CTRH2023: A Critical Reflection on Our Struggle for a More Just & Loving World

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to episode one thirty six of the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington. As always, this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Patricia Jennings, Zainab Belbakki, and Parvathi Savaraman. Today's episode is a bit different. It's the opening keynote to our conference to restore humanity twenty twenty three, which just wrapped up this week. In a second, you'll hear Chris introducing doctor Antonia Darter, an incredible activist, educator, and overall awesome human being who joined us to promote A Pedagogy of Love. And because of our fantastic sponsors, attendees, and donors, we'll be releasing most of the conference keynotes, events, and track resources under a Creative Commons license over the next month. So be sure to follow HRP on all the socials at HumerezPro, and consider supporting us at humanrestorationproject.org. Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to our first video keynote for Conference to Restore Humanity twenty twenty three. As a reminder, this is a flipped keynote address with a video recording of the keynote itself, followed by an extensive live q and a session on July 24 at 11AM eastern. We hope to see you there. Before we dive into doctor Antonio Darter's address, I wanna take a moment and thank the sponsors of this event, Holistic Think Tank, Cortico, Antioch University, Education Evolving with Future Powered Schools, Unruler, and our gracious donors at Human Restoration Project. These sponsorships ensure that we can continually host successful events like this, as well as release much of each conference's resources as Creative Commons licensed materials for years to come. More information about our partners can be found in the links below. Finally, please note that you should join our Discord to continue the conversation. A channel will be open to discuss doctor Darta's keynote address and engage with other participants. See information on our conference website for more details. Today, I am humbled to introduce doctor Antonia Darter. Doctor Darter is an internationally recognized activist scholar and professor emerita at Loyola Merrimont University, where for more than a decade she held the Levy Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership. She is an American Educational Research Association fellow, the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award, and an award winning author and editor of more than 20 books in the field. For nearly forty years, Antonia has worked tirelessly to counter social and material inequalities in schools and society. In the nineteen nineties, she convened the California Consortium of Critical Educators that brought together radical educators to contend with oppressive educational policies related to high stakes testing and attacks on bilingual education. Her critical scholarship and activism over the years has consistently focused on racism, political economy, and questions of social justice. Her critical scholarship and activism over the years has consistently focused on racism, political economy, and questions of social justice. She has continued the work of Paulo Freire, and contributed to our understanding of inequalities in schools and society. Through her decolonizing scholarship on the body, ethics, and methodology, she has contributed to rethinking questions of empowerment and liberation in the lives of oppressed populations. Beyond academia, she is a poet and visual artist. As a distinguished professor of policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois, she wrote and produced a student community collaborative award winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression, which explored the persistence of inequalities within higher education. Her lived experience growing up in poverty, her struggles as a single mother, her battles with the academy, and her love of life are essential to her commitment to fighting for a better world. With that, I am excited again to share with you Antonia Darter's keynote, and thank you again for joining.

Speaker 3 Alright. So I'm really happy to be with you today for this really wonderful conference and this event that that you've all come to. And I'm thankful to Chris McNutt and the human restoration project for inviting me to share my ideas and to be able to be with you today. So I'm gonna begin my piece is critical reflection on our struggle for a more just and loving world. So I was thinking a lot about this, and and what I'm going to be presenting, I hope, comes together as that reflection for you. So the spirit that informs my talk is this very heartfelt belief in our capacity to transform our world. Angela Davis' words, you have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world and do it all the time can illuminate our path towards a more just and loving world. This similar belief in the power of human beings to transform the world continues to shine in the work of my late mentor, Paulo Freire. A few years before his death, Paulo wrote, I think that it could be said when I am no longer in this world. Paulo Freire was a man who lived, who could not understand life and human existence without love and without the search for knowledge. Frei's view on the significance of love to our pedagogical and personal lives remains steadfast and resounding across the landscape of his writings. He believed deeply from the personal to the pedagogical to the political in the emancipatory and transformative power of love. Frei's radical articulations of love were grounded in an unwavering faith in human beings to generate the political will necessary to fight against injustice and to remake our world. In Freddy's eyes, to fight daily against the forces that dehumanize and undermine our existence without the power of love on our side is like to be lost travelers in a vast desert without enough water for us to complete the journey. Frei often came back to this notion of an armed love, the fighting love of those convinced of the right, and the duty to denounce and announce. His concept of love is not only meant to comfort or relieve the suffering of the oppressed, but also to awaken within us a historical thirst for justice and a political wherewithal to reinvent our world. Frei's love permeated his existence as a man and an educator. He could be gentle and tender and inspiring while at the same time critical, challenging, strategically unveiling the individual or collective follies he found. Fredri's pedagogy of love challenges the false generosity of those whose ideologies and practices work to sustain a system of education that transgresses at its very core every emancipatory principle of our humanity, every emancipatory principle of social justice and democratic life. It was this lucid recognition of love as an untapped political force of consciousness that most drew me to Paulo Freire's work and continues to fuel my commitment to the emancipatory political project that he championed throughout his life. Understanding then love as a political force is essential, an essential principle of Fady's revolutionary vision of education, a revolutionary vision that I continue to move forward in my work. He recognized that there is an inextricable relationship between love and justice. You can have no justice without love. There is an inseparability in how he theorized the political significance of love in the evolution of consciousness and in the making of meaning. So important was this concept to his pedagogy that Freud unapologetically insisted, I have a right to love and to express my love to the world and to use it as a motivational foundation for struggle. Love here speaks to an intentional and communal act of consciousness that emerges and matures as we live, learn, and labor together as educators, cultural workers, and activists. As such, Frady insisted that a politics of love must serve as the underlying force of any political project that requires us to contend daily with the traumas of structural and relational oppression as we simultaneously seek new radical possibilities for social and economic justice. Freire's politics of love was central to how he defined the revolutionary dynamics between teachers and students, where teachers and students were revolutionary partners in the struggle for a better world. He encouraged teachers to cultivate a great sense of intimacy between self, others, and the world. He argued, as did John Dewey, that creating the conditions for a living democracy must be a central pedagogical concern within the classroom. Here, democracy, along with the solidarity required for its evolution, is made possible through a pedagogy guided by a deep regard for the dignity of all people no matter their cultural differences or economic circumstances. For Frei, unity does not demand uniformity or assimilation from students or teachers, but rather a vision of education that's founded on a shared political commitment to a more just world. This view of love as a revolutionary force that simultaneously unites and navigates difference is imagined here as a radical sense of lived kinship, the kind of kinship necessary to challenging the material impoverishment and social alienation that are hallmarks of capitalist societies. Recognizing the manner in which so many are left marginalized by the rapid competition of the marketplace, Freyvi's ideas move us to engender a love born from our shared experience of suffering, of creativity, and of imagination, experiences that give give meaning to our acts of political resistance against the dehumanizing impact of capitalism. We exist today governed by globalized economic apartheid. It doesn't matter what you might think. If we look at what is happening in the world, what we have is globalized economic apartheid. The majority of the world societies are shaped by the law of profit and greed and a precarity fueled by the economic anarchy of the wealthy. According to Oxfam, eight men own more wealth than 3,600,000,000 people. The richest 1% have more than twice as much wealth as 6,900,000,000 people, while almost half of humanity survives on $5.50 a day. I don't know about you, but for me, this is staggering, just staggering to to think that eight people, that eight men own more wealth than 3,600,000,000 people. Through our work, we must confront then the greed, lovelessness, and immorality of those who perpetuate this economic apartheid through countering common sense myths that the poor will always be with us or that people are poor because of their own doing. Right? Like, it's their own damn thought that they're poor. Myths of modernity that conveniently camouflage those who are actually responsible for the global poverty and human suffering. So we have all these myths that are created to actually shroud the fact that this gross inequality continues, and there is a system of inequality well in place. Over the years, Freydie critiqued the dehumanizing impact of capitalism. He spoke often to the political necessity to unveil authoritarian pedagogies tied to economic apartheid that generate social alienation and a deep sense of estrangement from our bodies for both teachers and students. Alienation, Freyri contended, arouses in students' anxieties, insecurities, and the fear of freedom given the manner in which a sense of disaffiliation thwarts students' epistemological curiosity and their passion for learning so necessary to their intellectual and political formation. In pedagogy of the oppressed, Freddy noted the historical and systematic disregard for the dignity of students, for the humanity of students in his critique of the banking approach to education, an approach that on one hand can breed helplessness and disempowerment and on the other, stir forms of resistance that work against students' own interests. Authoritarian approaches to classroom life also keeps students from oppressed communities confused and estranged from one another, generating sentiments of fatalism and inferiority, sentiments that blame students for their academic failure, leaving the repressive practices and structures of capitalist schooling untouched. We find a similar process of alienation in the conditions of labor of teachers who seldom receive adequate resources or genuine opportunities to build meaningful relationships with their students, parents, or colleagues. Moreover, teachers are often assessed and disciplined in ways that blame them for difficulties that can be directly linked to dehumanizing institutional policies and practices that disrupt possibilities for democratic schooling. My granddaughter, who is a third grade teacher, she's in her second year, and we were having a conversation, and she was talking precisely how she was feeling in relationship to her labor in the classroom. She had 32 children. Half of the children were not at grade level. You know, the the these children were still feeling the impact of COVID and the virtual learning where they learned nothing, really. And she had little support in her classroom, little support to help her deal with the expanded workload that this is causing her. Frady's view of love then as a motivational force for struggle links the purpose of education to emancipatory values of voice, of social responsibility, of participation, and solidarity, which foster democratic life within the classroom and beyond. For Freddy, love must be seen as inseparable to our labor as educators and democratic citizens. In concert with Eric Fromm's notions, Freud embraced the idea that one loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves. This points undeniably to the extent to which Freud himself intimately and passionately loved the world, a significant feature of both his pedagogy and personal way of being, whether with children, students, colleagues, family, friends, or simply the many people who crossed his path each day. Through his life, he resisted the tyranny of binaries in his own philosophical ideas, political interpretations, and pedagogical practices. Grounded in an enormous sense of responsibility to use his privilege in the interest of the oppressed, Freddy stressed the importance of practicing respect and patience and faith in our struggles to dismantle the recalcitrant structures of domination that holds the majority of the world's populations slaves to capital. The reason I bring so many of these issues related to Fledy and his work is to, in essence, bring together that our struggle has to be linked to who we are. We can't be putting ideas out there and not leaving them. That that lack of coherence actually weakens us in our capacity to struggle for a better world. I wanna turn to this notion that I've been thinking about an epistemology of love. So this epistemology of love is an is indispensable to an embodied pedagogy for liberation. It signals a way of human knowing shaped by our underlying capacity to love. Another way to put this is that our knowing is directly shaped by our ability or inability to be open to the humanity of others. For instance, Paulo Freire's enormous capacity to love reflected in affirming way of knowing, one that could embrace a wide spectrum of humanity within himself and others. As such, an epistemology of love supports our capacity for intimacy, which expands our facility to identify or empathize with the core experience of another beyond simple, simply superficial responses or stereotypical distortions. A case in point here, often working class students or activists of color are perceived as being angry. Often, this is the way I I can't tell you how many times people have, you know, have reflected back to me when I've been passionate and and struggling. Oh, you were so angry. But rather than to acknowledge anger as a logical response to the repeated trauma of oppression, Most teachers issue racialized characterizations devoid of insight into the oppressive life conditions and suffering that inform students' anger or frustrations. Similarly, teachers are generally expected to be dispassionate, to repress their feelings, and quietly acquiesce to policies and practices that strip them of their humanity without expressing anger for the conditions of their labor. In contrast, Farrity insisted that the kind of education that does not recognize the right to express appropriate anger against injustice, against disloyalty, against the negation of love, against exploitation, and against violence fails to see the educational role implicit in the expression of these feelings. The right to be angry and the capacity to love can serve us as legitimate motivational forces for social justice work. In that anger aroused by injustice reminds us that we are not meant to live as objects of repression. About this, Freddy asserted, my right to be angry presupposes that the historical experience in which I participate tomorrow is not a given but a challenge and a problem to be solved. In light of this, one of the most important tasks of an embodied pedagogy of love is to create the conditions for teachers and students to engage the experiences the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative creative beings, dreamers of possibilities capable of being angry because of their capacity to love. This is particularly relevant given that many educators are disconnected from the realities of impoverished communities and too inhibited by their class and racialized biases and misconceptions to see the brilliance that students hold. Instead, students remain objects to be managed, manipulated, and controlled in ways that may eventually draw out of them the prescribed answers but leaves some alienated strangers to their own passion. However, neither teachers, students, or communities are objects to be manipulated or tweaked here or there. Learning like loving is an act that students must choose freely to practice through the exercise of their social agency and sense of autonomy. So too, a a commitment to social justice is a choice. It's a choice that we each must make. With this at the core of our pedagogical sensibilities, we can dissolve fixed notions of those we see as being so different from ourselves. This is a critical dimension of our work in that given the constant changing nature of our lives, seldom can we know anyone, even ourselves fully. At best, we come to know one another only through our embodied relationships of dialogue, of shared labor, and lived experience. In fact, it is precisely the wonderful, unpredictable, unruly, and dynamic processes of relationships that provide us rich terrain for struggle by cultivating an emancipatory consciousness of solidarity that accepts our human complexities and respects our yearning for freedom. A pedagogy of love overrides condition patterns. Excuse me. Let me say that again. A pedagogy of love overrides condition patterns of capitalist schooling by providing a demythologizing context in which we, as teachers and students, can consider together the political consequences of particular ways of thinking and being in the world. In the process, we must move away from fixed or prescribed notions of life, adopting instead a multidimensional relational and contextual contextual view of our our humanity. Inherent to this vision is a need for ongoing opportunities for the development of critically conscious cultural citizens prepared to challenge the debilitating impact of racism, of sexism, of transphobia, and other inequalities on both our personal and communal well-being. Freire's work urges us to recognize then that social consciousness and material transformation must be seen as this road to be traced out step by step in our organic relationship with the world and in our labor together as educators, activists, and cultural workers. For Freire, does not take place in abstract beings in the air, but in real men and women and in social structures. It cannot remain on the level of the individual. That was his quote. The last phrase is key. That sense that we cannot remain at the level of the individual, both ontologically and epistemologically, in that it turns the Western obsession with the individual on its head. Yet the truth be told, there is no such thing as an individual. All human beings are formed within the material conditions and communal relations of the cultural context that conditioned our development. To think of ourselves otherwise as an illusion, an illusion that has served the ravages of capital. Our political work for social change begins seriously at the very moment when we become both critically aware and intolerant of the oppressive conditioning that obstructs our ability to be in community and obstructs our freedom. This process of constant cessation is in fact most uplifting when individuals and communities undergo collectively experience experiences of breakthroughs and decide to forge another path despite the risks or an uncertain future. Noteworthy is Freydie's definition of conscientization as communal as a communal process that's fueled by dialogue, and that it is that it neurologically primes epistemological ground for activation of curiosity and imagination in the mind. Building consciousness is then a decolonizing road we must forge if we are to deepen our critical awareness and challenge at the root social and material conditions that betray our revolutionary dreams. Concept of concentration as unfinished is useful here as we grapple with what can often feel like the immovable force of oppressive policies and practices. Yet Freyri argued that it is precisely because of our unfinishedness that a socially just world is possible. For if this world were a created finished world, it would no longer be susceptible to transformation. Fedi's pedagogy of love begins then with a call for both disruption and openness, starting wherever we are at with faith in our creativity and resourcefulness as well as our capacity to reflect, to voice, and to be responsive to the challenges that arise in our lives. Brady, however, argued that social consciousness does not occur automatically, nor is it a linear phenomenon. Instead, it arises through an organic process of human connection where pedagogical interactions intentionally nurture intimate connections between people and their world. Here, the individual and community are inseparable. This collective principle is essential to embodying our work for liberation and that neither dialogue nor consciousness can be generated in the absence of others. It is not a solo enterprise. We are not lone rangers here. Habesse Fady argued, we cannot liberate others. People cannot liberate themselves alone because people liberate themselves in communion, mediated by the reality which they must transform. Moreover, an underlying revolutionary intention is vital to building consciousness as well as our mobilization and organization for the defense of rights and for laying claim to justice. Without embodying a grounded political intent, the necessary level of resistance and revolutionary presence required for substantive institutional change is impossible, leaving us to participate endlessly in this exercise of moving the furniture from here to there but leaving the basic structure of the room unchanged. I want to look for a moment at the relationship between what I call revolutionary presence and resistance. Revolutionary presence as embodied praxis enlivens classrooms and community dialogues. As such, it is essential in navigating both resistance to change and resistance to domination. In contexts where there is resistance to change, we must bring a sense of presence to our efforts to critically interrogate patterns of privilege and to nurture our capacities to engage with the epistemic disruptions that are necessary if we are to change the world. Useful here is Freyri's understanding of again or concentration by which we become more critically aware that our active collective involvement in the historical process is directly tied to our willingness to denounce injustice and announce more just than loving world. Further, revolutionary presence assists us to navigate the resistance to domination vital to the formation of political consciousness that emerges when students and communities name, challenge, and act to counter policies and practices that threaten their dignity and freedom to be. It is worth noting, again, that repressive policies and practices generally seek to limit the freedom to say yes or no without retaliation, the freedom of physical movement, the freedom to participate creatively, and the freedom of sexual expression. Therefore, it's not surprising that collective resistance rises when such freedoms are denied. Those are part of our human needs to be able to express our humanity. This also points to why resistance is a necessary precursor to revolutionary struggle. The politics of love enters here again given its role as a powerful force for social resistance and for structural and revolutionary change. With this in mind, revolutionary presence can reinvigorate classrooms and community dialogues in ways that can support teachers and students and communities to grapple more intentionally in fighting the good fight. In the struggle for this transformation of schools and universities and society, We must contend with what is occurring within the world both locally and globally. But, similarly, we must also acknowledge that the chaos in the world is connected to the chaos in our own minds. We are affected by the madness in the world. We can't pretend that it isn't having an impact on how we feel about ourselves and how we're able to express our humanity in the world. By accepting radical responsibility for our participation and relationships with others, we move beyond a focus on merely individual issues and instead labor collectively within and across communities to contend with the underlying roots of capitalist exploitation, suffocating the life out of all of us. However, as bell hooks reminds us, to do so requires that we transgress, transgress traditional linear binary and cause and effect thinking so that we might access the power of becoming revolutionary visionaries and actors in the world. This understanding of a politics of decolonization and a politics of liberation will not allow us to lose sight that all life is organic, interdependent, and ever changing, and that our struggles must be consistently expressed through living and breathing ideas, ideas born of cultural histories of survival and the contemporary conditions of everyday life. To fight the good fight, we must build together creative structures of community that place the majority of our energy and focus on what it is we want to create rather than just putting Band Aids on the same old problems. This does not suggest we ignore existing problems, but that we must struggle together to step out the limitations of the logic and structures that created the problems in the first place. Remaining focused on the old problems curtails our creativity and keeps us stuck in oppressive market driven paradigms of false generosity tied to conserving capitalist profit and accumulation. To counter the death grip of capitalism, because that's how I see it, we are in a death grip, We not only need new tools, we need living tools with the fluidity to shift and change as necessary in the interest of our collective well-being. Fighting the good fight demands that we do our work and live our lives differently if we are to actualize social and material change in the conditions faced by teachers and students and their communities. This calls us to undergo a revolutionary process of redefining ourselves as individuals and collective beings, a process I have experienced in my life and witnessed with my students and comrades. When we come to this place where we recognize that it is not just about ourselves as sole individuals, that we are always connected to the people who are in our lives and beyond. This process entails some key principles I draw loosely here from Firestone's book, Wounds to Wisdom. She speaks about six principles that are important, that we have to face openly and honestly our historical positionality by telling the silence stories of our collective suffering, that we have to harness the power of our suffering through developing an intimate understanding of our vulnerabilities and how these impact our capacity for connection and solidarity. We need to build together new communities of struggle by opening ourselves to the unknown, embracing our unfinishedness, and entering into supportive and loving relationships of struggle. We must overcome our tendencies to blame, scapegoat, or dehumanize, generally rooted in feelings of helplessness. We need to fight against helplessness by calling for the kind of change that will halt the violence, the poverty, the surveillance, and the legacy of inhumanity that corrupts our existence. We have to disidentify from our sense of victimhood and powerlessness, leaving behind the lies of submission and subordination and working with others to redefine our place as empowered subjects of our own destinies. We must take personal and collective action in the world that supports a vision of shared liberation. We must come to see that oppression is not immutable. We together have a choice about the outcome of the stories that are unfolding in our time. This is what it means to be empowered subjects of history. There is no question that we must find the courage to speak the unspoken, to seek the unknown, and to move through unchartered waters ever vigilant of our actions and their consequences upon others in the world. This way of life requires a sustained commitment to move beyond sentimentalism and individualistic gestures so that we might risk an act of love and enter into sustaining and nurturing political relationships of dialogue and solidarity, communal relationships grounded upon our unwavering fidelity to break out of the domesticating and oppressive conditions that trick us into complicity with deceitful promises of an economic system indifferent to people's suffering. Reyri's revolutionary vision of education for liberation continues to inspire and awaken hope in liberatory educators, cultural workers, and activists around the world. For many of us from working in and from poor and working class communities, the option of struggle has never been a matter of choice, but rather political necessity. If we are to be free to express our self determination and ensure our right to exist, if we are to have the right to express the sensibilities of our own humanity. Let us refuse then to justify and rationalize the poverty and suffering so blatantly present all around us. Let us challenge the pathetic politics of reform as we struggle to come to terms with this truth. Educational equality or social justice will never be ours within a political economic system that requires the impoverishment and political subjugation of the majority of the world's population. We must know down to our bones, however, that another way of life is indeed possible. It is not our destiny or that of our children or grandchildren to continue living this alienating nightmare of capital. Rather, we are here to live meaningful, creative lives in the interests of our collective well-being and our liberation. Our struggles must encompass a life affirming vision that places the needs of the people and the planet at the center of our political and pedagogical discourses, but more importantly, these values must be materially reflected in the everyday actions that shape our social, pedagogical, political, and economic interventions in the world. There is no doubt that we need new forms of social and material relationships in the world where an embodied pedagogy of love constitutes a lifeline for our future. And all this requires our personal and collective willingness to step out courageously to embrace our vulnerability and to embody intimate ways of being and knowing grounded in a revolutionary vision of societal reinvention and an ethics of liberation that disrupts the twisted colonizing logic of capitalism, unveils myths that breed exclusion and suffering while all along posing new questions, considering new solutions, and seeking liberatory forms of cultural, political, and economic life. Of course, none of this is as easy as writing a book or giving a speech, nor can we fight the good fight in isolation. I confess that living by these principles can be grueling and an arduous process. It can take our entire lifetime to glean its wisdom, to recapture our social agency, and to step into the power of the human creative force that is generated when our hearts, bodies, minds, and spirits commingle in the pursuit of a more just and loving world. But I can also affirm it truly is a meaningful and passionate way to live our lives, to love, to work, and to dream of those unimaginable possibilities that can set us free. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.