https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1700-8792
This special issue on Funds of Identity, guest edited by Moisès Esteban-Guitart, is comprised of six research papers and Esteban-Guitart’s response, with collective support from Julian Williams and Alfredo Jornet as host editors. The MCA collective chose to write this overall editorial, initially led by Julian, with Moisès, as we wish to place this Special Issue in conversation with recent developments at MCA that we hope will interest our readers.
Readers will have noticed the emergence of the Cultural Praxis website, which includes our statement of commitment and explains the expansion of our editorial collective.Footnote1 We welcome new editors Arturo Cortez (University of Colorado Boulder), Mara Welsh Mahmood (University of California, Berkeley), Monica Lemos (University of Helsinki), and Sophina Choudry (University of Manchester). We hope to expand further in due course. Expanding is not simply a matter of marshaling resources for the growing demands of publishing this journal and the Cultural Praxis website, but also addresses the need to promote and strengthen scholarship related to social movements fighting oppression, and to engage new international contexts and scholarship. These aims find renewed energy in our new editors’ expertise. We also welcome the move of Ivana Guarrasi (University of California, San Diego) from Managing Editor to Editor, and the move of Antti Rajala (University of Oulu) from Book Reviews Editor to Editor.
Our editorial expansion is part of a continued commitment to promoting scholarship associated with international social movements that currently receive less attention than they deserve. These include movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as the diaspora of these movements’ members around the world. Our vision for Cultural Praxis involves allowing this work to become known and to evolve into scholarly projects of many formats, including research articles to be published in this journal. We will continue to publish articles addressing the concerns of Mind, Culture, and Activity, while also stimulating new types of work that expand the scope of the journal and foster development and equity in our field.
Many of us had the benefit of working together in the Spencer Foundation funded “Regenerating CHAT” project, which has helped us to realize the new vision for the journal and for Cultural Praxis (https://re-generatingchat.com and http://culturalpraxis.net/). As a result, of the Regen project, we are working in interest groups on new projects, one of which, the “Learners’ Voices” group, is preparing papers for a new Special Issue, “Learners’ Voices: Activating Transformative Agency in Lifelong Learning” to be published in this journal. The current Special Issue was also conceived in Regen project’s discussions, as a means of critiquing what was perceived as a domestication of the Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity theories and developing a more critical edge to these theories and associated praxis.
In the following, we offer some background and history to Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity, before we briefly discuss each of the papers. A much more detailed account is given by Moisès in his open access paper (this issue), where he situates the whole issue and its contribution to the field.
The Funds of Knowledge approach in education emerged in Tucson, Arizona at the end of the 1980s, spearheaded by teachers and researchers including Carlos Vélez-Ibañez, James Greenberg, Luis Moll, Norma González, Deborah Neff, Martha Floyd Tenery, Patricia Sandoval-Taylor, Cathy Amanti, Marta Civil, and others. Its purpose was to challenge and dismantle deficit thinking in education, and to foster antiracist praxis. Broadly speaking, it consists of a theory and method by which teachers recognize, legitimize, and incorporate knowledge, skills, strengths, and resources that families possess into educational and pedagogical practice, thereby establishing meaningful links between teaching and the knowledge and skills identified through visits to students’ homes.
Currently, this approach is widely known and developed in different countries and sociocultural contexts. In particular, Funds of Identity is suggested as a way to conceptualize all learners as capable and valued individuals regardless of social and economic background. Funds of Identity theory complements the original unit of analysis, i.e., learners’ households, by taking into account learners’ own voices, their particular lifeworlds, and identity.
This Special Issue contributes to Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity through analyses from varied countries including the UK (Black, Williams, Choudry, Howker, Phillips, Swanson), New Zealand (Hedges), the Netherlands (Verhoeven, Polman, Volman, Zijlstra), Spain (Walker, Lalueza, Marín, Van Beek), Spain (Zhang-Yu, García-Díaz, García-Romero, Lalueza), and Australia (Zipin, Brennan, Sellar). We celebrate the international reach of this approach, which has historically aimed to voice and empower individuals and families, specially from underrepresented groups and regions. This involves incorporating voices and praxis internationally, in particular from the Global South, Latinx scholars, and other scholar-activists not represented enough in this special issue.
In “Realigning Funds of Identity with the struggle against capital: the contradictory unity of use and exchange value in cultural fields,” Laura Black, Sophina Choudry, Emilia Howker, Rebecca Phillips, David Swanson and Julian Williams report their research group’s development of the concept of cultural commodity which has critiqued and further developed the notion of funds, whether of knowledge or identity. The term cultural here arises partly from Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital and cultural fields wherein capitalism and oppression are reproduced. The term provides a basis for critique of the use of “funds” in the Funds of Knowledge/Funds of Identity literature. Black and colleagues seek to go beyond Bourdieu’s concept of educational capital in conceptualizing knowing-in-practice and identity in terms of a dialectical unity of use and exchange value, that is, in commodification. The proof of the value of this theory in practice begins in Black et al.’s own study, but the argument goes to an evaluation of the Latinx educational/social movement reported in Raza studies. Many in the US will recognize how this program built on a Funds of Knowledge/Funds of Identity approach, and how successful it was, and how its very success led to its destruction by those with a political interest in conserving the structure of capital in the educational field. The root of its success and failure is the cultural commodity, here the success of the Latinx students who engaged with knowledge as a Freirean praxis of liberation, but also acquired cultural capital in the particular educational field through improved competence and test results. It may have been the latter that was most threatening to the conservative political establishment who outlawed the program.
Helen Hedges, in “The place of interests, agency and imagination in funds of identity theory,” tells a story of the identity work of Zoe, a preschooler in Auckland, whose school encouraged her and her classmates to make identity artifacts and tell stories about their homes and migrant cultures. The reader may be struck by the creation, with her friend, of a private language that drew on their knowledge of, respectively, Hungarian and Samoan. An expression of Zoe’s agency involves her imagination of a future husband inspired by her parents’ wedding, and materialized in a drawing of this future husband. Hedges’ argument goes to the need for the theory of Funds of Identity to explicitly incorporate agency with Vygotskyan notions of imagination. Hedges persuasively argues that agency here engages intentional, often creative action, and imagination is implicated in particular in the child’s interest in a future identity (in Zoe’s case, a partner in marriage, and in her imagined future career as a police officer).
Monique Verhoeven, Joseph L. Polman, Bonne J. H. Zijlstra, and Monique Volman, in “Creating space for agency: a conceptual framework to understand and study adolescents’ school engagement from a funds of identity perspective,” follow an adolescent student as she positions and repositions herself in relation to learning in school, and then in relation to her work in a restaurant. Explanations for her changing and conflicted priorities and agentic engagements draw on a concept of Funds of Learner Identity (FoLI). This concept is used to chart her academic identity as a learner developing over the years in relation to her experiences of learning in changing contexts. Verhoeven and colleagues developed a methodology influenced by Azevedo’s work, which produced a detailed trajectory of the student’s FoLI away from academic learning and into a prevocational program in which she had time to go out to work and experience new, more engaging practices.
Dana Walker, José Luis Lalueza, Carolayn Marín, and Elisabeth Van Beek, in “Developing the imagination within funds of identity: insights from translocal youth radio,” reveal the use of identity artifacts in Funds of Identity work in new and challenging contexts. One adolescent announces that his choice of identity artifact is his name – he is named after a Muslim prophet. His story creates conflict with Roma girls of another religion who perceive him to be disrespectful, with unfortunate effects on their friendship. Later we see this student in another context where his radio skills and personality have established positive relationships, and new Funds of Identity opportunities arise in the group production of painting of a special imaginary bicycle. In accounting for this emergent form of engagement with transformational implications for learning, Walker et al. argue that imagination is a key concept for Funds of Identity. In fact, across most papers in this Special Issue, agency and imagination emerge as vital concepts, as in neo-Vygotskian theory.
Cristina Zhang-Yu, Sarai García-Díaz, David García-Romero, and José Luis Lalueza, in “Funds of identity and self-exploration through artistic creation: Addressing the voices of youth,” focus on three expressions of symbolic violence: (1) the intercultural paradigm, (2) racialization, and (3) perceived/non-perceived racism, which they identify in their work in a school that public authorities categorize as one of “extreme educational complexity.” Zhang-Yu and colleagues’ study of the Funds of Identity program called “Who am I?” provided an arts-based context for revealing 12–14 year olds’ experiences of these three types of aggression. The results illustrate collective situations in which students talk about daily events where issues of violence, racism, culture, and identity emerge.
Lew Zipin, Mari Brennan, and Sam Sellar, in “Young people pursuing futures: Making identity labors curricular,” focus on imagined future identities and the identity labor that such imagination demands. They report on their work in a school with (1) a group of working class, immigrant teenagers whom the school seems to have ignored as potential future college students, and (2) an “accelerated” group that was offered more advanced work and was bound for higher education. Through their intervention, Zipin and colleagues identify Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity in the working class students’ experiences that might have had potential for learning and identity development. The authors conclude with a call for a curriculum and a pedagogy responsive to the students experiences.
The Special Issue finishes with a paper by our guest editor, Moisès Esteban-Guitart, entitled: “Advancing the funds of identity theory: A critical and unfinished dialogue.” He clarifies the previous history and state of the art in the field of Funds of Identity and highlights the additions to the field in these papers, both in extending the range of contexts in which Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity have proved to be productive, and in outlining the new conceptual and methodological resources the researchers have developed. In particular, (1) the directive and prospective character of Funds of Identity is reconsidered, connecting it to imagination, agency and creativity processes; and (2) it is conceived as an identity-making process, in a collective, mediated pedagogical process, and as a resource to generate critical understandings of oneself and of the students’ lifeworlds.
Coming full circle, we are pleased that the authors’ contributions to this Special Issue have done a good deal to advance the cause of understanding and challenging oppression and inequality. We commend this Special Issue to readers as one that takes the journal’s work in the intended direction outlined at the outset of this editorial. We are committed to continuing to publish scholarship that explores how inequality, racism, and other forms of violence are challenged, brought to light, and successfully fought. Bourdieu argued that reflexive sociology should first of all expose “the weight of the world,” but the engaged scholar-activist sees this exposure as only the first step in the praxis of freedom and of our engagement in struggles for social justice.
Recent publications in cultural Praxis
Article, by Luigi Russi, Patricia Shaw, & Martin Daly, Withdrawal to the ‘always already there’: a practice triptych
Making use of an experimental structure of a triptych, authors give an account of an experiential, practice-based approach to social inquiry. To negotiate the line between the identity of a practitioner and research-practitioner they describe the unsettling moments in which a practitioner withdraws into a new way of observing their own habitual modes of action and interpretation. Of a particular interest to authors are their established practices of mentoring and supervising, each of them taking a ‘panel’ to represent a distinct take on withdrawal to discover new properties of their reality.