds. Different amounts they have read or not read (…) But then I’m surely still straightforward anyway, sometimes clumsy. (…) But I try to think more, think about it a little more. Not so much because they… it is the case that the older I get, the younger they will be, do you understand?

In Vilma’s description of moving between ‘shock pedagogy’ and ‘pragmatic pedagogy’, together with the other teaching strategies, I interpret an in and againstness that illustrates the institutional conditions for the classroom and thus what is becoming (im)possible to learn and to teach within it. The classroom can therefore be understood as situated in, and marked by, hegemonic ideological constructions of knowledge that here are being challenged. Hence the ‘shock’, or the ‘crisis’, when the students learn about different historiography.

Some of the classroom dynamics of subjects on colonialism, feminisms, and structural racism follow a similar pattern to those found in previous research (see e.g. Srivastava 2005, Heron 2007, Ahmed 2012, Habel 2012, Yancy and Davidson 2014). When moving towards a deeper anti-racist (instead of a non-racist) paradigm, many feminists, and also the organisations, can get stalled in finding a ‘personalised antiracist ethic that implicitly relies on a discourse of moral progression, one that requires either self-examination, utterances of purification, or salvation by others’ (Srivastava 2005, p. 56). In this setting, it is not uncommon for the students to express that they feel they are considered as ‘bad people’ when approaching the curricula and literature. The student Ida reflects on this:

And I do know I’m part of that, no matter how much I don’t want to be. But I get to hear how much she (one of the teachers) appreciates me, but I also get to hear what a terrible person I am because I belong to this group. And now… I don’t think anyone in our group is that (terrible).

Hence, there is confusion about the strains in connection with ‘one’s part of a structure, without blaming on an individual level’, as expressed by Ida’s facilitator. Even though Ida’s quote addresses a structural understanding, it also echoes those personalised ethics of being either a good or a bad person in relation to colonialism and racism. Ida also expresses her discomfort with being both in and against that group of possibly ‘terrible persons’.

As Srivastava (2005) describes the processes of personalised ethics of antiracism, in the interviews, the students and facilitators often return to how students use to experience a crisis during the course, contemplating the unsolvable problematics of the unfair world system they are part of (and the racial, classed and gendered reconsiderations of one’s self-images that might entail). Both facilitators and students give examples of how students could get stuck, entering a state of dwelling on their privileges, identities, and positionalities in relation to whiteness. I understand part of this as being presented as concerning ethics and how to recuperate moral selfhood and identity that is challenged when feeling like a ‘bad person’ or a person with privileges. The unresolvable features of these frustrations are further amplified when the students realise that the course and the facilitators are not about to give them that solution. There is thus, as described by Srivastava (2005), no ‘salvation’ of the moral self in sight.

One of the most noticeable ways in which the recuperation of moral selfhood and preservation of previous knowledges about the world is enacted is how the group of students lock themselves into their own community, protecting themselves towards what is referred toas an ‘outer threat’. I interpret this outer threat as thoughtforms, actions, or even persons that in some way intimidate their sense of moral self and community. Keeping the group together, without internal fights, becomes an important task uttered by the members, for example by blocking discussions about structural racism. An example is when one of the facilitators called out a behaviour as colonial, and the students responded with indignation and anger as well as by raising their subordination according to other power relations (such as age or being students), without remaining in the original discussion. One of the students, Alex, problematises this reaction as a discussion that is blocked within the group:

Just that it is problematic, that… there is not so much anti-racist… maybe it’s not so intersectional like it should be when we talk about (the issue) (…) But it is probably because nobody can cope with talking about it like that. (…) But it is this typical, like, white thing. That it is a, like, drama thing.

Relating this to the questions of inquiry, the classroom, and FHS, as a postcolonial contact zone, here appear as a place where hegemonic knowledges and structures are likely and expected, and then to be subjected to be challenged and contested. This requires the facilitators and students to navigate in and against it in multiple ways.

Both students and facilitators address how intersectional dimensions of power inform their experiences of participation in the classroom. As teaching from a marginalised position, Vilma addresses how formations of the classroom come to chafe in her practice. She explains that she does not always feel acknowledged as a teacher and leader in a classroom, and explains how certain occurrences make her feel like an invisible servant instead of a teacher. Vilma addresses intersectional dynamics of gender, race, and class as something that affect her in and againstness in the classroom.

The students also address specific normativities as something they have to relate to in various ways. For example, the students express transgender and non-binary identities as not unconditionally acknowledged and thus not included in the feminist community that the school is invoking. In addition, students depict their classroom as being marked by a normativity of a middle-classed whiteness. Two of the students, Alex and Linnea, both with working-class backgrounds from rural areas, frame this normativity in terms of space and entitlement in the classroom and the world. They assert that they are not bothered by thediscussions on structural racism and colonialism to the same extent as their upper-middle-class peers, due to the fact that they didn’t experience the same amount of centrality taken away from them in the first place. Linnea concludes:

I have always had to accept many things. It is as it is. (…) I may not fight for every small thing. And maybe, if you are very used to being always listened to, and such things. That your parents have (encouraged you) to claim space. That I can feel, for me, class is a lot about taking space in the room. That you naturally own the room you enter. I think that clashes a bit (for the middle-class students).

At the same time, Olivia, a student with an urban upper-middle-class background and strong inherited cultural capital, reflects on the same issue of claiming space in the classroom, but from another angle:

(…) Kind of, like, I started at (the school), studied for a while and thought it was so terribly hard because I’ve never been so diminished in my life. Because I’m so used to entering a room and being treated by people who say: ‘Oh, what is your contribution? How interesting! I believe you! I think you’re smart! I think you can!’ (…) And then being treated by someone like ‘You have nothing to say, I will not listen to you because you have nothing to say and now I’ll tell you how things are’. And so, I have listened to people who talk about racism and how it expresses itself in everyday life and just ‘Oh, I understand’, but no, I have not understood anything! Because I think it’s… really hard in this situation when people do not immediately think I know everything. And it can really be linked very much to perspectives and benefits, a lot.

I interpret Olivia and Linnea as talking about a certain kind of normative, white and (upper) middle-classed, student subjectivity, to which they express having different perspectives on depending on their classed habitus (cf. Skeggs 1997, 2004).

Understanding the students’ and the facilitators’ reflections about claiming and feeling entitled to space in the classroom relates directly to intersectional dimensions of in and againstness. It can, in turn, tell us important things about the institution itself. Here, the classroom is described from different intersectional angles of inconveniences, and the classroom is chafing according to its intersectional hegemonies. Hence, I see the struggles over space, as described by facilitators and students, as being part of the tensions of the complex institutional and ideological forces that constitute the FHS course as a classroom and postcolonial contact zone. Relating this to previous research, the classroom here appears as historically formed, and continuously organising itself around historical ideological constructions of white middle-classed femininity addressed in both volunteer work (Heron 2007) and other feminist educational settings for adults (Srivastava 2005). This is also characterised by an expectation of protection and maintenance of its centrality and self-evident morality (cf. Srivastava 2005). What can be seen in the material is, as I interpret it, how those structural conditions of the classroom are being both reproduced and challenged and examined in the teaching and learning setting. Working in and against the classroom can therefore be seen as experiencing, but also struggling to dismantle, the ideological hegemonies of the transnational teaching and learning space here studied.

Conclusions

Being located between both state policy and alternative endeavours of social movements, I have explored the complex site of learning and teaching that constitutes the FHS setting. Asking what is worked against and how it is done, I explore how being in and against is expressed in the narratives of the research participants of a transnational classroom understood as a ‘postcolonial contact zone’. Further, I analyse how the classroom, and its institutional prerequisites, can be reinterpreted according to the narratives of the research participants, as well as what those narratives can tell us about institutional and global conditions for transnational popular educational engagement.

Working in and against the classroom, as expressed from the very different intersectional locations of the students and the facilitators, finds its resonance in the title of this article: being ‘in and against global injustice’ and ‘decolonizing popular education on global development’. The title shows the tensions ofproblematizing the conditions of global injustice, while also being dependent on the same prerequisites, for this transnational popular educational space to be embodied. It here entails countering global and institutional material orders, prevailing knowledge shaped in former and current hegemonic (post)colonial contexts and institutions, as well as workinga gendered, racialized, and classed room. Even though the missions of the course are far from being about tourism of development aid, those discourses are present in the classroom. Logics of tourism and development aid are affecting the relationships between the school and facilitators working in the collaborating organisations, setting the agendas of how the collaboration can be carried out and shaped.

As illustrated, the classroom as a ‘postcolonial contact zone’ is subjected to struggles over spaces. Working in and against the course as a facilitator is expressed through the task of teaching a decolonial and antiracist content, problematizinghegemonic knowledges, and thus subject to an unlearning. Students and facilitators depict a certain type of entitled, white, and middle-classnormativity shaping the classroom. The classroom can thus be seen as a place built particularly on the expectation of the upholding and protection of this racialized and classed, entitled, and moral, subjectivity (cf. Skeggs 1997, 2004, Srivastava 2005, Heron 2007, Ahmed 2010); an investment in upholding this sense of self and community that may prevent genuine resistance and disassembling of colonial and racist knowledge (cf. Heron 2007). My interpretation is that we, in the research setting, are relating to this normativity—conforming, negotiating, or challenging it ‒ in different ways and according to what subject positions are available, as well as according to the structural limitations of the classroom and the research setting in itself, as a postcolonial contact zone.

Subject positions of morality can thus not be seen as an actual person, or something somebody can ‘be’, it is seen as an ideological construction, shaping the classroom and governing the possibilities of the ways of being within it. Given that the course carries discourses from two important institutions for the Swedish national self-image of democracy, development cooperation aid and popular education, the constructions of moral subjectivities can be interpreted as inherited in the historical and ideological constructions of the classroom (cf. Srivastava 2005, Heron 2007). We can interpret the classroom as formed according to the complex relationship of the Nordic countries to colonialism and whiteness, and the struggle to position oneself as innocent in relation to the European colonial project (cf. Essed 1996, De los Reyes et al. 2002, Ipsen and Fur 2009, Keskinen 2009, Habel 2012 Hübinette & Lundström 2014). Historically, both popular education and development cooperation/aid have an important symbolic value considering Swedish and Nordic self-images in international relations (cf. Osman 1999, Engh 2009, Österborg Wiklund 2019a). At the same time, the classroom is marked by the legacies of emancipatory endeavours of both the Folk High School and the community struggles of the collaborating organisations.

The complexity of the classroom as a postcolonial contact zone adds new knowledge to earlier research on adult education, and the notion of in and against. Working in and against the classroom here implicates intersectional normativities, as well as community and identity. This regulates both teaching and learning as well as ways of being in the classroom. It influences the (un)learning, and the strategies for (not) (un)learning. We can also understand this as entangled in the struggle of navigating through neoliberal individualistic society, with assumed individual responsibility for global, historical power structures. I interpret the endeavours of adding a deeper structural comprehension to knowledge characterised by individualism, as a difficult task for both facilitators and students.

In the narratives, the research participants resist, navigate through, and protect dominant knowledges, as well as making space for transformative change. Those practices and discourses depict in and againstness from different intersectional locations, from which many dimensions are lived and experienced. Coming from different sites in the Global North and South divide, the illustrations reflect diverse dimensions of working in and against the system, and for a better world. The different conditions for engagement I interpret as being crucial for how the research participants describe and make sense of their engagements in the course. Those conditions characterise the relationships of the narratives to the in and against. However, as Srivastava (2005) reminds us, social movements like this are influenced not only by hegemonic policies but also by alternative ideas. This is also the case with popular education and the FHS, as a historical site of emancipatory battles. The tensions of in and against in this classroom could therefore be understood as critical attempts to re-interpret and challenge the FHS setting, as well as the whole world.

One might ask what radical changes beyond, and not within, do the promises of in and againstness really imply? (cf. Mayo 2005). Does working within means working alongside global unequal logics? Or is in and againstness first of all a way of surviving and resisting in a world that does not give any other options? And theoretically, is it even possible, or desirable, to squeeze different positionalities of power into the same concept of in and against? From a theoretical point of view, those are questions that could be further explored in research on adult and popular education. Furthermore, studies on the institutional and political conditions for popular educational engagement and transnational cooperation in the Andean context, and from decolonial perspectives, are of importance. An empirical follow-up study on what personal and collective changes were sparked in this course, would also be an interesting topic to investigate. A continuing exploration of not only tensions and pitfalls in emancipatory adult education, but also the effects of embracing certain practices, such as personal development, as not a goal in itself, but as a strategy to reach greater purposes of collective struggle for societal change, could as well be a suggestion for further research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 http://www.codex.vr.se/texts/HSFR.pdf, 180904, 12:08; https://www.vr.se/download/18.2412c5311624176023d25b05/1529480532631/God-forskningssed_VR_2017.pdf hämtad den 1 November 2018 kl. 16:36 (2017 års utgåva är en delvis omarbetning av 2011 års utgåva).