Final reflection

Your final reflection letter gives you a chance to reflect on how well you achieved the course’s objectives. This assignment asks you to write a 1000-1500 word letter to Cody and Neda that answers the following questions:

What are your three main takeaways from this course? Be specific in your answers by identifying the course objectives, examples from the readings, class dialogues, and/or personal experiences.
How will you put dialogue into action moving forward outside of our classroom space?
This course asks you to get out of your comfort zone. In your reflection, describe moments when you felt uncomfortable and how that impacted your understanding of the course objectives.

easy to understandinggood grammar

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces

A New Way to Frame Dialogue
Around Diversity and Social Justice

Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens

T
he practice of establishing ground rules or guidelines for conver-
sations and behavior is foundational to diversity and social justice
learning activities. As student affairs educators, we expect this pro-

cess will help create a learning environment that allows students to engage
with one another over controversial issues with honesty, sensitivity, and
respect. We often describe such environments as safe spaces, terminology we
hope will be reassuring to participants who feel anxious about sharing their
thoughts and feelings regarding these sensitive and controversial issues.

But to what extent can we promise the kind of safety our students might
expect from us? We have found with increasing regularity that participants
invoke in protest the common ground rules associated with the idea of safe
space when the dialogue moves from polite to provocative. When we queried
students about their rationales, their responses varied, yet shared a common
theme: a conflation of safety with comfort. We began to wonder what
accounts for this conflation. It may arise in part from the defensive tendency
to discount, deflect, or retreat from a challenge. Upon further reflection,
another possibility arose. Were we adequately and honestly preparing stu-
dents to be challenged in this way? Were we in fact hindering our own efforts
by relying on the traditional language of safe space?

PAGE

135

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136 Facilitation Design and Techniques

As we explored these thorny questions, it became increasingly clear to us
that our approach to initiating social justice dialogues should not be to con-
vince participants that we can remove risk from the equation, for this is
simply impossible. Rather, we propose revising our language, shifting away
from the concept of safety and emphasizing the importance of bravery
instead, to help students better understand—and rise to—the challenges of
genuine dialogue on diversity and social justice issues.

CASE STUDY

We first began to question and rethink the framework of safe space as col-
leagues working in the Department of Residential Education at New York
University. The critical moment that spurred this rethinking occurred when
planning and implementing aspects of our fall resident assistant training
program. The department approached the task of training our resident assis-
tants on a wide range of content areas before the start of the academic year
by developing a series of 90-minute training modules. As members of our
department’s diversity committee, we were tasked with developing a training
module on diversity and social justice. We were excited for an opportunity
to channel our passion for social justice education into an important aspect
of student leadership training, yet also challenged by the short session time
frame of 90 minutes. Our intended learning outcomes for this module were
ambitious even without the challenge of time constraints. How, we won-
dered, would we introduce the concepts of social and cultural identity,
power, and privilege; encourage reflection on how these forces moved
through and shaped their lives; and draw connections between the session
content and their roles as student leaders?

Given our goals for the session, we decided to incorporate the One Step
Forward, One Step Backward activity, which is also called Leveling the Play-
ing Field and Crossing the Line. In this exercise, participants are lined up in
the middle of the room. The facilitator then reads a series of statements
related to social identity, privilege, and oppression; participants determine
whether these statements are reflective of their lived experiences and then
either step forward, step backward, or remain in place as directed. After all
prompts have been read, the facilitator leads a group discussion about their
interpretations of the pattern of the distribution of participants in the room.
Students who hold primarily dominant group identities usually end up in
the front of the room, those who hold primarily target group identities in

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 137

the rear, and those with a more even split of dominant and target group
identities in between the other two groups. The goal of the exercise is to
visually illustrate the phenomenon of social stratification and injustice and
how participants’ own lives are thereby affected. The exercise intentionally
pushes the boundaries of the participants’ comfort zones in the hope of
spurring them on to powerful learning about social justice issues.

After our module on diversity and social justice, we received mixed feed-
back about the One Step Forward, One Step Backward activity from the
student participants and from our colleagues who had served as facilitators
for other groups. Some participants reported they experienced heightened
awareness of social justice issues as a positive result. Most, however, were
critical of the activity. This critical feedback appeared largely dependent on
the social identities of the participant and the degree to which their target or
agent group identities held salience for them.

Participants who framed the activity primarily through their agent or
dominant group identities stated they felt persecuted, blamed, and negatively
judged for ending the exercise at the front of the room. Many expressed
feelings of guilt about their position in the exercise (though not necessarily
their privilege), as well as helplessness when hearing the emotional reactions
of those who were closer to the rear of the room. Common reactions
included sayings such as, ‘‘I can’t help being White’’ and ‘‘These problems
aren’t my fault.’’

Conversely, those who framed the activity primarily through their target
group identities ended up in the back of the room. Many of these partici-
pants stated their physical position at the conclusion of the exercise was a
painful reminder of the oppression and marginalization they experience on
a daily basis. Whereas their agent group peers expressed surprise at the pat-
tern of distribution, many of the target group participants stated they pre-
dicted the result of the activity from the beginning. Like their agent group
peers, the target group participants voiced frustration with the activity,
though their feelings tended to stem from a sense of being placed in the
familiar role of educator for agent group members—a role they felt was
inevitably theirs but one that made them feel angry, sorrowful, and in some
cases, afraid of the repercussions.

Interestingly, a critique shared by many participants across target and
agent group identities was that they experienced the activity as a violation of
the safe space ground rules established with each participant group at the
outset of the module. The profound feelings of discomfort many of them
experienced were, in their view, incongruent with the idea of safety.

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138 Facilitation Design and Techniques

It was apparent to us that on the whole our session had missed the mark
with respect to our intended outcomes, sparking the first of many long dis-
cussions between us. Although it was tempting to simply lump the critiques
together as the typical resistance you can expect when talking to folks about
power and privilege, we knew this was an oversimplification that would not
result in improved pedagogical practice or richer learning for our students.
What was the critical flaw in our design? Did we select the wrong activities
or place them in the wrong sequence? Did we do a poor job of training our
colleagues to facilitate the session? While mining these questions resulted in
some useful insights—for example, we no longer use the One Step Forward
activity as part of our facilitation practice, primarily because we are troubled
by its potential to revictimize target group members—we continually
returned to the quandary of safe space. Was it the activity that had made our
students feel unsafe, or did this sense of danger originate somewhere else? It
was here that we began to more closely examine the conventional wisdom of
safety as a prerequisite for effective social justice education and question to
what degree the goal of safety was realistic, compatible, or even appropriate
for such learning. What is meant by the concept of safety, and how does
that change based on the identities in the room?

DEFINING AND DECONSTRUCTING
SAFE SPACE

Many scholars have described visions of safe space as it relates to diversity
and social justice learning environments. Among them are Holley and
Steiner (2005), who described safe space as an ‘‘environment in which stu-
dents are willing and able to participate and honestly struggle with challeng-
ing issues’’ (p. 49). Staff at the Arizona State University Intergroup Relations
Center described the contours of safe space in more detail, with a stated
objective of creating ‘‘an environment in which everyone feels comfortable
expressing themselves and participating fully, without fear of attack, ridicule,
or denial of experience’’ (as cited by National Coalition for Dialogue &
Deliberation, n.d., §S). To create such spaces, ‘‘participants need some basic
discussion guidelines in order to develop trust and safety’’ (Hardiman, Jack-
son, & Griffin, 2007, p. 54).

Consistent with the literature, we believe facilitators of social justice edu-
cation have a responsibility to foster a learning environment that supports

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 139

participants in the challenging work of authentic engagement with regard to
issues of identity, oppression, power, and privilege. Student development
theorists assert that to support this kind of learning, educators must take
care to balance contradiction to a student’s current way of thinking with
positive encouragement to explore new ways of thinking (Baxter Magolda,
1992; Kegan, 1982; King & Kitchener, 1994; Sanford, 1966). Further, we
share the conviction that violence of any kind—physical, emotional, and
psychological—is antithetical to the aims of social justice work; indeed, we
see the use of violence to achieve one’s goals as a patriarchal norm that
should be challenged through such work. As such, we see great value in
many of the tenets of safe space as well as the common practice of setting
expectations, often called ground rules, with the learning group regarding
how we will engage with one another on these subjects.

We question, however, the degree to which safety is an appropriate or
reasonable expectation for any honest dialogue about social justice. The
word safe is defined in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as ‘‘free
from harm or risk . . . affording safety or security from danger, risk, or
difficulty . . . unlikely to produce controversy or contradiction’’ (Safe, 2010).
We argue that authentic learning about social justice often requires the very
qualities of risk, difficulty, and controversy that are defined as incompatible
with safety. These kinds of challenges are particularly unavoidable in partici-
pant groups composed of target and agent group members. In such settings,
target and agent group members take risks by participating fully and truth-
fully, though these risks differ substantially by group membership and which
identities hold the most salience for a given participant at a given time.

For agent group members, facing evidence of the existence of their
unearned privilege, reflecting on how and to what degree they have colluded
with or participated in oppressive acts, hearing the stories of pain and strug-
gle from target group members, and fielding direct challenges to their world-
view from their peers can elicit a range of negative emotions, such as fear,
sorrow, and anger. Such emotions can feed a sense of guilt and hopelessness.
Choosing to engage in such activity in the first place, much less stay engaged,
is not a low-risk decision and, therefore, is inconsistent with the definition
of safety as being free of discomfort or difficulty.

Indeed, the unanticipated discomfort and difficulty many agent group
members experience as a result of participation in a social justice learning
activity can also lead to resistance and denial. Here, the truth of how power
and privilege have moved in one’s life is rejected, and energy is redirected
toward critiquing the activity (rather than the content) as the source of her

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140 Facilitation Design and Techniques

or his discomfort or explaining away others’ experiences as springing not
from oppression but from some other more benign source, disconnected
from oneself. In this manner, the language of safety may actually encourage
entrenchment in privilege, which we may be able to curtail more effectively
by building conditions in which agent group members understand and
expect from the outset that challenge is forthcoming.

Further, it is our view that the agent group impulse to classify challenges
to one’s power and privilege as actions that detract from a sense of safety is,
in itself, a manifestation of dominance. For example, Wise (2004), in his
essay critiquing Whites’ insistence on safety as a condition of their participa-
tion in a cross-racial dialogue about racism, describes this expectation as ‘‘the
ultimate expression of White privilege’’ (� 15), whereby Whites attempt
to define for others—and especially people of color—how they wish to be
confronted about issues of race and racism. People of color are then expected
to constrain their participation and interactions to conform to White expec-
tations of safety—itself an act of racism and White resistance and denial. In
this manner, we suggest that the language of safety contributes to the replica-
tion of dominance and subordination, rather than a dismantling thereof.
This assertion does not mean we believe anything goes is a better approach;
rather, we suggest we do participants a disservice by reinforcing expectations
shaped largely by the very forces of privilege and oppression that we seek to
challenge through social justice education.

Members of the target group are even more disserved by well-intentioned
efforts to create safety. Target group members may, in fact, react with incre-
dulity to the very notion of safety, for history and experience has demon-
strated clearly to them that to name their oppression, and the perpetrators
thereof, is a profoundly unsafe activity, particularly if they are impassioned
(Leonardo & Porter, 2010). They are aware that an authentic expression of
the pain they experience as a result of oppression is likely to result in their
dismissal and condemnation as hypersensitive or unduly aggressive (Sparks,
2002). This dilemma looms large for target group members in any social-
justice-related learning activity; reflecting on and sharing their direct experi-
ences with oppression, and listening to dominant group members do the
same, will likely result in heightened pain, discomfort, and resentment.
These feelings alone are inconsistent with the definition of safety and exacer-
bated by ground rules that discourage them from being genuinely voiced lest
they clash with agent group members’ expectations for the dialogue.

Indeed, the pervasive nature of systemic and institutionalized oppression
precludes the creation of safety in a dialogue situated, as it must be, within

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 141

said system. As Wise (2004) observed with respect to race, ‘‘This country is
never safe for people of color. Its schools are not safe; its streets are not safe;
its places of employment are not safe; its health care system is not safe’’
(� 35).

Though Wise focuses on racism, we argue that his formulation about
safety can also be applied to examinations of sexism, homophobia, heterosex-
ism, ableism, religio-spiritual oppression, ageism, U.S.-centrism, and other
manifestations of oppression. Viewed through this lens, we see that assur-
ances of safety for target group members are just as misguided as they are for
agent group members.

We have come to believe, as argued by Boostrom (1998), that we cannot
foster critical dialogue regarding social justice

by turning the classroom into a ‘‘safe space’’, a place in which teachers rule
out conflict. . . . We have to be brave [emphasis added] because along the way
we are going to be ‘‘vulnerable and exposed’’; we are going to encounter
images that are ‘‘alienating and shocking’’. We are going to be very unsafe.
(p. 407)

BRAVE SPACE: AN ALTERNATIVE FORMULATION
AND FACILITATION PRACTICE

As we developed alternatives to the safe space paradigm, we were influenced
by Boostrom’s (1998) critique of the idea of safe space, and in particular his
assertion that bravery is needed because ‘‘learning necessarily involves not
merely risk, but the pain of giving up a former condition in favour of a new
way of seeing things’’ (p. 399). Some scholars have suggested that pedagogies
of fear (Leonardo & Porter, 2010) or discomfort (Boler, 1999; Redmond,
2010) are in closer practical and philosophical alignment with this kind of
learning. Although these provocative theories were useful to us, our primary
inspiration was from the concept of ‘‘courageous conversations about race’’
(Singleton & Hays, 2008; Singleton & Linton, 2006; Sparks, 2002), a strat-
egy developed specifically to encourage taking risks in dialogues focused on
the topic of race and racism. These ideas affirmed our decision to make a
small but important linguistic shift in our facilitation practice, whereby we
seek to cultivate brave spaces rather than safe spaces for group learning about
a broad range of diversity and social justice issues. By revising our framework
to emphasize the need for courage rather than the illusion of safety, we better

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142 Facilitation Design and Techniques

position ourselves to accomplish our learning goals and more accurately
reflect the nature of genuine dialogue regarding these challenging and con-
troversial topics.

We have found that the simple act of using the term brave space at the
outset of a program, workshop, or class has a positive impact in and of itself,
transforming a conversation that can otherwise be treated merely as setting
tone and parameters or an obligation to meet before beginning the group
learning process into an integral and important component of the workshop.
Brave space is usually a novel term for our students or participants, especially
those who are familiar with the idea of safe space, and frequently piques
their curiosity. In response, we often ask participants why they think we use
the term brave space instead of safe space, with the goal of involving their
critical lenses immediately. It is common for participants to respond by
unpacking the idea of safety much like we did as we developed the brave
space framework. Creating this space for the participants to make their own
meaning of brave space, in addition to sharing our own beliefs as facilitators,
can lead to rich learning in alignment with our justice-related objectives.

This process of actualizing brave space in a social justice learning activity
continues, appropriately, with the establishment of ground rules. There are
many different techniques for establishing ground rules. Often, the mode
selected is dependent upon the total amount of time allotted for the learning
activity. If time is relatively short, the facilitators may choose to advance a
predetermined list of ground rules to preserve limited discussion time for
other aspects of the activity. Alternatively, when time permits, facilitators
may lead a conversation in which the participants generate their own list of
ground rules. A hybrid version of both approaches is another possibility,
whereby the facilitators suggest some ground rules and invite participants to
ask questions about these as well as share additional ground rules of their
own. In any case, facilitators will likely seek commitment from the group to
adhere to these ground rules throughout the activity, although they may
also indicate the rules can be revisited and revised as needed as the activity
progresses.

We strongly encourage facilitators who use the brave space framework to
strive for protracted dialogue in defining brave space and setting ground
rules, treating this conversation not as a prelude to learning about social
justice but as a valuable part of such learning. We have found that so doing
allows us as facilitators to demonstrate openness to learning from partici-
pants, thereby disrupting and decentering dominant narratives in which
knowledge flows one way from teachers to students. A collectivist approach,

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 143

wherein all participants have the opportunity to shape the group norms and
expectations, is more consistent with the overall goal of social justice educa-
tion than one in which the facilitators dictate the terms of learning (Freire,
1970; hooks, 1994).

Whatever methodology is used to create ground rules, commonly used
ground rules include ‘‘agree to disagree,’’ ‘‘don’t take things personally,’’
‘‘challenge by choice,’’ ‘‘respect,’’ and ‘‘no attacks.’’ We believe that unexam-
ined, these common ground rules may contribute to the conflation of safety
and comfort and restrict participant engagement and learning. In the section
that follows, we discuss these common ground rules and characteristics of
safe spaces. We also offer some alternatives and examples for processing the
complexity of these guidelines that are more consistent with social justice
education goals and the establishment of brave spaces. In setting up guide-
lines for social justice conversations, we aim to encourage participants to be
brave in exploring content that pushes them to the edges of their comfort
zones to maximize learning. We offer all of these to support facilitators in
thinking critically about how ground rules can help or hinder students in
full and truthful engagement.

Common Rule 1: Agree to disagree. Implicit in this common ground rule is
that disagreements often occur in dialogues about diversity and social justice.
We welcome the voicing of disagreement and encourage students to offer
contrasting views. However, we believe that agreeing to disagree can be used
to retreat from conflict in an attempt to avoid discomfort and the potential
for damaged relationships. We often hear students say, ‘‘I’m not going to
change my mind, and neither are they; what is the point of continuing to
talk?’’ In our view, some of the richest learning springs from ongoing explor-
ations of conflict, whereby participants seek to understand an opposing view-
point. Such exploration may or may not lead to a change or convergence of
opinions or one side winning the debate, but neither of these is among our
objectives for our students; we find these outcomes to be reflective of a
patriarchal approach to conflict, in which domination and winning over
others to one’s own point of view is the goal.

Further, we believe that agreeing to disagree in a conversation about social
justice not only stymies learning for all participants, it can also serve to
reinforce systems of oppression by providing an opportunity for agent group
members to exercise their privilege to opt out of a conversation that makes
them uncomfortable. Consider, for example, a workshop focused on the
topic of sexism. The participants are engaging in a lively and contentious
discussion about how sexism has an impact on leadership and employment

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144 Facilitation Design and Techniques

opportunities for women in the United States. Many of the women, and
some of the men, in the room have shared statistics indicating that women
are underrepresented in positions of leadership and still paid less than men
for the same work. Most of the men in the room contest this view and offer
high-profile examples of women who have ‘‘made it.’’ Weary of the back-
and-forth conflict, the men invoke the rule of agreeing to disagree. The
conversation is halted, and the result is that the system of sexism that contin-
ues to confer unearned privileges to men and restrict freedom and opportu-
nities for women is left unexamined. This outcome is harmful for all
involved, but women carry the largest part of that burden.

An alternative rule is needed, one that inspires courage in the face of
conflict and continues rather than stops the dialogue process. Without such
a guideline, we are compromised in our ability to facilitate learning that
advances social justice for all people. To this end, we suggest that facilitators
explore the concept of controversy with civility and how it may prove a
stronger fit with the goal of dialogue. Controversy with civility, a term drawn
from the social change model of leadership development (Astin & Astin,
1996), is ‘‘a value whereby different views are expected and honored with a
group commitment to understand the sources of disagreement and to work
cooperatively toward common solutions’’ (p. 59). We find this proposed rule
to be in much closer alignment with our philosophy of social justice educa-
tion than agreeing to disagree. It frames conflict not as something to be
avoided but as a natural outcome in a diverse group. Moreover, it emphasizes
the importance of continued engagement through conflict and indicates that
such activity strengthens rather than weakens diverse communities.

As we discuss later, it is important to note that the word civility, in our
view, allows room for strong emotion and rigorous challenge. It does not
require target group members to restrain their participation to prevent agent
group members from disengaging. It does, however, require target and agent
group members to be attentive to the ways patriarchal societies socialize their
members to view aggression and dominance as normative means to approach
conflict and to use care to avoid replicating oppressive behaviors while
engaged in the pursuit of justice for all people.

Common Rule 2: Don’t take things personally. We see this often-used rule
as closely related to two other common rules: no judgments and it’s okay
to make mistakes. Invoking these rules seems to be intended to encourage
participants to become involved dispassionately to maintain safety in the
learning environment—in other words, safe spaces. Moreover, it also primes
participants for the inevitability of missteps while they are exploring social

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 145

justice issues. These rules may be very reassuring to participants who are
concerned that at some point in the activity they will betray ignorance attrib-
utable to one of their agent group memberships and do not wish to be
labeled or dismissed by their peers as sexist, racist, ableist, and so forth. So
reassured, they may participate and engage with less fear and greater honesty.

We share the desire for authenticity and see value in the acknowledgment
that human beings are imperfect and should not be expected to behave oth-
erwise. However, we have a number of problems with the use of these rules
to ground a social justice dialogue. First, they fail to account for another
truth we hold about human beings: although we have some choice in how
we respond to and express our emotions, we do not have control over which
ones we experience at any given time and to what degree. We suggest that the
view we can and should demonstrate such control is reflective of patriarchy,
whereby emotional restraint—a normatively masculine behavior—is un-
justly overvalued.

Further, we argue that these rules shift responsibility for any emotional
impact of what a participant says or shares to the emotionally affected peo-
ple. Those affected are now expected to hide their feelings and process them
internally; the rules may even imply to these participants that their feelings
are because of some failing on their part. According to the rules, the affected
parties are only permitted to react outwardly in a manner that does not
imply negative judgment of the participant who has caused the impact, lest
this person be shamed into silence. The affected people are in this way dou-
bly affected—first by the event that triggered their emotions and then again
by the responsibility for managing them. These rules also prevent the person
who caused the impact from carrying a share of the emotional load and
preclude the possibility of meaningful reflection on her or his actions.

In our analysis, these rules do not protect any participants’ safety and
certainly not that of the target group members, who are more often than not
the affected and silenced participants. Rather, they preserve comfort for
agent group members, who may allow their power and dominance to show
without having it reflected to them and without being held accountable for
it. We are careful here to avoid saying that agent group members are served
by such a rule; we believe it protects their privilege, but in so doing it also
does them a disservice. None of these outcomes is consistent with our view
of social justice, so we choose different language—own your intentions and
your impact—to ground our pedagogy. This language acknowledges that
intention and impact matter. It also makes clear that the impact of our

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146 Facilitation Design and Techniques

actions is not always congruent with our intentions and that positive or
neutral intentions do not trump negative impact.

For example, in a conversation about gender expression, gender normative
or cisgender people (those whose gender expression aligns with dominant
social expectations of their biological sex) may inadvertently cause pain to
transgender participants by expressing incredulity about how a biologically
male person could be a woman. If the trans participants have been supported
in choosing to approach controversy with civility by letting it be known they
have been harmed and why, there are now opportunities where silence would
have left only closed doors and untouched systems of oppression. The trans
participants have not been forced, as is so often the case, into silence but
rather have exercised agency by participating truthfully. The gender norma-
tive participants are aware they have caused harm and can seek to better
understand how and why they did so and what role their privilege as gender
normative people has played in creating the gap between intention and
impact. All participants, if they so choose, can better explore with one
another ways to challenge the social scripts that frame gender as binary and
essentially as indistinguishable from biological sex. These results would have
been discouraged in an environment in which the trans students were
directed to not take things personally.

Common Rule 3: Challenge by choice. This guideline emerged in the field
of adventure education and outdoor learning and has since been widely
applied in social justice education. Challenge by choice means individuals
will determine for themselves if and to what degree they will participate in a
given activity, and this choice will be honored by facilitators and other parti-
cipants (Neill, 2008). The principle of challenge by choice highlights what
we view as an important truth in social justice education. Though a given
activity or discussion question may provide a challenging opportunity for
participant learning, much of that learning may be internal. Students may
not externalize evidence of the degree to which they are engaged, but this
does not mean they are not wrestling with difficult questions or critically
examining how privilege moves in their lives and the lives of others. Further,
we recognize this kind of engagement cannot be forced. As facilitators, we
might make a pointed observation or pose a provocative question in hopes
of spurring such engagement. For example, during a conversation about the
controversy over same-sex marriage, we might say, ‘‘We notice that only
folks who have identified as lesbian or gay have said anything in this conver-
sation; we’d like to invite anyone who identifies normatively with respect to
sexual orientation to share their thoughts.’’ However, we understand it is

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 147

ultimately in the participants’ hands to decide whether they respond and to
what extent they will push the boundaries of their comfort zones.

Given this reality we believe it is important to do more than simply affirm
it by establishing challenge by choice as a ground rule. We believe it is
also necessary to actively encourage participants to be aware of what factors
influence their decisions about whether to challenge themselves on a given
issue. We see this awareness as being particularly important for agent group
members. Returning to our example of the same-sex marriage conversation,
silence from heterosexual participants could signify any number of things.
Some of them might have been thinking deeply about what it means to their
being able to enter a civil marriage with their chosen partner, while others
could not. Some might have even been formulating a thought to share with
the group. Some might have been very uncomfortable with the topic and
decided they were unable to rise to the challenge of discussing it.

In the latter case, it is our hope the internal process does not stop at the
decision not to accept the challenge. Therefore, when discussing challenge
by choice, we also ask participants to think about what keeps them from
challenging themselves. Do they hold what they believe is an unpopular
viewpoint? Are they fearful of how others will react to their thoughts? Are
they simply tired and not able to formulate a thoughtful contribution that
day? Whatever the reason, we hope our participants will be attentive to it.

We encourage participants to be especially attentive to the degree to which
their agent group memberships inform their decision about whether and
how deeply to engage in a challenging activity or dialogue. Specifically, we
suggest they consider how their daily lives are affected if they choose not to
challenge themselves, and by contrast, how target group members’ daily lives
are affected by the same decision. If they come to suspect or clearly see their
privilege enables them to make the choice not to challenge themselves, and
that oppression often invalidates such a choice for target group members, we
hope this knowledge factors into their decisions about how and when they
choose to challenge themselves.

Common Rule 4: Respect. Of all the common rules, we have experienced
this one as the least controversial and the least discussed. When respect is
offered as a ground rule, most of our participants agree readily that it should
be adopted—they want to be respected, and they want to be respectful to
others—and move quickly on to the next point of discussion.

We believe it is important to spend more time discussing respect with
the group. We often ask them what respect looks like: How does someone
demonstrate respect for you? Delving into this question can reveal various

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148 Facilitation Design and Techniques

cultural understandings of the term and mitigate assumptions participants
bring with them about what kinds of behaviors are respectful. For example,
participants will often say that interrupting someone who is speaking is a
form of disrespect. As facilitators, we use this as an opportunity to demon-
strate multipartiality (see Chapter 10) by affirming this particular un-
derstanding but also by acknowledging that in some cultural contexts
interruption and talking over one another is welcome; we then invite partici-
pants to share any examples they might have from their own experiences.
The objective here is not to lead participants to consensus but rather to
support them in maintaining increased mindfulness of the different ways
they can demonstrate respectfulness to one another.

We also circle back to the idea of controversy with civility when convers-
ing about respect. Specifically, we ask participants to give an example of how
they might firmly challenge the views of someone else in a respectful manner.
By further discussing the examples, the group can develop more clarity about
ways to firmly and respectfully challenge others and how to respond when
they themselves are firmly and respectfully challenged. Such discussion is a
potentially fruitful investment of time that can prevent students from auto-
matically experiencing and interpreting challenges from others as acts of
disrespect.

Common Rule 5: No attacks. The fifth and final of our common rules for
creating brave spaces is closely connected to the previous rule of respect.
Many of our students have described attacks as a form of extreme disrespect,
a view we agree with and connect directly to our rejection of any form of
violence as a viable means for advancing social justice. As with respect, we
find this rule is usually agreed to speedily and, in the absence of facilitator
intervention, without discussion.

Here again, we advocate for clarifying conversation. We typically ask our
participants to describe the differences between a personal attack on an indi-
vidual and a challenge to an individual’s idea or belief or statement that
simply makes an individual feel uncomfortable. These examples are always
very instructive. Most of the examples participants identify clearly as
attacks—‘‘You’re a jerk,’’ ‘‘Your idea is worthless,’’ and so on—have never
actually occurred in any session we have facilitated. However, those that are
classified during this conversation as challenges—‘‘What you said made me
feel angry,’’ ‘‘I find that idea to be heterosexist,’’ and so on—are ones that
in our experience are regularly named as attacks later on by the recipients of
the challenges. At this point, we have found it helpful to remind participants
of the group’s responses during this portion of the ground rules discussion;

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From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces 149

doing so has helped participants remember that pointed challenges are not
necessarily attacks, but the uncomfortable experience that may result can
sometimes lead to a defensive reaction. The attention can then be turned
away from the distraction of the nonattack and toward the roots of the
defensive response—more often than not, a sense of threat to the privileges
of one’s agent group membership.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

We have found that reframing ground rules to establish brave space is an
asset to us in our work as social justice facilitators. It has helped us to better
prepare participants to interact authentically with one another in challenging
dialogues. Moreover, as compared to the idea of safe space, brave space is
more congruent with our understanding of power, privilege, and oppression,
and the challenges inherent in dialogue about these issues in socioculturally
diverse groups. The feedback we have received from attendees at presenta-
tions (Arao & Clemens, 2006) and participants in workshops we facilitate—
including students, staff, and faculty—has been universally positive, and
many have requested our assistance in learning and using the brave space
framework in their own practice. Still, we recognize that brave space remains
a relatively new framework with ample room for growth and refinement.
Our evidence of its efficacy is primarily anecdotal. We believe qualitative
and quantitative studies would be useful in measuring how brave space is
experienced by participants in social justice educational efforts and how it
influences their learning and participation in these settings. Further, we wel-
come your additional philosophical and theoretical analysis of the framework
as articulated here, as we know that others will see and understand the
strengths and shortfalls of brave space in ways we, as yet, do not. We look
forward to continued engagement with you in our shared journey to develop
ever more efficacious social justice facilitation practices.

REFERENCES

Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2006, March). Confronting the paradox of safety in social
justice education. Educational session presented at the annual meeting of ACPA-
College Student Educators International, Indianapolis, IN.

Astin, H. S., & Astin, A. W. (1996). A social change model of leadership development
guidebook, version 3. Los Angeles, CA: Higher Education Research Institute.

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Baxter Magolda, M. B. (1992). Knowing and reasoning in college: Gender-related
patterns in students’ intellectual development. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge.
Boostrom, R. (1998). ‘‘Safe spaces’’: Reflections on an educational metaphor. Jour-

nal of Curriculum Studies, 30(4), 397–408.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum.
Hardiman, R., Jackson, B., & Griffin, P. (2007). Conceptual foundations for social

justice education. In M. Adams, L. Bell, & P. Griffin (Eds.), Teaching for diversity
and social justice (2nd ed., pp. 35–66). New York, NY: Routledge.

Holley, L. C., & Steiner, S. (2005). Safe space: Student perspectives on classroom
environment. Journal of Social Work Education, 41(1), 49–64. doi: 10.5175/
JSWE.2005.200300343

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New
York, NY: Routledge.

Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment: Understand-

ing and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. K. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory
of ‘‘safety’’ in race dialogue. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157. doi:
10.1080/13613324.2010.482898

National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. (n.d.). Safe space. Retrieved from
http://ncdd.org/rc/glossary�S

Neill, J. (2008). Challenge by choice. Retrieved from http://wilderdom.com/ABC/
ChallengeByChoice.html

Redmond, M. (2010). Safe space oddity: Revisiting critical pedagogy. Journal of
Teaching in Social Work, 30(1), 1–14. doi: 10.1080/08841230903249729

Safe. (2010). In Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (11th ed.). Retrieved from
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/safe

Sanford, N. (1966). Self and society. New York, NY: Atherton Press.
Singleton, G., & Hays, C. (2008). Beginning courageous conversations about race.

In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school
(pp. 18–23). New York, NY: The New Press.

Singleton, G., & Linton, C. (2006). Courageous conversations about race: A field
guide for achieving equity in schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Sparks, D. (2002). Conversations about race need to be fearless. Journal of Staff
Development, 23(4), 60–64.

Wise, T. (2004). No such place as safe. Retrieved from http://www.zcommunica
tions.org/no-such-place-as-safe-by-tim-wise

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Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

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“What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination
and the ends of the world

Armond R. Towns

To cite this article: Armond R. Towns (2020) “What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination
and the ends of the world, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17:1, 75-80, DOI:
10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801

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INVITED ARTICLE

“What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and
the ends of the world
Armond R. Towns

Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, USA

ABSTRACT
Building off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian
approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach
provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual
recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of
race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from
a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people
of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness
outside Western terms. Both can be utilized to point toward new
ways of theorizing for the field.

ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 27 January 2020
Accepted 27 January 2020

KEYWORDS
Blackness; fanon; human;
communication; self/other

Like the other contributors, I have been asked a simple question: Currently, where is com-
munication and critical/cultural studies and where do you see it going? I want to start this
short meditation on the field with a brief anecdote. One recent rejection that I received
from a journal reviewer will serve as an introductory point: Reviewer number two
informed the journal and me that my research should be rejected based on one of my
main assumptions: that blackness was an organizing principle of Western, White life.
As the reviewer informed the journal and me, this was an “overgeneralization” of what
constituted Western life. Reviewer two suggested that if I reframed the Black as “the
Other” and the White as “the self,” then my article could possibly be accepted but only
at another journal.

I do not seek to use this example to personally complain about a journal rejection or to
even protest the reviewer, per se. Instead, I want to point briefly toward one of the assump-
tions of the reviewer’s critique of my own assumption. Whether it is explicitly stated or
not, reviewer number two’s assumption is that some are allowed to overgeneralize. The
more pressing question for me is not who are the gatekeepers of academic journals
(though surely an important concern), but also what is and is not an overgeneralization?
Indeed, what is the “self/Other,” as a generally accepted onto-epistemological conceptual-
ization, other than an overgeneralization of Western life for much of philosophical thought
in the humanities and social sciences?

The questions of this essay are not aimed at reviewer number two; they are aimed at
ourselves, as communication and critical/cultural studies scholars. More specifically, I
ask, what value does the self/Other continue to hold in our work? This is not to say
that self/Other holds no use. There has been critical engagement with self and Other in

CONTACT Armond R. Towns towns.armond@gmail.com

COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES
2020, VOL. 17, NO. 1, 75–80
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communication and critical/cultural studies that illustrates the complexity of life outside of
Western subjecthood.1 Yet, we should exercise caution. Indeed, Frantz Fanon provides
insight into a critique of self/Other that we should utilize more in communication and
critical/cultural studies. As Fanon warned us, the self/Other has been reinterpreted in a
limited way in a lot of critical work, particularly those studying race; it has been
deemed as a mode of sought-after “mutual recognition,” as a way in which to argue
that the Other (the Black person, for reviewer two) requires recognition from the self
(White) under the terms outlined by the self. If one were to put this into communication
terms, the Other can receive recognition via engaging in dialogue, communication with
the self, and vice versa.

What a Fanonian approach to communication and critical/cultural studies provides is a
twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition: on the one hand, Fanon illus-
trated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced, overgeneralized conception of the
world; on the other, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions
of humanness outside these Western terms. Both can be utilized to point toward new ways
of theorizing communication and critical/cultural studies. According to Fanon, the self/
Other replicates a celebrated philosophical figure, who complicates the potential of
mutual recognition: GWF Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel described fragmenta-
tion as inherent in the “lordship/bondage,” self/Other dialectic. Hegel’s theory began with
the assumption of recognition, which was to say shared commonality between the self and
the Other. For Hegel, like the bondsman, the lord recognized, or acknowledged, the bonds-
man, “he” saw his own humanity in the bondsman, and this functioned as a crucial
moment in which self-consciousness materialized:

Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a
twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in
doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being,
but in the other sees its own self.2

Hegel noted that the lord and bondsman both “recognize themselves as mutually recogniz-
ing one another.”3 It is this relationship of recognition that scholars of the philosophy of
communication largely figure as a human communicative/speech relationship.4 It is via
communicating with one another that we come to mutually recognize one another as
human.

On the one hand, Hegel argued that the self and Other come into “mutual recognition”
with one another. As Fanon noted, this position often presumed that recognition was one
mode through which human freedom was attained. On the other hand, and for me far
more dangerous, a simple replication of Black people as the Other reads us into positions
that suggest that through speech, Black people can be “revealed” as the Other. This runs
the risk of placing Black people as historical actualities that exceed the West’s colonial/
racial project. Put simply, the self/Other can brush over the racial violence necessary to
force blackness into the frameworks of self/Other to begin with. Rather than as products
of the West’s colonial project, the universal application of the self/Other positions Black
people’s subjecthood as a certainty; rather than necessary for the West to position itself
as a monopolizer of subjectivity, Black subjectivity was waiting to express its actuality,
as the Other, unfairly denied via racism. Here, the self/Other does what reviewer two
asked of me: it replicates an unquestioned overgeneralization of subjecthood, as always

76 A. R. TOWNS

already located in the West, of which Black people are distorted replicants of the original.
Via accepting the terms of self/Other, one might argue that Black people have always been
Black. We just did not know it until Western Europe “benevolently”/violently revealed this
to us.

In her book Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that rather
than the Other, Black and Brown people are better defined as the “Others of Europe.” This
is no Eurocentric frame, but one that resituates race within its historically violent context
to ask why was it necessary for the West to produce something called blackness, brown-
ness, and more in the first place? Rather than Black people, those of us who belong to a
complex, changing assemblage that cannot be neatly classified, blackness is Ferreira da
Silva’s focus, a product of Western (which is also to say US) productions of self/Other
as White subject positions, representative of humanness. The Others of Europe are not
Others that attain mutual recognition with the self, they are not “always already historic.”5

This is the Other formulated out of racial violence. According to Ferreira da Silva, racial
violence holds an inseparable, two-part existence: “obliteration” of the historical as
signifier of non-White humanity (what we might call forced assimilation into Western
history—colonization, English-only schools for indigenous peoples, and the erasure of
African influence on European history) and literal murder and systemic violence, both of
which produce the Western self/Other as an articulation of universal humanness.6 Borrow-
ing from Fanon, Ferreira da Silva argues the self/Other is representative of humans (Western
White people), but only via their potential to inflict violence on the Others of Europe they
produced. Indeed, Western humanness is founded on the infliction of violence.

If we do not take a critical Fanonian approach to the self/Other, communication and
critical/cultural studies scholars may run the risk of taking for granted the terms of
humanness provided by the colonizer—terms that may be positioned as neutral modes
of describing our life-worlds. This may place me fully outside communication studies,
but I am skeptical that dialogue and/or communication is what is necessary between
self/Other and Ferreira da Silva’s Others of Europe to spark mutual recognition, as the
communicative terms are always structured on man’s terms of violence. Indeed, if the
structures of chattel slavery and colonialism taught us anything, then it is that the West
saw its racial violence against what would soon be Black and Indigenous peoples as ben-
evolent gifts.7 Further, one’s blackness and indigeneity were a part of those gifts, as Wester-
nized classificatory forms “brought Africans, like the indigenous populations of the
Americas, into (Western) history” and this “was deemed benevolent for those soon-to-
be-black, brown, and red people.”8 While many White people argued that slavery and
colonization were tragedies, they also contended that at least such racial violence delivered
the Others of Europe the technologies to move them into history, in the Hegelian sense.9

Thus, some were provided racial categories that made them legible (which did not mean
human) under the terms of Western man. Communicative and technological forms
monopolized by the West, then, were deemed as proof of racial superiority (what I call
“technological Darwinism” in forthcoming my book). And because the colonizer/enslaver
initially perceived their technologies as gifts for Black and Brown people, there is little to
suggest that solely communication (one of the initial “gifts”) will forever transform the
structures of coloniality and racism, though it may make many people feel better.10

The Others of Europe require alternative conceptions of communication. The whip,
chains, small pox blankets, the reservations, the plantation, the border, and the gun

COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 77

(i.e., the multiplicity of racial violences) were communicative technologies that laid the
foundation for both Black and Brown people to learn to speak English (and even
Spanish)—to begin to think of themselves/ourselves in terms of man’s mutual recognition.
Thus, as a Black man, the way that I can dialogue with a person, regardless of their
race, is always predicated on the racial violence of chattel slavery—which is to say
English was necessarily whipped into one of my ancestors on a plantation, until today
none of that ancestor’s relatives can speak anything else. I write and speak in blood,
despite promises of the recognition of “everyone’s” humanity.

If the colonizer’s frameworks structure the academic terms of communication, indeed,
the practice of communication itself, then we should really begin to have a conversation as
to the limits of communication or dialogue to grant us any capacity for mutual recog-
nition. If that is the case, then how do we (scholars of all races, but especially Black,
Brown, and whatever other color fabricated for us) articulate ourselves within human
communication studies? If we are not the self or Other, then what are we? The answer
is exciting, yet terrifying: We are whatever we want to be. Fanon is again of use here. In
Black Skin, White Masks, he critiqued the universality (or overgeneralization) of Hegel’s
dialectic, by contending that violence fragmented his body in “triple.”11 Fanon was not
capable of self/Other recognition, but was, instead, the infrastructure necessary for the
self/Other to exist in the first instance. Put simply, if the self/Other has a binary form,
the tripled figure is the foundation, that third element unaccounted for in Hegel’s terms
of recognition. Indeed, the black body does not have “being,” in the Western ontological
sense, but is instead the “‘available equipment’ … for the purpose of supporting the exis-
tential journey of the human being.”12 Racial violence against Fanon’s black body allotted
the shared humanity of different groups of White people, but never between Fanon and
White people. It is in the tripling that Fanon will later call for a radical alternative politics
of the “wretched,” not based on a precolonial reclamation of a racially pure past, but “in
the people’s struggles against the forces of occupation.”13 Often viewed as a theorist of vio-
lence, I propose that Fanon be alternatively read in ways that mirror Kendall Phillips’ dis-
cussion of Foucault: as a theorist of invention, only Fanon’s invention exceeds Foucault’s,
as it begins at the end of the West.14

What if Black and Brown people’s conception of humanity did not rely on Whites
“recognizing” us as human based on narrow colonial frameworks? What if a new
definition of humanness was based not on whether or not a White person recognizes
me—whether in their citation of my articles or by putting me on an editorial board—
but on a shared decolonial fight against the overrepresentation of Western man as the
human? Saidiya Hartman suggests answers to such questions have always been in plain
sight, particularly in mutual aid societies, or groups that provided Black people with criti-
cal associations, opportunities, and protections in the first 50–75 years after emancipation
in the US. Hartman argues that mutual aid societies were spaces where the self/Other did
not neatly fit onto Black lives; further, mutual aid societies illustrated that self/Other could
not prevent alternative, Black conceptions of humanness:

Mutual aid did not traffic in the belief that the self existed distinct and apart from others or
revere the ideas of individuality and sovereignty, as much as it did singularity and freedom.
The mutual aid society survived the Middle Passage and its origins might be traced to tra-
ditions of collectivity, which flourished in the stateless societies that preceded the breach
of the Atlantic and perdured in its wake. This form of mutual assistance was remade in

78 A. R. TOWNS

the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the ghetto. It made good the ideals of the
commons, the collective, the ensemble, the always-more-than-one of existing in the world.
The mutual aid society was a resource of black survival.15

Mutual aid societies hold multisymbolic value for Hartman. On the one hand, they speak
to Black survival under conditions of violence, which is to say, Black people have struc-
tured such societies based on the violence enacted on us by Whites, those who aspire to
whiteness, and the state; on the other, and more importantly, they rupture the Western
self/Other overgeneralization. Here lies the potential for a new human, never monopolized
by one racial group over another, but structured on a decolonial, survivalist fight against a
thing called a racial group to begin with.

What Fanonian approaches to communication can teach us, then, are two things, at the
least: first, that the conception of self/Other must be complicated when considering Black
and Brown life; and that such complications point to the fact that Black and Brown life
ruptures the foundation of the overgeneralization itself. Indeed, self/Other is not so
much wrong, as much as a formulation of one “genre” of humanness: White, male, het-
erosexual, middle-classed, and able-bodied.16 Communication and critical/cultural
studies scholars should take note: we do not have to replicate our self-conceptions
along the terms of seeking recognition from White people. I find it more productive to
think about ourselves in two inseparable ways: one, theoretical (away from self/Other
toward comprehending racial violence’s necessity for our self-constitution); the other,
radical (Fanon’s tripling that points toward new humans). The call for more represen-
tation can only go so far, particularly under our transnational capitalist system, monopo-
lized by the same group that works to maintain its status (i.e., more representation can
further the wealth of the one percent). Instead, what if we had a communicative strategy
that reconsidered recognition on our own terms, on terms that criticized the linkage
between Western structures of mutual recognition and correct overgeneralizations of
humanity, as per reviewer number two? What if we reframed such overgeneralizations
as complicit within the racial (which means capitalist, gendered, ableist, heterosexist)
order of things? To do so would not only reposition the theoretical terms of engagement
within communication studies, but also ask communication studies to think radical poli-
tics. I would welcome such an intervention.

Notes

1. Jenna Hanchey, “Toward a Relational Politics of Representation,” Review of Communication
18, no. 4 (2018): 265–83; and Tiara Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas
and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cul-
tural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.

2. GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 111.

3. Ibid., 112.
4. Leslie Baxter, “Mikhail Bakhtin: The Philosophy of Dialogism,” in Perspectives on Philosophy

of Communication, ed. Pat Arneson (Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007): 249–54;
Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” The Quarterly
Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987), 133–50;

5. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, MN: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2007), 6.

COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 79

6. For more on Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of racial violence, see Armond Towns, “Whither
the ‘Human’?: An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum,” Google Documents, unpub-
lished article, December 29, 2019, https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LFu8xlLpdoOV
92JG-8jCNJZQQyn5PMR6XczxTww00w/edit, 1–34.

7. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Cres-
cent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The
Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2015).

8. Towns, “Whither,” 8.
9. Mehrsa Baradaran argues that, in the wake of racial slavery, the political and economic

figures of the United States used the end of racial slavery, and the “improvement” it suppo-
sedly provided, as a reason to deny reparations. Indeed, slavery was deemed as a civilizing
mission of the West. See Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial
Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

10. To be clear, we are not making the case that to challenge Western humanness, one must learn
or create a non-Western form of communication. But we are beginning with the assumption
that Western forms of communication structure the way many of us can even imagine
humanness, and there were material, political, and racially violent processes that make my
communication with you possible.

11. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
12. Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2018), 27.
13. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 159.
14. Kendal Phillips, “Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault,”

Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2004): 328–44.
15. Saidiya Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” The

South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 471.
16. I am pulling the phrasing genre of humanness from the work of Sylvia Wynter. See Wynter,

“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After
Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial, 3, no. 3 (2003):
257–337.

80 A. R. TOWNS

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LFu8xlLpdoOV92JG-8jCNJZQQyn5PMR6XczxTww00w/edit

Abstract

Notes

From Here to There
How to Use Auto/ethnography to Bridge Difference

Robin M. Boylorn

Abstract In this reflexive auto/ethnography, the author challenges the

lessons she learned about difference growing up in a small community.

Seeing Johnson’s quare theory as an opportunity to reimagine problematic

conditioning, she reflects on moments of clarity related to sexuality, race,

class, and gender difference and theorizes the possibilities of quare auto/

ethnography as an opportunity to critique and engage difference. She uses

auto/ethnography to introduce the possibilities of bridging (backward) in an

effort to make sense and make meaning from difficult, painful, and com-

plicated experiences.

Keywords: difference, stereotypes, prejudice, embodiment, place-specific expe-

rience, quare theory, quare auto/ethnography, blackened auto/ethnography,

bridge building, black women, reflexivity

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary

polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then

does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within

that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the

power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage

and sustenance to act where there are no charters. (Lorde, 2007, p. 111)

My body houses my stories and remembers them sensually. Viscerally.

(Here.) Elbows, knees, chin, lips.

(There.) Ear lobes, nose, eyes, hands.

(Here.) Skin.

(There.) Stretch marks, moles, scars.

My body is a bridge that carries all the places I have lived and all the people I have

known.

International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 312–326.
ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455. © 2014 International Institute for Qualitative Research,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or
reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/irqr.2014.7.3.312.

http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.

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Auto/ethnography1 is like a bridge on my body, marked in words and scripts that

tell stories and secrets in invisible ink only I can see. When I tell my stories, reading

from the prose on my skin, written in my handwriting between brown lines on my

flesh, they are run-on sentences and fragments, falling off my side like long outgrown

garments. The stories blend in the archways of my body, the bend of my elbow, the

crevices between my fingers and toes, in the dip of my belly button, behind my ears,

on my thighs, and between my lips. I hide my deepest secrets there because no one

looks for bridges between the lines.

* * *

Bridges are passageways from here to there. They fill in gaps and openings, get

crossed over, in both directions, sometimes at the same time. Some people are afraid

of crossing a bridge, out of a fear that it might collapse under the weight of the

unknown. The uncertainty of encountering difference on the other side of ourselves

is a challenge.

Bridges are shoulders.

Bridges get tired.

* * *

Our experiences of difference and place are marked on the body. While places map

onto our identity, we also map and mark the places we live and inhabit (Mingé &

Zimmerman, 2013). Our presence (and absence) in these spaces leads to place-

specific experiences that influence our identity and how we come to know and

understand ourselves in relationship to others. Our positionality and standpoint

dictate difference and how it is performed, experienced, and understood. In the

following autoethnographic excerpt, I expand the metaphor of my body as a bridge

and my story as a bridge, across difference.

A Bridge At Home: Intersections and Dirt Roads

I don’t remember much about the first trailer we lived in other than it sat just beyond

the borders of our family land. We were surrounded on both sides by neighbors far

enough for privacy but close enough to feel welcome. There were well-worn paths in

the woods to get from our house to the babysitters and trees with trunks that looked

like welcoming arms every time I climbed them. My grandmother had a modest

garden in the yard, and there was a patch of sweet dirt near where the cars were

parked and where we kept Blackjack, our Doberman pinscher, tied up to the light

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pole. The dirt road seemed endlessly long when we rode our bikes, and there were

deep ditches to hide in when we played hide and go seek and went to bury our

treasures (cheap prizes from cereal boxes or happy meals).

When I think of my childhood I remember the sanctity of home. I remember the

deep orange and heavy burgundy of curtains that kept the house dark and warm year-

round. I remember the tattered pictures of relatives in cheap gold foil frames hanging

on the hollow walls with wallet-sized school pictures of unrecognizable children

tucked in the corner. I remember plastic-covered couches in the ‘‘living room,’’ where

we were never allowed to sit, and the hiss of the pressure pot and smell of ham hocks

brewing every time my grandmother cooked.

Home, back then, did not mean the walls around the place you lived but every-

thing around it. Our bedroom community was close-knit with shared histories and

legacies that captured our security and intentional stagnancy. We chose small

churches that our grandparents helped build over megachurches where our names

would be lost. We preferred hometown minimarkets to grocery stores because we

could buy things on credit (reputation), not with credit (cards). We kept our doors

unlocked during the day so that company could ‘‘come on in’’ when we called, and

our phone number was listed in the phone book so that anyone looking could find us.

When we said ‘‘make yourself at home,’’ we meant it, so our guests would take off

their shoes, fix themselves a plate, and sink into the cheap couch like they belonged.

We felt safe and protected because even though crime and violence existed, even

criminals respected the people they grew up with.

On the inside, our lives were all alike because we were four or five generations

deep in the struggle to exist. Generation after generation we had lived there, on land

that was ours, roads named after us, with jobs and talents passed down to hardheaded

children. We lived lives that no one else seemed to care about. From the outside

looking in, nobody distinguished the haves from the have nots; we were all poor to

them, as dirty as the red mud we walked barefoot on. We were invisible to outsiders

and sometimes to each other.

To be invisible was preferable. Invisibility meant hegemony, which translated, in

our community, to harmony. Difference was strictly disciplined.

We saw outsiders, anyone not from where we were from, as other-worldly,

suspicious and not worthy of trust or consideration. We were aware that people

on the outside saw us as good for nothing, uneducated, unsophisticated, retrograde

rural Jesus freaks who would never have anything or amount to anything. These were

both stereotypes and possibilities for some of us, but we concentrated on our realities

instead of other people’s imaginations.

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Our homogenous lives were grounded in redundancy and familiarity. There is
comfort when everybody knows your name (and your business). We learned differ-
ence was dangerous. I was warned to avoid driving down unlit roads alone at night
because Klansmen were known to lie in wait there. I was told, at a certain age, that to
wear provocative clothes would provoke the masked lusts of boys and grown men
alike and that it was my responsibility to not tempt them. I was expected to receive
good grades and to pay attention in school because white people assumed black
children were ‘‘hard learners,’’2 and I would have to prove them wrong by working
twice as hard. When someone pointed out a man in the neighborhood who dressed
like a woman, or a woman who walked like a man, they were called ‘‘funny,’’ and their
parents, especially the mother, were blamed for them turning out ‘‘that way.’’ Women
kept and ran households, but there was an unspoken understanding that men, even
in their absence, were somehow superior to women, so women and blackgirl children
were expected to cook, clean, fix plates, wash clothes and dishes, and otherwise cater
to men and to try with all of their might to deserve a man’s love, affection, or loyalty
when they were grown. These lessons came from the pulpit, the porch, and the
pathway, from aunts, cousins, and strangers.
Auto/ethnography: Here and There
Chang (2013) describes autoethnography as a personal and social process. She says:
It is personal because the personal experiences of researchers themselves are the
foundation of autoethnography. It is also a highly social process.
Autoethnographers carefully examine how they have interacted with other people
within their socio-cultural contexts and how social forces have influenced their
lived experiences. Therefore, in a public light, autoethnographies reveal their
author’s personal, professional, relational, and socio-cultural identities. (p. 107)
While auto/ethnography is traditionally used to encourage reciprocal (inside-out)
and analytical investigations of self and culture, the personal and social significance
make it a useful method for introducing and discussing controversial topics related to
social identity (Boylorn, 2011a, 2011b), especially for marginalized folk. In this article,
I use auto/ethnography to confront my biases, interrupt stubborn narratives that
resist diversity, and make new and revised storylines possible.
As a form of ‘‘doubled storytelling that moves from self to culture and back again’’
(Boylorn, 2013a, p. 174), auto/ethnography values lived experience as data and allows
researchers to be fully conscious as writers and participants in their narratives.
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Because it privileges the ‘‘I’’ and centers personal experience, auto/ethnography has
the capacity to speak to/from both the margins and hyphens of subjective experi-
ences. I engage reflexive auto/ethnography as a bridge that connects the past with the
future. Engaging auto/ethnography as a way of making meaning and reimagining
moments with new eyes and new insight introduces the possibilities of bridging
(backward) in an effort to make sense and make meaning from difficult, painful, and
complicated experiences.
Auto/ethnography asks that I pay attention to the details and everydayness of my
life, write about and through difficult moments, write to make sense of my self, write
to make sense of the world, and write to alleviate the seeming discomfort that resides
in topics that go unspoken. This call to write as a personal and social endeavor
requires me to interrogate not only how I influence places and culture but how the
places I live, visit, and inhabit influence me. I want to understand how the place I call
home provided security and safety but also instigated prejudices.
Autoethnography requires researchers to ‘‘make personal experiences meaning-
ful for others, and, consequently, say something about cultural experience and/or
motivate cultural change’’ (Adams, 2011, p. 158). Accordingly, I write auto/ethnog-
raphy as a method of inquiry (Richardson, 2000) to resist assumptions (Griffin, 2012),
to demystify difference, to examine how my interior life shapes and is shaped by
larger culture, to implicate and interrogate myself in my prior and present prejudices,
to emphasize intersectional components of identity, and to instigate positive cultural
change by challenging the homogenous groupthink that is often rooted in small rural
communities.
I situate my raced, sexed, and classed consciousness by writing ‘‘blackened’’ auto/
ethnography (Boylorn, 2013a), which helps me negotiate place-specific realities and
find connections in seemingly incongruous spaces. I concentrate on my role as a former
member of a small rural community and how my relationship to that community and
the people who live in it has influenced my perspective of difference. I interrogate
myself as an outsider-within (Collins, 1986) to discuss how my experiences in my home
community inform how I approach and understand difference outside it. I also inter-
rogate difference in the academy, in dorm rooms and classrooms, to explain how auto/
ethnography can be considered alongside theory to help bridge cultural difference.
Theories of Difference
In the opening quote to this article, Audre Lorde (2007) explains the creative poten-
tial of difference. Lorde celebrated diversity in her work and focused on the theory of
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difference that claims black women’s experiences are not only different from white
women but different from each other. In her lectures and essays, she discussed the
impact of race, class, sex, age, ability, and sexual orientation as factors that influence
how oppression is uniquely experienced. She was disinterested in ignoring our dif-
ferences for the sake of solidarity but instead challenged us to think about how our
particular and singular experiences inform and are informed by our standpoints.
Building on Lorde’s work, Crenshaw (1991) introduced the concept of intersection-
ality, which looks at the marginalization experienced when race and gender identity
politics are centralized. While I feel that these issues are important to consider
holistically, it is equally important to think about how difference is constructed and
understood on the margins. Because social identities are sometimes fluid and it is
possible to experience privilege and marginalization simultaneously, or in different
ways and at different moments in time, it is important that all people, including those
who are considered ‘‘different’’ or marginalized, understand how to relate with others
and each other despite tangential and discreet differences.
For example, Johnson (2001) expands the discussion of difference with his inter-
vention and reinterpretation of queer studies, which he found to be too focused on
white experience(s). Johnson defines the term quare from the African American
vernacular for queer as ‘‘sometimes homophobic in usage, but always denot[ing]
excess incapable of being contained within conventional categories of being’’ (p. 2).
He defines quare theory as having the capacity to both critique (‘‘speak across’’) and
locate (‘‘articulate’’) class and race identities. Inspired by his rural roots and his
grandmother, he understands ‘‘quare’’ to be a culture-specific rendering of things
that are unfamiliar. Referring to his grandmother’s use of the word, he says:
Her use of ‘queer’ is almost always nuanced. . . . On the one hand, my
grandmother uses ‘quare’ to denote something or someone who is odd,
irregular or slightly off kilter—definitions in keeping with traditional
understandings and uses of ‘queer.’ On the other hand, she also deploys ‘quare’
to denote something excessive—something that might philosophically translate
into an excess of discursive and epistemological meanings grounded in African
American cultural rituals and lived experience. (p. 2)
Quare theory offers an opportunity to challenge white- and male-centered paradigms
by addressing the absence of diversity and naming the specificity of individual ex-
periences. While Johnson’s intervention of queer theory preceded and is distinct
from the consideration of autoethnography as queer (Adams & Holman Jones,
2008), the concept of quare study (incorporating an intentional race and class
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critique) can extend to autoethnography, especially in a discussion of speaking across
difference(s). Quare auto/ethnography (in comparison to queer autoethnography)
shifts its focus to culture-specific realities situated in race, rurality, and class. Con-
necting notions of difference to the practice of autoethnography offers the opportu-
nity to bridge moments and experiences across place and time.
A Bridge in the Dorm Room (circa 1998)
When I was 19 years old, I relished ignorance and books. The nightstand in my
cluttered dorm room housed at least three novels I would reread in rotation fea-
turing characters who were rebels and pariahs. I identified with them, I felt for them,
I wanted to be them, but I never experienced the depth of difference they navigated
to survive. I also never considered how my failure to engage people like them in the
real world made me a hypocrite.
When I was 19 years old, I began to question some of the lessons of my childhood
community. The meaning and significance of difference shifted in my new environ-
ment. I was different in every way that mattered. I was black, female, working class,
and from a small town. I failed at attempts to fit in with the popular girls and
befriended another small town blackgirl who stayed in the dorm room next door
to mine. We spent our evenings sitting in the hallway gossiping, doing homework,
sharing snacks, and watching people pass by. It was from our hallway spying that we
decided there was a lesbian living on our hall. Her room was four doors down, and
she disappeared behind the door every night with a girl we had initially mistaken for
a boy. We never spoke to her, other than a quick ‘‘hey’’ when she rushed past us,
trying not to trip over our legs or our paraphernalia, strewn selfishly on the floor
between our rooms. We never admitted the reciprocal fear that existed between our
impersonal exchanges. She was probably afraid of being rejected or judged by us, and
we were afraid of confronting or admitting our biases. We hesitated to befriend our
neighbor out of an ignorant fear that lesbianism was contagious. Because she was
black, like us, we were not repulsed by her different way of loving; we were intrigued.
We were also conflicted because we were taught to believe that homosexuality was
wrong. There were no lesbians (that we knew of) where we were from. And there was
no more despicable difference according to our communities.
We were fascinated by the same-sex couple and assumed that their relationship
was heteronormative because the girl who lived with us was feminine and her part-
ner, who dressed in men’s clothes and wore a short haircut, was presumably mas-
culine. We stared when they walked past us and listened intently from our windows
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when they argued on the front steps of the dormitory, the feminine partner walking
away in tears while the masculine partner stomped away in silence. We were captivated
by them, and as small town blackgirls who had been adequately indoctrinated, we
were torn between judging them (for being different) and admiring them (for being
themselves). It was one of the first times I can remember feeling conflicted and
confused because of my community conditioning, but it was not the last. I felt similar
guilt/shame/confusion when I smoked marijuana for the first time, had sex out of wed-
lock, and got a bad grade. The older I got, the more difficult it was to not be different.
* * *
Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Boylorn, 2013b) is a black
girl’s song (Shange, 1997) that chronicles what it was like to grow up poor, rural, and
black in the South. The book is a dance of poetry, prose, and pain punctuated by laugh-
out-loud moments, resonance, and resilience. I wrote the book to respond to the
erasure I felt as a blackgirl in the academy whose lived experiences were inconsistently
represented. Sweetwater is also an expression of my difference and defiance. Embedded
in my small town story are critiques of the internalized racism, sexism, and homopho-
bia I learned as a child. ‘‘Porch Premonitions,’’ a prelude between the first and second
parts of the book, offers the unspoken possibility of a lesbian relationship between
Sweetie Pie and Peewee, a queer couple who gossip about other characters. While
lesbian relationships were not detailed or discussed in my interviews for the book, it
was important to me to make them possible through Sweetie Pie and Peewee’s open-
secret relationship. The ambiguity of the description mimics the ways these women
would have existed in the hostile environment, visible but unnoticed.
Many readers overlook their relationship because it doesn’t fit small town think-
ing and it doesn’t make sense in the heteronormative lens of the larger narrative, but
they are there, in the same ways that queer black women have always existed in small
communities. However, we are socially conditioned to pretend differences don’t
exist, or to minimize them (Lorde, 2007).
A Bridge in the Bedroom (circa 2008)
Elbows, knees, chin, lips.
Ear lobes, nose, eyes, hands.
Skin.
Stretch marks, moles, scars.
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On mornings after making love I talk to myself. My postcoital conversations keep me
company after lovers leave, careful not to overstay their welcome or invite specula-
tion of relationship or expectation that their interest in me was anything more than
fleeting. Even though I was warned about roaming men, I was also trained to want
them. To want one. To want one to want me. I was taught, inadvertently, that my life
would be meaningless without a man. Women in my community were faithful to
unfaithful men and desperate for happily ever after.
I was told that every woman has needs. Every woman needs a man. These dis-
cussions never included women who are not sexually interested in men. Or women,
like me, who are suspicious, overly cautious, and afraid of commitment. I am told that
women are supposed to be wives and mothers. I am told that my aversion to these
desires is only temporary, that when I meet a good man I will change my mind about
marriage, that when I fall in love I will change my mind about children. These things,
I am told, are my destiny as a black woman.
* * *
If I were a man, patriarchy would protect me from the traditional and hegemonic
expectations of marriage and parenthood. My independence would be celebrated,
and it would make me more, not less, desirable. If I were a black man, my currency
would make me a commodity and I would not be accused of being selfish if I decided
to prioritize my interests, goals, or ambitions. I was conditioned to revere men at the
expense of myself, to downplay my abilities so I don’t intimidate them, and to feel like
a failure if I remained childless and unmarried in adulthood. These decisions were
not seen as choices but rather as disappointments.
My intentional single status is deviant. While many women are without hus-
bands, it is not by choice. I am reminded by older women, whose husbands are rarely
faithful, that I don’t know my proper place and that it is my responsibility to make
a man feel necessary. They also warn me to keep a separate bank account if I ever
marry, just in case.
A Bridge in the Classroom (circa 2013)
I never cease being a rural blackgirl. I enter spaces fully aware that the myths of black
womanhood are embedded on my body, so too, my rurality. I introduce myself as
someone who was born and raised in the South. I know what that means is different
to different people, and I accept the burden and assumptions it carries. Bringing my
whole self, and my backstory, into the classroom sometimes complicates
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conversations because I am so presumably different from most of my students. The
easiest response to ignorance is judgment, but it is not a fair response. When I was
20 years old, I had a distinctly different understanding of what difference meant.
I didn’t recognize the ways that I victimized those who were different from me.
While my judgments were well-intentioned and based on things that I had been
taught to embrace as truth, they inevitably caused harm to people I ignored,
avoided, or judged for being ‘‘not like me.’’ I wasn’t open to getting to know them
or listening to their stories.
I witness the same know-it-all attitude from my students that I felt when I was
their age, and while engaging difference in the classroom can be challenging, I see
difference as a pedagogical possibility rather than a burden. I find that engaging
students with the truth of my personal experiences, through honesty and vulnera-
bility, can help them reconsider their own prejudices.
* * *
Day 1: It is the start of another semester, and I am teaching a class about race, class, and
gender difference. When I enter the room I realize I may be the only black professor
many of the students will have during their tenure at the Southern, predominantly white
university where I teach. I also realize I am one of the few black people in the room. In
the moments before class starts, the students are watching me and wondering if I am in
the right place. My name on their schedules does not offer the slightest hint that I am
black, or a woman, or young enough to be their sister. I stand before them feeling judged
and inadequate, aching for the opportunity to read off my credentials.
Day 2: Teaching about diversity is difficult. Many of my students are from homog-
enous communities that have not prepared them to engage difference. When we
begin discussing the topic of social privileges, several students struggle with admit-
ting they are privileged and become defensive. They are uncomfortable when I
explain that there are structural oppressions that reinforce injustice and disenfran-
chisement for marginalized groups. They realize they are not marginalized, but they
prefer to believe that no one is. They are adamant that we are postracial, that the real
racists are those who want to talk about race, and disadvantage is a preference or
punishment for bad choices. When I tell them that racism is institutionalized, poor
people are not lazy, homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice, and statistically most of
the women on welfare are white, they are skeptical. A raucous student who has
challenged all of my statements sits in the corner and rolls her eyes.
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Day 3: I introduce an in-class activity that will allow us to silently witness the
diversity represented in the room. I have done this activity many times before, and
it is usually an opportunity for the class to coalesce and bond. I participate along-
side the students and am uncomfortable when I am the only person to ‘‘out’’ herself
as having grown up poor. I wonder how the students, all white except for one black
woman, feel. During the talk-back discussion, a well-meaning white student raises
her hand. ‘‘I really admire rags to riches stories,’’ she says, ‘‘I’m proud of them.’’
I am confused by her comment in the context of our discussion of diversity and
attempt to salvage the conversation by discussing how rags-to-riches myths are
stories of exceptionalism and oftentimes do more harm than good. I later realize
she was talking about me. She considers my ascension from working class to
professor to be admirable. She’s proud of me. I don’t know if I should be offended
or flattered.
Day 4: We read a list of white privileges in class. When I ask if anyone thinks the
statements are outdated or irrelevant, several hands go up. One woman likens red-
headed white women to black women in reference to beauty standard claims. ‘‘Gin-
gers are discriminated against,’’ she says, ‘‘so it’s not just black people.’’ Another
student says that she knows what it is like to be a minority because as a freshman
she took a women’s studies course that had as many black people in it as white
people. I am surprised by the arguments and feel temporarily silenced. When
I attempt to explain that their examples don’t compare to race and ethnic difference,
they become frustrated, with one student saying ‘‘I am just tired of people acting like
white people don’t know what it feels like to be different.’’
Day 5: A black woman student raises her hand during a discussion on social class.
She has expressed anxiety, at times, about participating in class because she speaks
with a Southern dialect and is unfamiliar with the jargon of the discipline. I call her
name and wait for her words. We speak the same language, not just as black women
but as Southern, small town black women. The colloquialisms that she sometimes
uses to punctuate a point are familiar to me. She reminds me of home. She reminds
me of me.
‘‘I have never really understood how social class works,’’ she explains, ‘‘because my
family doesn’t have a lot of money, but we own a lot of land and for us that means
something. We are country folks, farmers, so land and animals is all we need.’’ While
she is talking I am thinking about the family land in my hometown and wonder how
much money it is worth.
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I never understood how folk who are well to do might look down on us, you
know, because we don’t live in big houses or drive fancy cars but what we have is ours.
We don’t have a big house, but the house we have is on several acres of land that is
ours. And we might drive old raggedy cars, but they get us where we need to go, and
they are paid for. And other folk, they have nice things, but they are slaves to it. They
make payments on it. They don’t own it outright. But our stuff, it may not be the best,
but it’s ours’.
* * *
Auto/ethnography helps me to deconstruct difference and stereotypes in the class-
room. I frame discussions of difference in the classroom with auto/ethnographies.
My truth-telling inspires students to tell their truths and consider their biases.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When I am confronted with prejudices
in the classroom, especially those that are embedded in ignorant statements or non-
verbal reactions to my lecture, I try to remember that arriving at an inclusive ideol-
ogy is a process and many of my students, like me, have to unlearn the prejudices
that have been ingrained in them from childhood. We don’t recognize the ways we
discriminate against others until we hear the story of what it feels like to be the Other.
I am embarrassed about the ways I used to think about difference. Even though
I was never openly hostile, my ambivalence was injurious. Disconfirmation is a form
of discrimination that strips a person of their humanity, and there were countless
times when I pretended the person was not there or that their difference did not
exist. My response is similar to the notion of colorblindness. Well-meaning white
folk believe that racism cannot exist if we pretend to not notice skin color. They
assume that racism is the equivalent of seeing and acknowledging difference. Truth
is, it is not discriminatory to see difference, it is discriminatory to treat someone
badly because they are different. The danger is not in being different, the danger is
in denying it.
From Here to There and Back (Home) Again: A Conclusion
I learned a handful of lessons from my community, and while some of those lessons
were useful, others were limiting. In the same moment I was taught to be cautious of
racism, I was also taught to be homophobic. I received contradictory messages about
being a good woman: independent, capable, and generous, but also subservient to
men. My community taught me that I should know my place (as a black woman), be
seen and not heard (as a child), and conform to community standards at all costs. It
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was unacceptable to be or act any different. I couldn’t tell the difference between the
difference, but I did not question what I learned. Nobody did.
I look at difference differently now. I don’t see it as something to be challenged,
feared, or hidden. I see difference as beautiful possibility and auto/ethnography as
a creative means by which to build bridges across our differences. I believe auto/
ethnography is an important tool as a self-researcher because it implicates me as
a cultural member but also allows me to confront problematic cultural practices that
I myself have participated in. Marginalized folk tend to prioritize or organize oppres-
sion so their prejudices are overlooked. Auto/ethnography is an accountability check
for me. By looking at myself through an introspective and retrospective lens, I have to
take responsibility for my actions and attempt, through personal narrative, to correct
them.
Johnson (2001) describes homeplace as ‘‘a site which quare praxis must criti-
que . . . we may seek refuge in homeplace as a marginally safe place to critique
oppression outside its confines, but we must also deploy quare theory to address
oppression within homeplace itself’’ (p. 19). I had to be willing to turn my critical lens
back on my home community to identify problematic ideologies that threaten exter-
nal bridge-building. People who are disadvantaged, like those who have privilege, are
oftentimes oblivious to the ways their actions or behaviors further oppresses other
marginalized folk (e.g.,, homophobia in the black community, sexism in the civil
rights movement, and racism in the feminist movement).
As an outsider-within (Collins, 1986), my commitments to my home community
and my politics outside it create an interesting dichotomy. I am committed to making
my homeplace a safe space for those who do not conform to traditional and hege-
monic norms because I am invested in eliminating injustice against all people. As
a teacher, I am interested in challenging how people think about identity. As an ally,
I am offended by homophobia and invested in creating a world that is inclusive of all
people (regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender performance, and
myriad identifications and self-expressions). As a feminist, I am determined to not be
held to gender scripts or expectations about my life as a woman. As someone raised
working class, I understand the nuances of social class and its impact on social
identity. As a country, rural black woman, I am interested in dismantling the stereo-
types outsiders have about rurality and the fear rural folk have about difference.
It is easy to demoralize difference when you are never exposed to it or when you
are conditioned to avoid it. The safety and familiarity of home always made me feel
connected, safe, welcome, and cared for. It was, however, also isolating. We do not
live or exist on islands. It is important for me to bridge the different places and spaces
324 ROBIN M. BOYLORN

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in my life so that I can navigate my way back and forth. That means that I have to
resist and reject parts of my small town self and challenge the notion that difference,
discrimination, and prejudice only matter when I am personally affected. Auto/eth-
nography (as a way of engaging intersectionality and quare theory) is a powerful and
strategic tool for bridge-building across difference. Our stories, embodied and
embedded within, are opportunities to learn about ourselves and each other. And
that is a bridge worth crossing.
Note
1. The author intentionally uses a slash when referring to her personal auto/ethnographies in
an effort to recognize the plurality of her experience as a black woman and to designate an
acknowledgment and reverence to other black women whose stories have not/will not/or
cannot be told. This is a conscious political choice done in solidarity with other black
women auto/ethnographers and is not a typo.
2. To be a hard learner meant you were ‘‘difficult to teach’’ or had a hard time understanding in
school.
References
Adams, T. E. (2011). Narrating the closet: An autoethnography of same-sex attraction. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Adams, T. E., & Holman Jones, S. (2008). Autoethnography is queer. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S.
Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies
(pp. 373–390). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Boylorn, R. M. (2011a). Black kids’ (B.K.) stories: Ta(l)king (about) race outside of the classroom.
Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies, 11, 59–70. doi:10.1177/1532708610386922
Boylorn, R. M. (2011b). Gray or for colored girls who are tired of chasing rainbows: Race and
reflexivity, Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies, 11, 178–186. doi:10.1177/
1532708611401336
Boylorn, R. M. (2013a). ‘‘Sit with your legs closed!’’ and other sayin’s from my childhood.
In S. Holman Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp.
173–185). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Boylorn, R. M. (2013b). Sweetwater: Black women and narratives of resilience. New York: Peter
Lang.
Chang, H. (2013). Individual and collaborative autoethnography as method: A social scientist’s
perspective. In S. Holman Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethno-
graphy (pp. 107–122). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of Black
feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14–S32. doi:10.2307/800672
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence
against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241–1299.
FROM HERE TO THERE 325

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Griffin, R. A. (2012). I am an angry black woman: Black feminist autoethnography, voice, and
resistance. Women’s Studies in Communication, 35, 138–157. doi:10.1080/07491409.2012.
724524
Johnson, E. P. (2001). ‘‘Quare’’ studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies
I learned from my grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly, 21, 1–25. doi:10.
1080/10462930128119
Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. (Original work published 1984)
Mingé, J. M., & Zimmerman, A. L. (2013). Concrete and dust: Mapping the sexual terrains of
Los Angeles. New York: Routledge.
Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),
Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Shange, N. (1997). For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. New
York: Scribner. (Original work published 1975)
About the Author
Robin M. Boylorn teaches and researches topics related to diversity and social identity with an
intentional focus on the lived experiences of black women. She is the author of Sweetwater:
Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Peter Lang) and co-editor of Critical Auto-
ethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (Left Coast).
326 ROBIN M. BOYLORN

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Women & Language

Volume 42.1, Spring 2019
doi: 10.34036/WL.2019.014

Forum
Intersectional Feminisms and Sexual
Violence in the Era of Me Too, Trump,
and Kavanaugh

Judy E. Battaglia
Loyola Marymount University

Paige P. Edley
Loyola Marymount University

Victoria Ann Newsom
Olympic College

HasHtags sucH as #Metoo, #tiMesup, #StopKavanaugh, and
#MuteRKelly1 illustrate anger in the aftermath of sexual violence.
Normalizing rape culture, the U.S. President mocked and construed the
#MeToo movement as creating “a very scary time for young men in
America. . . [but] Women are doing great” (Diamond, 2018). Activists
have used hashtags and other forms of advocacy to express their outrage
about sexual harassment in Hollywood and business, Trump’s comments
about grabbing women “by the pussy” (Jacobs, 2017), and Judge Brett
Kavanaugh’s confirmation as Supreme Court Justice after the world
witnessed Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s powerful, moving, precise, and
credible Senate testimony about how Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her
as a teenager. Those in power continue to protect the privileged cis-
hetero, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2000, p. 118).

Outrage to unchecked sexual violence has resulted in movements
like #MeToo and the election of more than 100 women to the most
diverse U.S. Congress ever in 2018. Additionally, worldwide movements
have emerged, such as #MeTooIndia, Italy’s #QuellaVoltaChe, Spain’s
#YoTambien, Arabic-speaking countries’ #AnaKaman, and others
(Adam & Booth, 2018). It is imperative that white cis-hetero people
be disruptors/contrarians to stand up against the wrongs perpetrated
on marginalized bodies by white systems. White silence is violence. We
argue in brief that marginalized voices must be centered and call for
intersectional scholarship, activism, and advocacy for and about the

134 Battaglia, Edley, & Newsom

most vulnerable voices—children (Crowe, 2018; Children’s Hospital
of Philadelphia, 2019), black trans people (Morgan, 2018), sex workers
(Carr, 2019; Raghurim, 2015), and students whose schools strive to
protect their brand rather than vulnerable students (Dick & Ziering,
2018; Freitas, 2018; Grigoriadis, 2017). We conclude with four steps to
emphasize intersectional voices.

Complexities and Intersectionality
The complex intersections of sexual violence and multi-marginalized
identities and lived experiences of children, cisgender femmes, and
non-binary individuals worldwide need to be unpacked vigilantly. In the
era of Trump, Kavanaugh, and Fox News, open racism and (hetero/cis)
sexism have become normalized in everyday life. Political polarization
has generated tensions, open hostility, and dichotomous language
that encourages “us versus them” narratives and prevents the “both/
and” (Pew, 2014). Complexities of identities are not represented in
contemporary political, feminist, patriarchal, and hegemonic languages,
resulting in erasure of multiply marginalized voices. We must elevate
the voices of the multi-marginalized.

Political rhetoric often works to construct various kinds of
dichotomies: feminists versus men, blacks versus whites, queers
versus heteros, and globalists versus nationalists. Such manufactured
divisiveness can empower authoritarian narratives. Activists who speak
and work against hegemonic norms often have to build coalitions,
forcing them to choose between oppressions that need the most
aggressive action. Both conservative and progressive arguments often
neglect multiple and alternative narratives and oppressions. The
problematic language of political argument does not allow multiplicities
of identity, experience, and standpoints that need voice and opportunity
to promote social change. For instance, Martínez’s (1998) notion of the
“oppression Olympics” describes the process whereby marginalized
groups compete with each other and thereby reduce their collaborative
power as a whole.

Erasure is itself a form of violence. Similarly, those who remain
silent when people of color, queer, and trans individuals are maligned
due to their race, sex, or gender identities, trivialize their commitment
to human dignity. Privileged white cisgender women must realize the
work accomplished by multiply marginalized peoples, both domestically
and globally, and recognize when to step in and when to step aside.
Black, brown, trans, queer, and other marginalized women/femmes

Forum Provocation: Intersectional Feminisms & Sexual Violence 135

are already doing sexual trauma movement work; privileged, white, cis-
hetero women must stand alongside as supportive bodies in the room,
if we are fortunate enough to be invited into those spaces. Moreover,
white cis-hetero men and conservative voices must stop saying “but not
all men” and realize the Me Too movement is about the pain of sexual
assault, not an opportunity for cisgender men to redirect the focus on
themselves. (Bateman, 2018). We must center the marginalized, listen
to the voices of survivors, and believe them. All bodies must feel safe to
recover from trauma.

Multiple Lenses, Methodologies, and Movements
In analyzing global rape culture, we use Halualani’s (2018) critical lens.
Halualani stresses the need to confront our own privilege and implicit
bias through what she calls Clear Sight, which “optimally positions
us to work for social change and intercultural justice. This bestows on
us the space and opportunity to connect and help others around us
(and especially those whose interests are marginalized) in a real and
authentic way” (p. xiv). We also build on Allen’s (2011) Difference Matters
to further the argument that categories of difference and experience
must be recognized in their own right and not as monolithic sets of
need. Moreover, we argue the language of oppression and sexual
violence, frequently constructed as a binary choice between victimhood
or survival, may be too limiting. Feminist scholars have debated about
the language of sexual violence for decades (see, in chronological order,
Lorde, 1984; Irigaray, 1985; Anzaldúa, 1987; Trinh, 1989; Taylor,
Hardman, & Wright, 2009; Freitag, 2018).

We call on feminist scholars within and beyond the field of
communication to consider sexual violence, especially the #MeToo,
#TimesUp, #StopKavanaugh, and other hashtag movements through
intersectional feminist and Halualani’s (2018) Clear Sight lenses to
understand the most vulnerable, invisible, and erased populations.
We are not the first to call for intersectional feminist scholarship on
vulnerable populations. As three cisgender, hetero, white women,
working with an intersectional feminist perspective, we recognize
the need to be more than allies and to be co-conspirators (Patterson,
2018). Recognizing our own privilege as we write this provocation essay
emphasizes distinctive intersectional positions among scholars, topics/
texts, and research participants.

As one example of using these multi-methodological, multi-linguistic,
intersectional, intercultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary lenses,

136 Battaglia, Edley, & Newsom

we foreground Tarana Burke’s creation of the Me Too movement 12
years prior to white feminist celebrity Alyssa Milano’s 2017 invitation,
“If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply
to this tweet” in response to allegations of sexual harassment and assault
by Harvey Weinstein, a former Hollywood producer, resulted in a viral
tweetstorm (Garcia, 2017). But Burke started the Me Too movement
in 2005 when she created the nonprofit JustBeInc.com in an effort
to facilitate healing for black women and girls in her community.2 In
describing the original Me Too movement, Burke (2018) argued:

This is a movement for and about survivors. If you let mainstream
media define who the “survivors” are[,] then we will always
only hear about famous, white, [cisgender] women. But they
don’t own the movement. […] We are building something that
has never existed[,] and we will need your help. The work of
the #metooMVMT will happen on and off-line. We want to
make sure survivors have the tools they need to craft their own
healing journey. I have no expectation of mainstream media to
tell the stories of marginalized people unless it serves them. But
when these groups speak out[,] are our communities ready to
stand in the gap? That’s how the movement grows.

Thus, we call on our colleagues to be strategically inclusive about whom
we listen to and whose pain we take seriously—both domestically
and internationally. As scholars, advocates, and accomplices/co-
conspirators, we must do better. We must keep in mind Burke’s
original mission and vision. Celebrities have supported the movements
financially and through their activism.3 As white, cisgender women, we
call on all our readers of privilege to make reparations and expand on
the valuable activism already being done to heal sexual trauma. Burke
(2018) explains how her work focuses on healing:

We don’t believe survivors have to detail their stories all the time.
We shouldn’t have to perform our pain over and over again for
the sake of your awareness. We also try to teach survivors to
not lean into their trauma but lean into the joy they curate in
life instead. […] Imagine […] you are trying to do that when
the news media keeps on erasing your experience or people
continuously reduce you to your pain. (Burke, 2018)

Forum Provocation: Intersectional Feminisms & Sexual Violence 137

Burke’s focus on healing rather than reliving trauma leads to our use of
the word “survivor,” despite Freitag’s (2018) powerful argument that the
word suggests the trauma is not ongoing. Burke (2018) argues: “Trauma
halts possibility, movement activates it. Movement creates possibility.”
Creating growth and possibility is crucial for healing.

Moreover, it is imperative to foreground Burke’s voice, which has
been co-opted as her movement gets redefined by white cisgender
women. This critical movement work must be enacted through
intersectional inclusivity (Crenshaw, 1989, 1992) and anti-racism.
To address problematic dichotomous language, we need to be more
collaborative in our research in terms of multi-voice/collaborative
methodologies, as well as joining alongside activists and advocates
(rather than as consultants). In opening up the complexities of voice, we
call for the inclusion of personal and multi-linguistic narratives; poetry;
rhetorical, textual, and content analyses; feminist (auto)ethnographies;
and community-based participant action research to keep mainstream
media from systemically redefining a movement founded and led by a
black woman and created specifically for black girls’ healing.

We are intersectional and intergenerational in our perspectives
within our multifaceted, embodied lives. We question through different
lenses and multiple standpoints. We speak from certain and specific social
locations, seeking to make material differences in the lived experiences
of individuals who are sexually assaulted often without consequences for
their attackers. Also imperative for healing is for white people to elevate,
rather than claim as their own, the intellectual and emotional labor of
people of color. This is what happened in the case of #MeToo. When
Burke learned Milano’s tweet had spread like wildfire, she had to decide
if she wanted to be “In concert or in conflict” with these white women
(Burke, 2018). She chose to collaborate. This example is not meant to
diminish Milano’s established work as a gender justice activist,4 but in
celebrity fashion, her tweet simultaneously brought her own story to the
forefront while erasing Burke’s important hands-on Me Too movement.

Call for Action
There must be action—scholarly and hands-on activist and advocacy
work. We call our academic colleagues to join the conversation being
led by activists and by students behind closed doors in dorm rooms.
We must enact real change and center the most vulnerable voices in
leadership, development, and narratives. Collins (2000) wrote, “Placing
African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of

138 Battaglia, Edley, & Newsom

analysis opens up the possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one
in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in
one historically created system” (p. 224). We must center marginalized
and multiply-marginalized experiences. The case of Cyntoia Brown
is a poignant example: a sex trafficked black teen, Brown received a
51-year prison sentence for killing the man who forced her into sex
slavery. Thanks to the organizing and activist work of black women,
the governor of Tennessee recently granted Brown clemency (Grafas
& Burnside, 2019). This case illustrates how sex, violence, and racism
intersect in the lives of children and women of color and how crucial it
is to believe all survivors, not just white cis-hetero women. In addition,
institutions of power, such as the Catholic Church and the Southern
Baptist Convention (Phillips & Wang, 2019), have admitted recently
to covering up sexual assaults of children and adults by clergy. The
Vatican has defrocked multiple priests and most recently a cardinal
(“U.S. ex-cardinal,” 2019) and confirmed stories of priests’ abusing
nuns and keeping them as sex slaves (“Pope admits clerical abuse,”
2019). Admission is one thing, defrocking another, but we must stand up
against powerful institutions to help heal the traumas of the vulnerable
and the voiceless.

Moreover, we need to examine our own implicit biases. Those
invited to the table from outside any given group need to be co-
conspirators (rather than allies) with survivors of all races, nationalities,
creeds, education, classes, abilities, sexual orientations, and gender
identities. We encourage our readers to view all co-conspirators with
healthy “cispicion” (Patterson, 2018, p. 146). Co-conspirators must
perform reality checks and exhibit real humility when we mess up. Co-
conspirators need to pass the mic, need to learn when to step in and
when to step aside. As co-conspirators ourselves, our first step is writing
this provocation essay and inviting intersectional responses alongside us.
Our next step is to release a call for intersectional and international voices
to contribute to our upcoming edited book and expand the conversation
begun here. Step three is to join our students in an intergenerational
movement to bring forward their alternative zines and podcasts to tell
survivors’ stories. Step four is to move out of the ivory tower and into
the streets to work alongside nonprofits and intersectional leaders who
are already doing and succeeding in Me Too movement work.

Forum Provocation: Intersectional Feminisms & Sexual Violence 139

Judy E. Battaglia (MA, California State University, Northridge)
is clinical associate professor in Communication Studies at Loyola
Marymount University. Her research focuses on post- & transmodern
theories of representation in various media forms and on the intersections
of race, class, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, & (dis)ability
in the nonprofit and educational sectors. She worked as Director of
Communication for I Live Here Projects, a nonprofit founded by Mia
Kirshner to tell stories of marginalized and disfranchised peoples
worldwide, and was instrumental in initiating the projects in Malawi
& Burma. She is advisor of the student-run mental health initiative,
To Write Love on Her Arms, which seeks to break the silence of
students living with anxiety, self-injury, depression, eating disorders, and
struggling with suicide. She is also a poet.

PaigE P. EdlEy (PhD, Rutgers University) is professor of Communication
Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her research and teaching
focus on the intersections of gender, power, and identity, especially
in the contexts of work-life balance, relationships, gender equity in
organizations, and a feminist critique of friends living with chronic
illness. She has published articles in such premiere journals as Management
Communication Quarterly, Communication Yearbook, and Women & Language,
as well as numerous edited books. Her teaching, scholarship, service,
and activism are mutually informative. She works with nonprofit
organizations, protests corporate greed, and works to promote social
justice on campus in the Los Angeles community and beyond.

Victoria ann nEwsom (PhD, Bowling Green State University) is
professor of Communication Studies at Olympic College in Bremerton,
Washington. Her research centers on the negotiation of power, gender,
and identity in performative and communication contexts. Her
current projects include work in international media activism, peace
studies, postcolonial feminism(s), Islamophobia studies, performative
pedagogies, and cultural studies-grounded analyses of transnational
diplomacies and policy making. She has published articles in, among
others, International Journal of Communication, Studies in Symbolic Interaction,
Global Media Journal, Communication Studies, Communication Yearbook, Journal
of International Women’s Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. Victoria’s
current research and activist interests focus on the intersection of post-
truth media, consumerism, and activism.

140 Battaglia, Edley, & Newsom

The authors’ names are in alphabetical order to demonstrate equal collaboration in
this essay.

Notes
1 The documentary Surviving R. Kelly broadcast on Lifetime (2019, January)
and social media movements #MuteRKelly and #BlackGirlsMatter
prompted RCA Records to dissolve their business contract with Kelly
(Sisario, 2019). The power of the movements focused on black girls’ and
women’s sexual trauma won over the power of the wealthy entertainer
who had rumors of sexual misconduct with teenage girls swirling around
him for two decades.
2 Throughout this essay, we distinguish between Burke’s original Me
Too movement without a hashtag and the social media movement as
#MeToo.
3 Alyssa Milano, America Ferrera, Emma Watson, Kiera Knightly,
and others have donated to the Me Too and Time’s Up movements to
help marginalized groups affected by sexual violence (Tribune Content
Agency, 2019; “Emma Watson”, 2019; “#MeToo: UK Stars”, 2019).
4 This includes her activism for breastfeeding mothers’ rights, queer
rights, and HIV/AIDS health status. When Milano was a child actor,
she appeared on The Phil Donahue Show and kissed Ryan White, a
child sick with HIV/AIDS in order to show that HIV/AIDS was not
spread by casual contact (Chuck, 2017).

References
Adam, K., & Booth, W. (2018, October 5). A year after it began, has

#MeToo become a global movement?. Washington Post. https://
www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-year-after-it-began-has-metoo-
become-a-global-movement/2018/10/05/1fc0929e-c71a-11e8-
9c0f-2ffaf6d422aa_story.html

Allen, B. J. (2011). Difference matters: Communicating social identity (2nd ed.).
Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new Mestiza. San
Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Bateman, S. (2018, Dec. 14). Not all men is an astonishingly selfish
reaction to women’s pain. Newshub. Retrieved from https://www.
newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/12/opinion-not-all-
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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack

by Peggy McIntosh

Through the work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the
curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-
privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say
they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the
curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials which
amount to taboos sur round the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s
disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged,
lessened or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized
that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a
phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white
person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a
disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white
privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught
not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is
like to have white privilege. I have come to se white privilege as an invisible package of
unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was
‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of
special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s
Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so
one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I
do to lessen or end it?”

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I
understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered
the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are
oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when
we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned
skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an
unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to
see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.
My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out:
whites are taught to think of their lives as a morally neutral, normative, and average,
also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow
“them” to be more like “us.”

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects
of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case
attack some what more to skin-color privilege that to class, religion, ethnic status, or
geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately
intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American co-worker, friends and
acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time,
place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the
time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing
in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or
pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be
followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown
that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the
existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white
privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race
represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my
cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my
hair.

10. Whether I checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work
against the appearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not
like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without
having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the
illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who
constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such
oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and
behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be facing
a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I
haven’t been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys,
and children’s magazine featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling
somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard,
held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers
on the job suspect that I got it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race
cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against
me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode
or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or
less match my skin.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realization on this list until I wrote it down. For
me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to
avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things
are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors
open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible backpack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of
daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated
taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for

everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant
and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of
assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main
piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the
turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could
think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant
cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly free.

In proportion as my racial group was being make confident, comfortable, and
oblivious, other groups were likely being made confident, uncomfortable, and alienated.
Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I
was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color.

For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually
think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck.
Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically overempower
certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power
conferred systematically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it
is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are
inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or
that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society.
Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the
holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we
can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always
reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the
human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege of a few.
Ideally it is an unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned
male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like
is whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage
and conferred dominance and it so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we
need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many,
perhaps most, of our white students in the US think that racism doesn’t affect them
because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In
addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need
similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage,
or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many.
Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated

with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects
of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion,
sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are
interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind
us eloquently.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both
active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the
dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as
a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by
members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance
on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to
think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. [But] a “white”
skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the
way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end,
these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen
dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned
advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by
whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to
get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness
about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to
maintain the myth of meritocracy the myth that democratic choice is equally available to
all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a
small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the
hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions
for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the
perquisites of being light-skinned. What well we do with such knowledge? As we know
from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned
advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our
arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

[1989]

WhiteSupremacy Culture

Tema Okun . dRworks . www.dismantlingracism.org

• This piece is dedicated to the late Kenneth Jones, a long-time colleague, mentor,

and friend who helped me become wise about many things and kept me honest
about everything else. I love you and miss you beyond words.

• This piece on white supremacy culture builds on the work of many people, including
(but not limited to) Andrea Ayvazian, Bree Carlson, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Eli
Dueker, Nancy Emond, Kenneth Jones, Jonn Lunsford, Sharon Martinas, Joan
Olsson, David Rogers, James Williams, Sally Yee, as well as the work of Grassroots
Leadership, Equity Institute Inc, the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, the
Challenging White Supremacy workshop, the Lillie Allen Institute, the Western
States Center, and the contributions of hundreds of participants in the DR process.

* These sections are based on the work of Daniel Buford, a lead trainer with the People’s
Institute for Survival and Beyond who has done extensive research on white supremacy culture.

This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in our
organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the
same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below
are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-
actively named or chosen by the group. They are damaging because they
promote white supremacy thinking. Because we all live in a white supremacy
culture, these characteristics show up in the attitudes and behaviors of all of us –
people of color and white people. Therefore, these attitudes and behaviors can
show up in any group or organization, whether it is white-led or predominantly
white or people of color-led or predominantly people of color.

perfectionism*
• little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing;

appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the
credit anyway

• more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate
• or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or

their work without ever talking directly to them
• mistakes are perceived as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person

making them as opposed to being seen for what they are – mistakes
• making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being

wrong
• little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned

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that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes
• tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and

appreciate what’s right
• often internally felt, in other words the perfectionist fails to appreciate her own

good work, more often pointing out his faults or ‘failures,’ focusing on
inadequacies and mistakes rather than learning from them; the person works
with a harsh and constant inner critic

antidotes: develop a culture of appreciation, where the organization takes
time to make sure that people’s work and efforts are appreciated; develop a
learning organization, where it is expected that everyone will make mistakes
and those mistakes offer opportunities for learning; create an environment
where people can recognize that mistakes sometimes lead to positive results;
separate the person from the mistake; when offering feedback, always speak
to the things that went well before offering criticism; ask people to offer
specific suggestions for how to do things differently when offering criticism;
realize that being your own worst critic does not actually improve the work,
often contributes to low morale among the group, and does not help you or
the group to realize the benefit of learning from mistakes

sense of urgency
• continued sense of urgency that makes it difficult to take time to be inclusive,

encourage democratic and/or thoughtful decision-making, to think long-term,
to consider consequences, or learn from mistakes (see above)

• frequently results in sacrificing potential allies for quick or highly visible
results, for example sacrificing interests of communities of color to more
quickly win victories for white people (seen as default or norm community)

• reinforced by funding proposals which promise too much work for too little
money and by funders who expect too much for too little

antidotes: realistic workplans; leadership which understands that things take
longer than anyone expects; discussion and planning for what it means to set
goals of inclusivity and diversity, particularly in terms of time; learn from past
experience how long things take; write realistic funding proposals with
realistic time frames; be clear about how you will make good decisions in an
atmosphere of urgency; realize that rushing decisions takes more time in the
long run because inevitably people who didn’t get a chance to voice their
thoughts and feelings will at best resent and at worst undermine the decision
because they were left unheard

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defensiveness
• the organizational structure is set up and much energy spent trying to prevent

abuse and protect power as it exists rather than to facilitate the best out of
each person or to clarify who has power and how they are expected to use it

• because of either/or thinking (see below), criticism of those with power is
viewed as threatening and inappropriate (or rude)

• people respond to new or challenging ideas with defensiveness, making it
very difficult to raise these ideas

• a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that people’s
feelings aren’t getting hurt or working around defensive people

• white people spend energy defending against charges of racism instead of
examining how racism is actually happening

• leaders perceive calls for change as personal attacks (because if they were
leading in the “right” way, then nothing would need to change); their
defensiveness creates an oppressive culture where people feel they cannot
make suggestions or when they do, these are ignored

antidotes: understand that structure cannot in and of itself facilitate or
prevent abuse; understand the link between defensiveness and fear (of losing
power, losing face, losing comfort, losing privilege); work on your own
defensiveness; name defensiveness as a problem when it is one; give people
credit for being able to handle more than you think; discuss the ways in which
defensiveness or resistance to new ideas gets in the way of the mission;
support yourself and others to avoid taking things personally

quantity over quality*
• all resources of organization are directed toward producing measurable goals
• things that can be measured are more highly valued than things that cannot,

for example numbers of people attending a meeting, newsletter circulation,
money spent are valued more than quality of relationships, democratic
decision-making, ability to constructively deal with conflict

• little or no value attached to process; if it can’t be measured, it has no value
• discomfort with emotion and feelings
• no understanding that when there is a conflict between content (the agenda

of the meeting) and process (people’s need to be heard or engaged), process
will prevail (for example, you may get through the agenda, but if you haven’t
paid attention to people’s need to be heard, the decisions made at the
meeting are undermined and/or disregarded)

antidotes: include process or quality goals in your planning; make sure your

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organization has a values statement which expresses the ways in which you
want to do your work; make sure this is a living document and that people are
using it in their day to day work; look for ways to measure process goals (for
example if you have a goal of inclusivity, think about ways you can measure
whether or not you have achieved that goal); learn to recognize those times
when you need to get off the agenda in order to address people’s underlying
concerns

worship of the written word
• if it’s not in a memo, it doesn’t exist
• the organization does not value other ways in which information gets shared
• those with strong documentation and writing skills are more highly valued,

even in organizations where ability to relate to others is key to the mission
antidotes: take the time to analyze how people inside and outside the

organization get and share information; figure out which things need to be
written down and come up with alternative ways to document what is
happening; work to recognize the contributions and skills that every person
brings to the organization (for example, the ability to build relationships with
those who are important to the organization’s mission); make sure anything
written can be clearly understood (avoid academic language, ‘buzz’ words,
etc.)

only one right way
• the belief there is one right way to do things and once people are introduced

to the right way, they will see the light and adopt it
• when they do not adapt or change, then something is wrong with them (the

other, those not changing), not with us (those who ‘know’ the right way)
• similar to the missionary who does not see value in the culture of other

communities, sees only value in their beliefs about what is good
antidotes: accept that there are many ways to get to the same goal; once the

group has made a decision about which way will be taken, honor that decision
and see what you and the organization will learn from taking that way, even
and especially if it is not the way you would have chosen; work on developing
the ability to notice when people do things differently and how those different
ways might improve your approach; look for the tendency for a group or a
person to keep pushing the same point over and over out of a belief that
there is only one right way and then name it; when working with communities
from a different culture than yours or your organization’s, be clear that you

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have some learning to do about the communities’ ways of doing; never
assume that you or your organization know what’s best for the community in
isolation from meaningful relationships with that community

paternalism
• decision-making is clear to those with power and unclear to those without it
• those with power assume they are capable of making decisions for and in the

interests of those without power
• those with power often don’t think it is important or necessary to understand

the viewpoint or experience of those for whom they are making decisions
• those without power do not really know how decisions get made and who

makes what decisions, and yet they are completely familiar with the impact of
those decisions on them

antidotes: make sure that everyone knows and understands who makes what
decisions in the organization; make sure everyone knows and understands
their level of responsibility and authority in the organization; include people
who are affected by decisions in the decision-making; make sure everyone
understands the budget (because if you understand the budget, you
understand a lot)

either/or thinking*
• things are either/or — good/bad, right/wrong, with us/against us
• closely linked to perfectionism in making it difficult to learn from mistakes or

accommodate conflict
• no sense that things can be both/and
• results in trying to simplify complex things, for example believing that poverty

is simply a result of lack of education
• creates conflict and increases sense of urgency, as people feel they must

make decisions to do either this or that, with no time or encouragement to
consider alternatives, particularly those which may require more time or
resources

• often used by those with a clear agenda or goal to push those who are still
thinking or reflecting to make a choice between ‘a’ or ‘b’ without
acknowledging a need for time and creativity to come up with more options

antidotes: notice when people use ‘either/or’ language and push to come up
with more than two alternatives; notice when people are simplifying complex
issues, particularly when the stakes seem high or an urgent decision needs to
be made; slow it down and encourage people to do a deeper analysis; when

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people are faced with an urgent decision, take a break and give people some
breathing room to think creatively; avoid (when possible) making decisions
under extreme pressure

power hoarding
• little, if any, value around sharing power
• power seen as limited, only so much to go around
• those with power feel threatened when anyone suggests changes in how

things should be done in the organization, feel suggestions for change are a
reflection on their leadership

• those with power don’t see themselves as hoarding power or as feeling
threatened

• those with power assume they have the best interests of the organization at
heart and assume those wanting change are ill-informed (stupid), emotional,
inexperienced

antidotes: include power sharing in your organization’s values statement;
discuss what good leadership looks like and make sure people understand
that a good leader develops the power and skills of others; understand that
change is inevitable and challenges to your leadership can be healthy and
productive; make sure the organization is focused on the mission

fear of open conflict
• people in power are afraid of expressed conflict and try to ignore it or run

from it
• when someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to

blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is
causing the problem

• emphasis on being polite at the surface (while often deeply offensive to those
who have a beef with you or your organization); insisting on politeness as
terms for conversation or negotiation (i.e. requiring people to “check” their
anger, particularly when it is a logical response to what is happening)

• equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line

antidotes: role play ways to handle conflict before conflict happens;
distinguish between being polite and raising hard issues; don’t require those
who raise hard issues to raise them in ‘acceptable’ ways, especially if you are
using the ways in which issues are raised as an excuse not to address those
issues; once a conflict is resolved, take the opportunity to revisit it and see
how it might have been handled differently

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individualism*
• little experience or comfort working as part of a team
• people believe they are responsible for solving problems alone
• accountability, if any, goes up and down, not sideways to peers or to those

the organization is set up to serve
• desire for individual recognition and credit
• leads to isolation
• competition more highly valued than cooperation and where cooperation is

valued, little time or resources devoted to developing skills in how to
cooperate

• creates a lack of accountability, as the organization values those who can get
things done on their own without needing supervision or guidance

antidotes: include teamwork as an important value in your values statement;
make sure the organization is working towards shared goals and people
understand how working together will improve performance; evaluate
people’s ability to work in a team as well as their ability to get the job done;
make sure that credit is given to all those who participate in an effort, not just
the leaders or most public person; make people accountable as a group
rather than as individuals; create a culture where people bring problems to
the group; use staff meetings as a place to solve problems, not just a place to
report activities

I’m the only one
• connected to individualism, the belief that if something is going to get done

right, ‘I’ am the one to do it
• little or no ability to delegate work to others
antidotes: evaluate people based on their ability to delegate to others;

evaluate people based on their ability to work as part of a team to accomplish
shared goals

progress is bigger, more*
• observed in how we define success (success is always bigger, more)
• progress is an organization which expands (adds staff, adds projects) or

develops the ability to serve more people (regardless of how well they are
serving them)

• gives no value, not even negative value, to its cost, for example, increased
accountability to funders as the budget grows, ways in which those we serve

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may be exploited, excluded, or underserved as we focus on how many we are
serving instead of quality of service or values created by the ways in which we
serve

antidotes: create Seventh Generation thinking by asking how the actions of
the group now will affect people seven generations from now; make sure that
any cost/benefit analysis includes all the costs, not just the financial ones, for
example the cost in morale, the cost in credibility, the cost in the use of
resources; include process goals in your planning, for example make sure that
your goals speak to how you want to do your work, not just what you want to
do; ask those you work with and for to evaluate your performance

objectivity*
• the belief that there is such a thing as being objective or ‘neutral’
• the belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not

play a role in decision-making or group process
• invalidating people who show emotion
• requiring people to think in a linear (logical) fashion and ignoring or

invalidating those who think in other ways
• impatience with any thinking that does not appear ‘logical’
antidotes: realize that everybody has a world view and that everybody’s world

view affects the way they understand things; realize this means you too; push
yourself to sit with discomfort when people are expressing themselves in ways
which are not familiar to you; assume that everybody has a valid point and
your job is to understand what that point is; recognize that we can know
things emotionally and intuitively in ways that we may not be able to explain
“rationally;” understand that often “rational” thinking is actually an emotional
response couched in logic

right to comfort
• the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological

comfort (another aspect of valuing ‘logic’ over emotion)
• scapegoating those who cause discomfort
• equating individual acts of unfairness against white people with systemic

racism which daily targets people of color

antidotes: understand that discomfort is at the root of all growth and
learning; welcome it as much as you can; deepen your political analysis of
racism and oppression so you have a strong understanding of how your
personal experience and feelings fit into a larger picture; don’t take

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everything personally

One of the purposes of listing characteristics of white supremacy culture is to
point out how organizations which unconsciously use these characteristics as
their norms and standards make it difficult, if not impossible, to open the door
to other cultural norms and standards. As a result, many of our organizations,
while saying we want to be multi-cultural, actually only allow other people and
cultures to come in if they adapt or conform to already existing cultural norms.
Being able to identify and name the cultural norms and standards you want is a
first step to making room for a truly multi-cultural organization.

Partial Bibliography:
Notes from People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond Workshop, Oakland, CA, spring
1999. Notes from Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, San Francisco, CA, spring
1999. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the
Cafeteria? NY: HarperCollins, 1997. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words.
NY: Context Books, 2000. Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism. PA: New Society Publishers,
1996. Anne Wilson Schaef, Living in Process. NY: Ballantine, 1998. For complete
bibliography, see complete notebook for dRwork’s Dismantling Racism process.

dRworks can be reached at www.dismantlingracism.org.

Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E

Dialogue, Activism, and Democratic
Social Change

Shiv Ganesh1 & Heather M. Zoller2

1 Department of Management Communication, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
2 Department of Communication, University of Cincinnati, OH, USA

This article provides a systematic description of various positions on dialogue and their
implications for understanding activism and social change. It describes three orientations
toward dialogue — collaboration, co-optation, and agonism — which are differentiated by
assumptions regarding the pervasiveness of dialogue, the role of difference, and conceptions
of power. We argue for a multivocal, agonistic perspective on dialogue that centers issues of
power and conflict in activism. Such a perspective illuminates a broad range of activist tactics
for social change instead of privileging consensus-oriented methods. These approaches are
illustrated with two ethnographic case studies that highlight the importance of lay theories
of activism and dialogue.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01396.x

Political upheaval and conflict across the world in 2011 from New York and Wiscon-
sin to Syria and Egypt, underscored the tremendous global need for democratic social
change in the wake of a slew of crises arising from political repression, corporate cor-
ruption, and rapid environmental degradation. The proliferation of research centers
on civic discourse, democracy, participation, and voice in a range of universities such
as Arizona, Kansas State, Southern California, Stanford, Texas, and Washington,
among others demonstrates that communication scholarship has much pragmatic
value in offering visions of how such change can take place and how democracy
across the world can be deepened and woven into everyday communication practices.
Indeed, theoretical concerns with democratic change have arguably been at the heart of
much communication inquiry in the past century, and scholars have crafted a diverse
range of perspectives on communication processes and mechanisms through which
individuals, communities, and organizations procure and enact democratic change.

Throughout, however, we find that scholars have relied on dialogue and activism as
significant tropes to understand specific communication processes involved in such
change. There are many ways in which communication scholars have positioned these
two concepts with and against each other, so our purpose in this article is to clarify

Corresponding author: Heather M. Zoller; e-mail: heather.zoller@uc.edu

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and elaborate how theoretical and ideological assumptions regarding dialogue influence
our understanding of the role that activism plays in enabling democratic communication
practice. Dialogue is evident in a number of areas of communication inquiry into
democratic practices. Interpersonal communication studies have considered the role
of face-to-face dialogue in managing difference and promoting social participation
(Cissna & Anderson, 1994; Rawlins, 2009; Wood, 2004). Organizational communica-
tion researchers have attempted to understand how communities experience dialogue
as they attempt to engage in democratic communication (Medved, 2003; Zoller, 2000).
Public relations research has focused on symmetrical communication across a range
of publics in the context of social change (Grunig, Grunig, & Dozier, 2002). Studies of
environmental communication have employed notions of dialogue to understand and
frame intractable stakeholder conflicts (Brummans et al., 2008). Health communica-
tion scholars have used dialogic theories to promote participatory models of health
promotion (Dutta & Basnyat, 2008; Melkote, Krishnatray, & Krishnatray, 2008).
Development communication research has employed participatory communication
as a key construct to understand meaningful social change (Papa, Auwal, & Singhal,
1997). And rhetoricians have used the term invitational rhetoric to describe ways in
which actors may engage in ethical and dialogic exchange (Foss & Griffin, 1995).

Likewise, a wide range of scholars have also employed activism as a major
construct in understanding connections between communication and democratic
practice (Frey & Carragee, 2007). Examinations of advocacy and activist discourse,
for instance, are prominent in rhetorical studies (Bowers, Ochs, & Jensen, 1993; Fabj
& Sobnosky, 1995; Stewart, 1997) as well as cultural studies (Wood, Hall, & Hasian,
2008). Scholars of new media have investigated ways that activists use technology
to engage in radical democracy (Pickard, 2006). Social movement researchers have
been especially concerned with how activists mobilize collective action as they
engage in protests (Bennett, Breunig, & Givens, 2008). Studies of organizational
communication and public relations have also attempted to understand how activist
organizing practices create opportunities for meaningful social change (Ganesh &
Stohl, 2010), how they function as influential stakeholders (Weaver & Motion, 2005),
and how organizations might effectively manage activists (L. A. Grunig, 1992; Smith
& Ferguson, 2001).

The prevalence and centrality of dialogue and activism in scholarship on com-
munication and transformative social change warrant greater attention to underlying
theoretical assumptions. This article describes three primary orientations toward
dialogue — collaborative, co-optive, and agonistic — based on assumptions about
conflict, power, and the role of difference. We discuss multiple theoretical positions
within each orientation and seek to show how hidden assumptions hinder theo-
rizing by delegitimizing certain forms of activist communication as they privilege
consensus-oriented methods. We argue for the merits of agonistic theories of dialogue
that can shed light on a broader range of activist communication methods and tactics
for social change by acknowledging issues of power and conflict as a central feature
of dialogue. Following our analysis, we contextualize the agonistic perspective by

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presenting two case studies drawn from research projects conducted by the authors
in different parts of the world.

Perspectives on dialogue and activism

Generally, the theoretical roots of dialogue research trace back to the works of Mikhail
Bakhtin, David Bohm, Martin Buber, Hans Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Paulo Freire,
and others. Communication studies have identified several distinct approaches to
dialogue in these key works. For instance, Cissna and Anderson (1994) identified
several strains of inquiry. One strain draws from Buber’s (1958) concepts of ‘‘I’’ and
‘‘Thou’’ to describe the idea of genuine, authentic, and open relationships, where
identity and otherness are mutually implicated. A conversation-analytic point of
view conceives of dialogue as ordinary conversation, featuring turn-taking, etiquette,
and immediacy, but which may include situations where ‘‘both parties talked but
neither really listened — and neither really expected the other to listen’’ (p. 26).
Another approach draws from Bakhtin to describe language as inherently dialogic
in representing difference, otherness, and multivocality (Bakhtin, 1981), wherein
dialogue becomes a fundamental way of being in the world.

Three positions on dialogue
Across various approaches, we identify three positions on dialogue that are particularly
relevant to understanding connections and tensions between activism and dialogue.
These positions vary on the basis of their assumptions about the pervasiveness of
dialogic phenomena, the constitutive power of difference, and the role of conflict and
power relationships.

Extant research differs on the pervasiveness of dialogue, often depending on
whether authors approach the concept in prescriptive or descriptive terms. Pre-
scriptive theories of dialogue tend to view it as a specialized and rare form of
communication composed of certain conversational and interactional features, a
view often influenced by Bohm (1996) or Buber (1958). Conversely, others view
dialogue in descriptive terms as an everyday, pervasive aspect of language use and
interaction, a perspective often influenced by Bakhtin (Barge & Martin, 2002).

Second, issues of difference are central to dialogic theories. Dialogue involves
tensions between needs for convergence, inasmuch as there are desires for consensus
and communicative requirements for sharing assumptions, and needs for emergence,
or the possibility that new ideas will develop from the representation, construction,
and negotiation of difference (Hammond, Anderson, & Cissna, 2003). While some
theorists construe dialogue as a nonpolarized method that rules out or overcomes
conflict in favor of consensus (Black, 2005; Bokeno & Gantt, 2000), others position
argument and debate themselves as dialogic interactions and strategies (Barge &
Martin, 2002; Hyde & Bineham, 2000).

Finally, questions of difference and conflict invariably involve issues of power.
Although theorists do not always acknowledge the issue, researchers may often

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start from different assumptions about the place of power in dialogue. Some, often
Bohmian perspectives, propose that power relationships must be set aside to enter
dialogue. Others view power differentials as something to be addressed and managed
in dialogue (Wood, 2004). Still others see dialogue as a means of overcoming
dominance by allowing for marginalized voices and the creation of spaces for
change (Freire, 1970; Hammond et al., 2003). And finally, some approaches, often
poststructural, implicitly view dialogue as being irrevocably tangled with, constituted
by, and disruptive of power (Falzon, 1998).

Based on their different approaches to these issues, we identify three positions
on dialogue that have significant implications for how one can understand potential
overlaps and tensions between activism and dialogue. These positions do not
constitute unique theories of dialogue; indeed, as we discuss later, they are perspectives
that often draw from multiple traditions in dialogue inquiry. We refer to the first
position as Dialogue as collaboration, the second as Dialogue as co-optation, and the
third as Dialogue as agonistic.

Before we discuss connections and disjunctures between dialogue and activism,
some discussion of what ‘‘counts’’ as activism is also in order. Like dialogue, activism
has been conceptualized in a variety of ways, and scholars have isolated a number of
key features of activism. Some definitions have focused on activist tactics. For instance,
L. A. Grunig (1992) identified education, compromise, persuasion, pressure tactics,
and force as defining characteristics of activist communication, while excluding
dialogue as a key activist tactic. Other conceptualizations have emphasized activity.
Diani (1992), for example, suggested that a defining activity of activism is its
engagement with conflict, and Urietta (2005) cast activism in terms of the active
participation of people advocating a particular set of issues. Kim and Sriramesh (2009)
defined activism as ‘‘the coordinated activity of a group that organizes voluntarily in an
effort to solve problems that threaten the common interest of members of that group’’
(p. 88). Still others focus on defining principles of activism. For instance, Jordan’s
(2002) work on activism argues that while contemporary activism is constituted by
diverse repertoires, including direct action and dis/organization, culture jamming,
pleasure-politics, and hacktivism, the twin principles of transgression and solidarity
unite activists.

Clearly then, definitions of activism vary, and different bodies of knowledge even
appear to diverge in their collective emphasis on the importance of defining activism,
which underscores the political function of definitions in constituting key knowledge
interests. We observe, for instance, that research in public relations, often criticized
for its managerialism (McKie & Munshi, 2007) appears to have produced a significant
number of definitions of activism. Across perspectives and disciplines, however, one
finds an emphasis, on contestation as a core aspect of activist communication, and
key concepts such as advocacy, conflict, and transgression do appear to be central
to activism. While some definitions of dialogue appear to preclude activism, others
may implicitly incorporate one or another notion of activism. We discuss these
perspectives in the following sections.

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Dialogue as collaboration

The tendency to treat dialogue as a specialized form of communication involving
consensus, collaboration, equality, and mutual trust is particularly evident in Bohmian
approaches and is also sometimes visible in other traditions. Below, we describe these
approaches and investigate how adopting such collaborative orientations influences
our understanding of activist communication.

Theorists commonly construe dialogue in interpersonal terms. For instance,
emergent understanding is seen as a product of dialogic relationship building.
This is particularly evident in the organizational learning literature (Schein, 2004;
Senge, 1990), which views dialogue as a form of internal learning through open
communication and consensus building (Bokeno & Gantt, 2000). Similarly, Bohmian
approaches view dialogue as ‘‘thinking together,’’ emphasizing the creation of new
meaning through connection and relationship building between individuals (Black,
2005). Bohmian approaches depict dialogue as a specialized form of collaborative
communication that emphasizes interpersonal win-win relationships. The focus on
collaboration and deep connection can also be found in the work of Goodall and
Kellett (2004), who described a hierarchy of communication culminating in dialogue
as a transcendent and profound experience, suggesting that ‘‘Achieving dialogue often
results in a deepened sense of connection between oneself and others . . .’’ (p. 167).

Some scholars who draw from more poststructural lenses that highlight ten-
sionality have also theorized dialogue as a special form of mutual relationship
building and collaboration. For example, Cissna and Anderson (1994) characterized
dialogue as including strange otherness and emergent consequences, and although
they argued that ‘‘contrary to some popular conceptions, dialogue does not preclude
heated or even agonistic exchange’’ (p. 14), they still cast the process in collaborative
terms: ‘‘Dialogue is characterized by high levels of concern for self (and one’s own
position) as well as for the other (and for the position advanced by the other . . .
rather than a primary focus on winning and losing’’ (p. 14). Similarly, Rawlins
(2009) highlighted the tensions surrounding difference, power, and friendship, while
primarily describing dialogue in terms of sometimes rare and deep interpersonal
connections of respect, vulnerability, and openness, resonant with Buber’s I – Thou
relationships.

Many collaborative orientations to dialogue emphasize openness as a key marker.
Pearce and Pearce (2004), for instance, said that ‘‘the defining characteristic of
dialogic communication is that all of these speech acts are done in ways that hold
one’s own position but allow others the space to hold theirs, and are profoundly open
to hearing others’ positions without needing to oppose or assimilate them’’ (p. 45).
Feminist communication scholars who promote invitational rhetoric describe it as
a ‘‘cooperative, nonadversarial, and ethical’’ (Foss & Griffin, 1995, p. 115) form
of communication that eschews persuasion, which is associated with patriarchal
attempts at domination and control. Indeed, Foss and Griffin also liken invitational
rhetoric to Buber’s dialogic I – Thou relationship because the approach requires a
willingness to give up one’s position in favor of mutual interests.

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Conceptualizing dialogue in terms of interpersonal, consensual relationship
building with an emphasis on mutual care and vulnerability has implications for
understanding activism. Here, we discuss three ways that consensual views of dialogue
may influence our understanding of activism. Scholars may preclude the possibility
of activists engaging in dialogue by treating activism as oppositional to dialogue.
Others privilege dialogue by stakeholders, including activists, as a preferred means
of obtaining social change over protest and other forms of contestation. Finally, a
third stance casts internal activist communication as potentially dialogic and external
communication as almost exclusively confrontational.

Privileging collaboration over activism
First, theories that emphasize mutual relationship building and consensus often
assume that participants put aside pre-existing interests and goals. This idea is
incompatible with many depictions of activism. Most obviously, researchers who cast
activism largely in terms of protest, and theorize protest as aggressive and violent,
rule out the possibility of activists engaging in collaborative dialogue. We often find
these assumptions in descriptions of global activists targeting capitalist structures. For
instance, Nichols (2003), writing about ‘‘new’’ activism suggested: ‘‘The sad reality of
today’s global political environment is that we now face a new generation of activists,
who could come to dominate — not through force of arms, but through pressure,
intimidation and even terror to serve their radical agenda’’ (p. 137). Creating a
startlingly postapocalyptic image, he adds: ‘‘Many lead small, roving guerilla bands
of increasingly vocal, rapacious, confident militants, preying on weak businesses,
ganging up on large companies, taking to the streets, demanding tribute, and
threatening to unleash actions that (they hope) will overwhelm industries, life styles,
and social, economic, legal and political institutions’’ (p. 137). Similar language is
evident in L. A. Grunig’s (1992) commentary, which cast corporate engagement with
activists as a war: ‘‘when it comes to a fight, the weapons in each activist’s arsenal
might vary. And as the battle drags on, the weapons might become more lethal.’’
Although such language is the exception rather than the norm, other researchers have
tended to unreflexively characterize activists in terms of violence, construing them as
incapable of conversation, consensus, or relationship building.

The tendency to separate activism from collaboration-oriented dialogue is even
evident in the use of labels such as ‘‘anticorporate’’ for nonlabor corporate campaigns
(Manheim, 2001), which frames all activism as inherently antagonistic toward
corporations. Characterizing activist communication using words such as pressure
and force also results in implicitly casting activism as distant and confrontational, in
contrast with interpersonal and relational depictions of dialogue.

Some scholars construct activism as a form of escalation in confrontation.
For instance, Gantchev (2009) developed a sequential model for activism, arguing
that activists usually engage in low-cost strategies that include cooperation before
moving to high-cost confrontational tactics such as direct action and protest. At
its worst, rhetorical associations of activism with escalation permit associations

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between activism, violence, and terrorism. Such dichotomous understandings fly
in the face of the fact that all over the world, the overwhelming majority of
protests, confrontations, demonstrations, strikes, and actions are peaceful (Pandey,
2006).

Even the general association of activism with persuasion can facilitate viewing
activism as oppositional to dialogue if we greatly emphasize the idea that dialogue
involves listening to, rather than trying to change, the other. Consensual theories of
dialogue exclude activism from dialogic methods to the degree that activism involves
entering interactions with goals of influence and social change, often in situations
of unequal power. These theories thus risk privileging civility over the need for
democratic and material social change.

Privileging activist dialogue over activist contestation
Other theorists distinguish between activists who use protest methods and activists
who work cooperatively with their targets of change, privileging consensual dialogue
as a superior method of social change. For instance, management theorists of activism
aimed at global capitalism frame activist dialogue as a two-way, mutually beneficial
process and activist contestation as a one-way, ‘‘either-or’’ process. Jordan and
Stevenson (2003) labeled protest as ‘‘win-lose,’’ problem-focused politics in contrast
to the ‘‘win-win’’ solution-focus of activist dialogue. Stakeholder theories sometimes
reflect this argument as well. For instance, Deetz (1992) celebrated the possibility
of emergent solutions through stakeholder dialogue, which he contrasted with the
merely expressive function of protest.

Public relations scholars Taylor, Vasquez, and Doorley (2003) differentiated
between confrontational activists such as ACT UP! members who pressured pharma-
ceutical companies and activists who worked through dialogue with these companies.
Referencing groups who worked cooperatively with Merck, the authors suggested,
‘‘This group recognized that confrontational strategies may actually delay the real
objective of all AIDS activists — safe, effective treatments’’ (p. 264). The authors
even employed dialogic relationship building as a criterion for ethical corporate
stakeholder communication, stipulating that ‘‘. . . communication by publics will
also be judged ethical if it contributes to the engagement of the relationship with
the target organization’’ (p. 262). Such a statement depicts activist communica-
tion as unethical if it does not contribute to relationship building with targets of
change. Moreover, this approach assumes that consensus and compromise are more
effective than pressure tactics. Similarly, Smith and Ferguson (2001) observed that
although one goal of activism is to ‘‘argue for their recommended resolutions to
the problem’’ (p. 294), compromise and negotiation by activists are more fruitful
approaches.

Theorists seeking to promote new forms of social change also point toward
relational and consensus-driven views of dialogue as more ideal than contention
and protest. Like Gergen (1999) who recommended giving up traditional rhetorics
of alienation in favor of a ‘‘poetic of unity,’’ Chatterton (2006) posited the need to

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‘‘transcend activist spaces and identities, to seek creative alliances, to literally give up
activism (p. 260),’’ suggesting that:

. . . spending enough time with others on uncommon ground often reveals
shared concerns and fears, and . . . possibilities that arise, not from activists
looking to gain allies, converting people to causes, or building a broad social
movement, but from taking encounters on uncommon ground as a starting
point for a dialogic and normative politics based up the need for us all to engage
in politics as equals (p. 260).

Such a position stakes out creative alliances and dialogue as inherently separate from
activism.

At times, privileging dialogue as consensus over other methods of activist social
change casts confrontational communication as devoid of substance. Stewart and
Zediker (2000) restate Freire’s position that action without dialogic participatory
action research is ‘‘mere activism’’ or sloganeering, which actually prevents social
change. Likewise, Singh (2008) discounted Huesca’s (2003) call for development
through social movements: ‘‘Huesca’s call regarding social movements is misplaced;
without genuine participation in grassroots development work, joining social move-
ments, while a good expression of solidarity with the oppressed, can devolve into
empty sloganeering’’ (p. 718). He then suggested that telenovelas create the oppor-
tunity for such dialogue: ‘‘Freire understands dialogues as conversations fostered in
a spirit of inquiry that allow the participants to not only comprehend and delineate
their world but also to transform it. Such comprehension can come only if people
find a cultural voice to tell their own story through a process of dialogue’’ (p. 702).

Casting dialogue as internal and confrontation as external to activism
Finally, assumptions about dialogue as consensus may lead scholars to investigate
dialogue as a collaborative internal activist tool rather than an external method.
For instance, Lozano-Reich and Cloud (2009), in a critique of invitational rhetoric,
argued that the proper place of dialogue lies in building solidarity in internal
activist communication, whereas contestation and confrontation are its proper
external functions. Starhawk’s (2002) widely circulated essay ‘‘How we really shut
down the WTO’’ talks about the importance of consensus decision making, vision,
empowerment, dance, and humor involved in creating affinity groups through which
blockades in Seattle were achieved in 1999. A recent strand of such argument is
grounded in online activism. For example, Victor Pickard’s (2006) work described
online activism as a form of democratic participation, describing how internal
organizing that created the Independent Media Collectives (IndyMedia) are dedicated
to consensus-based decision making between and within activist groups.

Placing consensus and collaboration at the heart of ‘‘internal’’ activist work can be
problematic to the degree that it detracts attention from the critical role that internal
contestation and tension can have in social movements. Such work may frame
activist organizing as being formally leaderless (Epstein, 2001). While sensitive to

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the rhetorical significance of the notion of ‘‘leaderlessness’’ in constructing the com-
munitarian character of activism, we suggest that the notion of a formally leaderless
activist group could prevent identifying novel ways in which leadership is enacted and
constructed in social movements. For instance, Zoller and Fairhurst (2008) theorized
the potential connections between leadership processes, resistance, mobilization,
change, and influence. Additionally, bifurcating dialogue as internal and protest
and contestation as external may create a crudely confrontational portrait of activist
tactics. We discuss this issue further when we unpack the notion of agonistic dialogue.
Before that, however, a discussion of dialogue as a form of co-optation is in order.

Dialogue as co-optation

Scholarship grounded in critical orientations toward dialogue often warns about
the possibility that dialogue can be manipulated, co-opted, and limited by state,
corporate, and other powerful agents. While collaborative notions of dialogue
emphasize the need to suspend power relations, dialogue as co-optation assumes
that what appears to be collaboration is better understood as a tactic of power. This
perspective continues to depict dialogue as a specialized form of communication,
but it treats power as pervasive and difficult, if not impossible, to suspend. There
are at least three key aspects of such arguments. While some scholars emphasize the
inherent fragility and vulnerability of dialogue, others imply that powerful interests
are able to rhetorically employ dialogue as a legitimizing activity precisely because it
has communicative resonance. Still others stress the impossibility of genuine dialogue
given the pervasiveness of inequity and the inherent problems involved in practices
of representation themselves.

Dialogue as fragile
While some research in the dialogue-as-collaboration tradition questions activists’
willingness to risk being changed through an open and collaborative dialogue, some
critical research casts suspicion on their more powerful targets. Representations
of dialogue as implicitly fragile and vulnerable are reflected in critical scholarship
that depicts dialogue between activists and powerful targets, such as corporate
leadership, as being easily manipulated by corporations to prevent larger, more
material democratic transformation. For instance, sociologist Judith Richter (2001)
described dialogue as a key issue management method used by the infant formula
industry to address an activist boycott targeted at formula safety and marketing.
Equating issues management with the engineering of consent, she recounted ways
in which ostensibly dialogic negotiations were used as methods of covert corporate
environmental scanning. She observed that dialogue can be used ‘‘to gain intelligence,
transfer image and divert attention from more pressing issues’’ (p. 160). In this light,
she argued that activists should think carefully before joining dialogues that feature
great power asymmetry and demand greater transparency in dialogues between
corporations and their partners in civil society.

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In a chapter evocatively titled ‘‘Dialogue: Divide and Rule,’’ Rowell (2002)
described environmental dialogue as a ‘‘new phase of sophisticated greenwashing’’
(p. 33) that both pre-empts conflict and co-opts activists. He noted such dialogues
are inherently risky for activists because they privatize debates in ways that reduce
the public attention necessary for social change. Strikingly, the author paraphrased
advice from Ronald Duchin of the public relations company Mongoven, Biscoe
& Duchin, about using dialogue to defeat activists: ‘‘isolate the radicals, ‘cultivate’
the idealists and ‘educate’ them into becoming realists, then co-opt the realists
into agreeing with industry’’ (p. 33). Similarly, Moberg (2002) characterized the
Chemical Manufacturers Association’s Responsible Care initiative, which promotes
community engagement and stakeholder dialogue to manage environmental conflict,
as ‘‘. . . designed to co-opt or marginalize local opponents. Despite the stated emphasis
placed on candor by the program’s promoters, all ‘dialogue’ between industry and
community members is carefully scripted to ensure that dissenting voices are not
heard’’ (p. 380).

Dialogue as resonant
While the studies above demonstrate the fragility of dialogue, questioning the extent
to which activists should risk direct dialogic engagement with powerful interests,
several of them also indicate another quality of dialogue that make it amenable
to co-optation: its resonance in public imaginations. Arguably, the very fact that
dialogue is normative and is construed as a warm and friendly democratic ideal
lends itself to the possibility of it being used to legitimize and present corporate
and business interests as the public good. This is akin to Habermas’s (1989) classic
argument on the structural transformation of the public sphere, notably in the thesis
that the idea of a public sphere continues to have strong resonance and relevance
despite its increasing mediation by organizational, corporate, and structural interests.

The strategic use of dialogue for the rhetorical legitimation of state and corporate
activities is evident in arguments put forward in the studies cited above. Rowell
(2002), for instance, discusses Shell’s 1997 – 1998 dialogues regarding its Peruvian
gas operations at Camisea, which he depicted as a means of tempering potential
resistance and adding legitimacy to its engagement with affected communities. As
Rowell noted ‘‘crucially, not up for discussion was whether the gas project should
go ahead, but how it should go ahead’’ (p. 35). Zoller (2004) also found that
a transnational business trade advocacy group used the language of symmetrical
communication and dialogue to prevent conflict rather than air it, develop unitary
positions, and usurp governmental policy-making functions. Critiques of this kind
of synthetic personalization (Fairclough, 2001), which employ friendly, relational
tropes to prevent dissent and disagreement, further amplify the issue of risk,
turning it on its head in some ways. Similarly, Dutta and Basnyat (2008) critiqued
the apparently participatory entertainment education-based Radio Communication
Project in Nepal as co-optive of more dialogic culture-centered health promotion
models. The appearance of participation masked how the program diffused the U.S.

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Agency for International Development’s pre-existing elite goals. These studies treat
dialogue as a form of co-optation because activists take on excessive amounts of risk
as they converse with power and also because of the unwillingness of those in power
to risk their dominant positions and cede ground to other interests. In this sense, it
is not surprising that some activist groups have refused to engage in dialogue with
structural interests because they see themselves as participating in bids to preserve
the status quo (Zorn, Roper, & Motion, 2006).

Dialogue as impossible
Finally, some studies that are focused on representation, difference, and the problems
of liberal pluralist models of democracy express doubt about the possibility of
dialogue for social change. For instance, McPhail (2004) was pessimistic about the
possibility for interracial dialogue that recognizes racism rather than reinforces the
worldview of dominant White groups. Similarly, Kersten (2006) argued that without
deconstruction, dialogue replicates social divisions and power differentials. Her work
on race dialogue shows frequent: ‘‘(a) inability to see and hear the racial Other,
(b) lack of common language and experience, and (c) lack of meaningful action’’
(p. 362).

These positions echo critics of consensually oriented theories of public sphere
participation (Fraser, 1990). For instance, Iris Young (2000) questioned conventional
notions of democratic discussion, arguing that their emphasis on a common good
results in further marginalization of minority groups, thereby preventing deep
democracy. This in turn is related significantly to interrogations about the possibility
of dialogic knowing and knowability in the work of scholars such as Spivak and
others, most explicitly in the argument that attempting to engage with otherness
invariably results in its further incorporation into existing systems of meaning and
representation (Ganesh, 2010; Spivak, 1999). Dutta and Pal (2010) also drew from
Spivak to argue that subaltern groups are erased and co-opted through dialogic
methods entailed in dominant neoliberal discourses. The co-optive view of dialogue
is an important corrective to theories of dialogue that privilege civility and order
over democratic transformation. These theories highlight the significance of contexts
of power and conflict that permeate activist efforts. As public relations scholars
Leitch and Neilson (2001) argued, ‘‘In practice, in cases where access to resources
is so unequal, attempting to practice symmetrical public relations might constitute
a self-destructive discourse strategy for the least powerful participant’’ (p. 129). We
support the contentions of much of this research, so our point is not to undermine
research into dialogue as a strategy for elites to co-opt activist groups. We do caution,
though, against maintaining a presumption that dialogue between activists and more
powerful targets is impossible. Such a position may ontologically reify social actors
and their interests by assuming fixed ideological or material positions. Theorists
should not rule out the potential for powerful interests to risk vulnerability through
dialogue for a variety of reasons or for activists to create dialogic spaces in what may
appear to be woefully unbalanced situations of power.

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Agonism

We understand agonism to refer to pluralistic views of democratic processes that
treat social conflict as central (Mouffe, 1998). Agonistic approaches see dialogue
as a phenomenon closely intertwined with radical democracy that emerges out of
difference, conflict, disagreement, and polyvocality (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). An
agonistic theory facilitates a pragmatic approach to dialogue by highlighting shifting
relationships of power, identity, and vulnerability, while simultaneously paying
explicit attention to questions of justice and social and material needs.

Agonistic perspectives privilege conflict as an element of social change. The
search for common ground is seen as problematic because, as Wood (2004) argued:
‘‘The search (and belief in) common ground may thwart, rather than facilitate,
genuine dialogue, because almost inevitably the dominant culture defines what
ground is common or legitimate’’ (p. xvii). Accordingly, agonistic perspectives focus
on the potential for subverting power relations. Gergen, Gergen, and Barrett (2004)
expressed such a position when they said that dialogue ‘‘may enable authority to be
challenged, multiple opinions to be expressed, or taken-for-granted realities to be
deliberated’’ (p. 44).

While much work on agonism and democracy is largely critical in orientation,
it is also important to note that there are overt poststructural sensibilities in the
notion. For instance, Falzon (1998) provides a dialogic conception of Foucault’s
work, arguing that central to his work ‘‘is not structure or domination but our
involvement in an open-ended ‘agonistic’ dialogue of forces. Out of this dialogue,
forms of social order and entrapment emerge, and are themselves destined to be
overcome in the course of ongoing dialogue’’ (p. 3). At the same time that agonistic
theories foreground power and conflicting interests, they stipulate that interests,
identities, and relationships are shifting rather than fixed. For instance, Melkote
et al. (2008) contrasted the monologism of diffusion health promotion models
with the ability of participatory models to transform health workers, patients, and
community members through dialogic interaction. This transformation facilitates
social change goals versus compliance, such as activating self-help, social support,
access to resources, community empowerment, organization, and activism.

Additionally, scholarship rooted in Bakhtinian traditions may support an agonistic
approach by emphasizing the dialogic nature of language itself rather than prescribing
specific criteria for ideal interaction. For Bakhtin (1981), language is inherently
multivocal and therefore dialogic. Language is marked by tensions between centripetal
and centrifugal forces seeking to restrict or open up meanings, respectively (see also
Rawlins, 2009). Moreover, Bakhtinian perspectives help illuminate how dialogue
interanimates other forms of communication such as argument, discussion, debate,
or even polemic. Barge and Martin’s (2002) work, for instance, extends this focus
from language to social interaction as they position dialogue as a context-based
practical activity and explicate the communicative value of constructive cacophonies
of dissent and contradiction.

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From a Bakhtinian point of view then, there is a dual quality to agonistic dialogue.
At one level, dialogue and conflict can be seen as diachronic, that is, interactionally
and pragmatically intertwined. This involves continuing to see dialogue as a form of
openness, rather than common ground. At another level, the synchronic effects of
contestation itself can be understood as dialogic, in that the very act of challenging
dominant systems of power and meaning through argumentative, confrontational,
or irrational tactics opens up alternative spaces. In both diachronic and synchronic
stances, the emphasis is on different forms and understandings of openness. We
detail them below.

Diachronic views
By viewing dialogue within the context of unfolding communication over time,
a diachronic view of agonistic dialogue acknowledges ways in which ‘‘one-way’’
communication, including narrative, argument, and persuasion, may make room
for or alternate with mutual attempts at openness. For instance, Papa, Singhal, and
Papa (2006) theorized a dialectical relationship between dissemination (one-way
communication) and dialogue in social change efforts. They depict entertainment
education programs as a form of dissemination that encourages dialogue among
audience members to promote greater acceptance of marginalized groups such as
Dalits and women by dominant groups. Rawlins (2009) interrogated the dialogic
potential of narrative among friends to open spaces for civil participation and
social movements. Similarly, Porrovecchio (2007) analyzed how WTO activists used
testimony, something that might normally be viewed as one-way communication,
in dialogic ways by creating spaces for marginalized voices within larger social
discussions among a range of publics and counterpublics.

What counts as dialogic openness itself can take multiple forms here, and two
are particularly relevant. Openness can take the form of deliberation, involving
attempts at explanation rather than consensus. For instance, van de Kerkhof (2006)
criticized stakeholder dialogues in environmental decision making as negotiations
that seek to gain consensus. As an alternative, she promoted a deliberation model of
stakeholder dialogue: ‘‘Whereas consensus building can be characterized as a process
of negotiation, deliberation is about dialogue and argumentation’’ (p. 282). Similarly,
Wakefield (2008) argued for collaborative advocacy as a way for organizations and
activists to explain and deliberate positions with the objective of establishing rather
than dissolving difference.

Openness also can take the form of pragmatic caution regarding activist stances
toward both collaboration and confrontation. For instance, Hernes and Mikalsen
(2002) examined three activist campaigns targeted at the fishery industry, suggesting
that greater environmental awareness in the industry has created opportunities for
industry partnerships with activists rather than adversarial relations. They described
the Greenpeace campaign in terms of cautious confrontation, which involved a mix
of militant confrontation and direct action, lobbying and research, and cooperation
and collaboration. As Greenpeace has shifted toward cooperation with industry, they

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continue to board vessels and attach buoys to nets to prevent the fishing. Rather
than privilege cooperation, the authors discussed tradeoffs between effectiveness and
visibility.

Synchronic views
Synchronic perspectives involve understanding confrontational activist tactics them-
selves as dialogic because they effect a kind of discursive opening. Protests, in
particular, help relativize a dominant discourse by constructing and rendering visible
alternative political stances. Knight and Greenberg (2002), for example, explicitly
characterized activism as dialogic, arguing that many activist methods create the
possibility for social dialogue, an argument echoed by Henderson (2005). Knight
and Greenberg’s case analysis of activists targeting Nike resulted in the suggestion
that ‘‘Antisweatshop activism has thus been able to exploit Nike’s own dependence
on public image and communication as a way to turn promotionalism back on itself
and open up issues such as wages, working conditions, and worker rights to ethical
criticism’’ (pp. 550 – 551). Public relations scholars observed that activists can create
openings through which public relations practitioners can promote ethical changes
on the part of organizational leaders (Berger, 2005; Smith & Ferguson, 2001).

Synchronic views expand our understanding of dialogic openness in several ways.
For one, they highlight unpredictability. For instance, Ólafsson (2007) appropriated
Bakhtin to establish the dialogic and multivocal character of protests. Unlike for-
mal political deliberation, protests are dialogic because they involve unpredictable
communicative outcomes and do not follow orderly or methodical conventions
of structured and politically legitimate tactics such as deliberation: ‘‘The protester
should rather be seen as someone who tries to expand the arena of political action
and dialogue, refusing to submit to the demands of orderly argumentation’’ (p. 439).

Second, we can evaluate openness in terms of communication that creates
social awareness and visibility. For instance, subaltern groups organized responses to
the Human Genome Diversity Project through public argument and debate. This
discourse helped create counternarratives about identity and genetics, resist patent-
ing and commercialization, and question dominant assumptions about informed
consent, thereby spurring more participatory approaches to genetic research with
subaltern groups (Wood et al., 2008). Such a view brings a wider range of commu-
nication modes and processes under a dialogic perspective. The dialogic character of
contestation is implicit in Deluca and Peeples (2002), who argued that contemporary
protests enable new forms of collective democratic communication practices that
emphasize postrational notions of embodiment and emotion. Their conceptualiza-
tion of the public screen involves the very practical question of how it can be used
as a new space for citizen discourse, despite the challenges of access, infotainment
norms, and image-based grammar.

The postrational and creative character of protest as dialogue is also evident in
studies that examine carnivalesque genres. For instance, Weaver (2010) drew on a
Bakhtinian tradition in tracing aspects of the carnivalesque in communicative tactics

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deployed by MAdGe, a women’s group in Aotearoa, New Zealand, against genetic
engineering (GE). The group’s strategies included humor, irony, provocation, and
even grotesque imagery that had dialogic consequences by making GE a public
issue, opening spaces for discussion, and resonating with a range of constituents
in the country. Boje (2001) also alluded to the dialogic potential of contemporary
carnivalesque forms of activism. A strong strand of inquiry in rhetorical studies on
the comic frame (Burke, 1968; Carlson, 1986; Schwarze, 2006) also emphasizes the
historical importance of carnivalesque and comedic protest as ways of increasing
visibility and opening dialogic space.

As a result of these perspectives on openness, agonistic perspectives recognize
the potential for dialogue in a wider array of methods than collaborative-oriented
theories. In situated contexts of marginalization and silence, radical acts or even
property violence may be viewed in a dialogic frame. Deluca and Peeples contrast
Seattle WTO protest leaders, who stated that violence detracted from the goal of
dialogue, with William Greider’s statement that images of broken glass transformed
the WTO into an icon of unregulated globalization. The authors considered the
‘‘productive possibilities of violence on today’s public screen’’ (p. 138), arguing that
anarchist violence gave a pretext for explanations of police violence, which otherwise
might have been unreported. While reporters decried the violence, they followed by
detailing the substantive grievances of the nonviolent protestors: ‘‘far from stealing
the limelight from legitimate protestors, the compelling images of violence and
disruption . . . drew more attention to the issues’’ (p. 142).

Finally, we need to consider how various forms of openness are engendered
within activist groups themselves, through processes of internal debate, argument,
struggle, and contention. While much current scholarship understands internal
activist communication as consensus driven and harmonious, other studies have
documented how contestation and struggle have historically important internally
dialogic effects among activist groups. For one, we know that social movements
themselves are often significantly internally segmented in terms of repertoires and
ideology (Gerlach & Hine, 1970). Furthermore, movement methods themselves
have a constitutive force, creating groups and factions (Enck-Wanzer, 2006). The
role of tension between segments and factions cannot be underestimated. For
instance, Haines (1984) discusses the radical flank effect within the civil rights
movement, arguing that tensions between moderate and radical groups worked both
synchronically and diachronically to further the goals of the movement. Hayden
(1999) identified similar internal tensions in suffrage rhetoric in the turn of the 20th
century.

Cases in activism, agonism, and dialogue

To prevent our theoretical synthesis of agonistic dialogue above from creating the
impression that agonism is a concern separate from activist praxis, we offer two
case studies from our own ethnographic research that not only illustrate both

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diachronic and synchronic aspects of agonistic dialogue, but crucially highlight
that activist groups themselves are acutely aware of issues of dialogue, developing
pragmatic approaches and analyses of both dialogue and contestation. We present
them to underscore the pragmatic and theoretical relevance of deep engagement with
contemporary activist practice.

Zoller studied Ohio Citizen Action (OCA) in the United States, an environmental
organization that uses ‘‘the good neighbor campaign’’ (GNC) to address local
polluters. A campaign in Addyston, Ohio, targeted a plastics company emitting
noxious odors and chemicals above permitted levels. The goal of a GNC is to
achieve a binding commitment from management to reduce or eliminate toxic
exposures. OCA’s handbook recommends that neighbors avoid both submissiveness
and belligerence when communicating with management because both are easy
to dismiss. The organization recommends that residents speak respectfully, but
always as equals (for instance, ‘‘calling for’’ rather than ‘‘requesting’’ a meeting),
first appealing to a manager’s conscience as a ‘‘good neighbor.’’ OCA reminds
campaigners to express interests (‘‘to breathe clean air’’) rather than request specific
changes (‘‘50% emissions reductions’’) because the GNC process may yield win-win
solutions that exceed such requests and simultaneously improve company efficiency
and cost-effectiveness.

GNCs offer cooperative companies the opportunity to bolster their reputation by
improving their environmental performance, but the model assumes that neighbors
will need to raise the stakes before management will respond. GNCs promote
asymmetrical pressure tactics, including organizing neighbors, talking to the press,
protesting, logging odors, and measuring air quality through lay science methods.
OCA also generates thousands of letters to management of the target organization
through its statewide canvas.

It is tempting to view these asymmetrical actions as a separate activist repertoire
outside of dialogue, yet these moves are seen as an inherent part of the relationship-
building process. Canvassing and letter campaigns give OCA influence, and such
influence itself is the means by which less powerful groups gain invitation to dialogue.
The OCA campaign handbook does not distinguish among tactics based on which are
more or less dialogic, including media campaigns, neighbor organizing, and meeting
with management, instead seeing them as integrated.

The handbook also illustrates the cyclical and synchronic nature of the relationship
between dialogue and contestation, in the process implicitly challenging conventional
views of activist groups as starting with dialogue and escalating to confrontation. It
does so in a number of ways. First, the handbook recommends that residents continue
with their pressure campaign at the same time they engage with management to
maintain momentum. The handbook promotes the ‘‘Getting to Yes’’ approach
devised by the Harvard Negotiation Project (Fisher & Ury, 1981). Second, the GNC
model encourages neighbors to talk to management, even though they may not trust
the company to honor any agreement they might arrive at. The ‘‘trust but verify’’
approach is simultaneously suspicious and hopeful, insisting on verifying key issues

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through neutral parties until trust has been earned through action. Once agreement
has been reached, neighbors and managers generally forge long-term relationships
to manage implementation and share information. This relationship is the ultimate
goal of a campaign. Thus, the GNC model takes a pragmatic approach to dialogue
that acknowledges the power differentials between residents and corporate managers
and seeks to redress them as a part of an overall process aimed at productive dialogue.
The model also recognizes that the dialogue is not an end in itself — participants
have material goals they wish to accomplish — yet this does not rule out a working,
dialogic relationship.

The Addyston case highlights how forms of dialogue and advocacy are interwoven,
as well as ways in which advocacy can have dialogic effects. While most studies that
identify the dialogic potential of confrontational tactics such as protest and direct
action use elite, a priori researcher concepts (see Henderson, 2005), the case illustrates
that activists themselves are aware of the strategic value of maintaining openness,
while also exercising strategic influence. Likewise, Ganesh’s study of animal rights
activism in Aotearoa New Zealand, also shows that activists themselves understand
and evaluate the dialogic potential of confrontational tactics not only in the sense of
engendering public debate but also within the movement itself.

Aotearoa New Zealand, has a rich history of animal rights activism, with at least
20 organizations and groups across the country in this country of four million people.
Like all social movements, it is multivocalic and internally segmented (Gerlach &
Hine, 1970). While some groups, such as Save Animals From Exploitation (SAFE),
have worked at a national level, attempting to lobby the government to pass legislation
to protect both land and animals, most other groups operate regionally or locally,
in areas such as Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland, or Otaki. The relationship
between national and local, more radical groups has historically been tensional, yet
productive, involving not only the use of particular activist methods, but in the
construction of animal rights as an issue itself.

Local activists tend to be more radical and criticize national groups such as SAFE
as professionalized and formal, overly reliant on conventional activist tactics:

There is a national group and they are, how do I put this without offending
them? They are kind of like . . . Greenpeace, and have salary and offices and on
top of that . . . beside them are the local groups which tend to come and go. I
have always thought that open rescue and direct action are the way to go, but
SAFE disagrees, and they keep on doing the lobbying.

Activists also detailed how dramatic direct action tactics such as open rescues in farms
tended to garner attention, arguing that prominent formal groups such as SAFE could
not engage in such direct action without legal repercussions. Consequently, it was
the tactics of radical activists that were responsible for making animal rights abuses
visible: ‘‘Without the direct action the national movement would not have any more
traction. Without the illegal stuff there would not be a movement. So there needs to
be tension between them and us.’’

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In general, radical activists were open to embracing tensions between tactics and
methods employed by different groups. Ongoing debates about tactics, especially
open rescues, appeared to have resulted in both tacit and explicit support for
multiple forms of action across both national and local groups. While various groups
continue to disagree about the efficacy of particular tactics, the ongoing discussion
has resulted in more tacit support for multiple forms of action. Several activists
recounted how national groups explicitly endorsed conventional approaches such as
lobbying or school-based education efforts and also tacitly supported controversial
and potentially illegal direct action tactics such open rescues and chain-outs, saying
‘‘they know it’s our thing — so [they] accept it.’’ Thus, continued internal tension
and debate about tactical efficacy has had dialogic effects inasmuch as diverse activists
recognize the constitutive power of a range of tactics, including institutional moves
such as parliamentary lobbying and extrainstitutional maneuvers such as direct
action, and they now acknowledge the ability of all these tactics to create greater
openness, in the form of increased awareness and visibility.

Activists in the movement were also aware that there were some key tensions
between groups in how animal rights issues themselves were defined. As in many other
countries, all activists tended to view animal rights in multi-issue terms. However,
national-level groups constructed animal rights differently from local groups. Groups
such as SAFE were prone to understand animal rights in terms of classic animal
welfare, holding out for the possibility of humane treatment of animals by industry.
They were therefore much more likely to connect animal rights with specific
issues such as GE. Indeed, SAFE has worked extensively on the issue. However,
more radical groups tended to connect animal abuse much more directly to the
global corporatization of agriculture and dairy, and the consequent intensification of
industrial dairying, arguing for basic shifts in production systems to end animal abuse.
They were thus much more likely to articulate animal rights as a core component
of capitalist exploitation. Two current issues exemplify this: The importing of palm
kernel from Indonesia as cattle feed as an animal rights issue as well as the diversion of
water resources to enable placing more and more cattle on the same amount of land.

Activists also acknowledged that multiple interpretations of animal rights in
different parts of the movement were both inevitable and desirable for the growth
of the movement itself. On one hand, SAFE’s approach enabled them to lobby the
government on specific issues. On the other hand, by articulating animal rights as
an anticorporate and antiglobalization issue, local activists could engage with other
groups that worked on global social justice issues, ultimately enabling the movement
to draw on more grassroots resources: ‘‘Grassroots activists tend to be more radical
and more anarchist and more anti-globalisation than say SAFE — if you ask them they
say sure we’re against globalization, but they don’t necessarily do so much [whereas]
when we talk to people about these issues we always stress that we’re part of a wider
movement against the globalization of capitalism.’’

Thus, activists acknowledge the dialogic potential not only of confrontation but
also of productive internal dialogic tensions within the animal rights movement,

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which eventually serve to grow and differentiate the movement. Recently, tensions
between radical and mainstream factions in the movement resulted in some radical
activists further segmenting the movement by creating a national-level network of
animal rights activists called Animal Freedom Aotearoa. The group sought not only
to consolidate activist energy and ensure protests at major industry events such as the
annual dairy summit but also to put sustained pressure on mainstream groups in the
movement such as SAFE to keep lobbying efforts up and not develop compromised
solutions with industry. In this way, the tensions between radical and mainstream
segments have operated as an internal dialogic over a period of years, which in turn
constitutes the movement itself, keeping it alive.

In highlighting that activists themselves operate with lay notions of dialogue that
in many instances are more sophisticated than theoretical renditions of their work,
our cases illustrate several aspects of agonistic dialogue. The Addyston case clearly
demonstrates that activists are aware of diachronic aspects of agonistic dialogue and
are able to alternate between or simultaneously use confrontational tactics as well as
consensus-based, civil methods. The Aotearoa, New Zealand, case shows that activists
are acutely aware of and harness the synchronically dialogic potential of tensions
and confrontations, both externally, and among different segments of the movement
itself. In both cases, activists clearly enact openness in multiple ways.

Discussion and conclusion

We have outlined three major ways in which scholarly work represents connections
between activism and dialogue. When theorists treat collaboration and consensus
as defining features of dialogue, three views of the relationship between activism
and dialogue are evident. Dialogue is privileged and cast in oppositional terms with
activism. Second, dialogic activist methods are privileged over contestation. And
third, activist communication may be dichotomized in terms of internal dialogue
and external confrontation. When dialogue is understood as co-optation, then it
is treated as fragile and risky for activists, as publically resonant and a source of
legitimacy for corporate or state domination, or as an impossibility. Finally, when
dialogue is treated as agonistic and multivocal, then dialogue and contestation can
either be understood as distinct forms, diachronically intertwined, or contestation
itself — including protest and other seemingly ‘‘asymmetrical’’ techniques — can be
considered synchronically as dialogic.

This article suggests that, just as communication research should not seek
to enhance social relations at the expense of addressing social inequalities and
exploitation (Rawlins, 2009), it should not privilege consensual dialogue as the best
form of social change, an attitude sometimes displayed in theories of dialogue, public
deliberation, invitational rhetoric, public relations, and even activism itself. Indeed, it
may be that commonsensical understandings of activism as involving confrontation,
challenge, and contestation has pushed scholars to treat dialogue in terms of consensus
when considering activist practice. For instance, public relations theorists, especially

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S. Ganesh & H. M. Zoller Dialogue and Activism

in Europe and Australia/New Zealand have developed sophisticated conceptions
of dialogue that incorporate argumentation and disagreement when considering
corporate communication practices (Zerfaß, 2010). However, public relations studies
of dialogue in the specific context of activism, with some non-U.S. exceptions
(Henderson, 2005; Weaver, 2010), tend to be dominated by a consensus-oriented view
that emphasizes symmetrical communication (Kim & Sriramesh, 2009), continuing
to risk privileging civility over social and material needs, including social justice.

An agonistic perspective is well suited to shift this bias and aid theorizing about
activism and dialogue in a number of ways. First, observations from our own studies
as well as those of others have shown that it is unrealistic or naïve to understand
activist dialogue in terms of the abandonment or suspension of power differences.
Rather, even as scholars understand power as irrevocably imbued in dialogue, it may
well also be necessary to understand how power negotiations influence strategies,
and that even protests can be important preparatory stages for dialogue. Research
could examine ways in which such power moves establish, create, and constitute the
grounds for activist dialogue.

Second, an agonistic perspective helps move away from ideas, often explicit in
treatments of dialogue as purely collaborative, of activism as a form of conflict
escalation. If one accepts the idea that dialogue itself involves tension in the form of
a movement, as Mouffe (2000) says, from a construction of ‘‘them’’ as enemies to
be destroyed, to adversaries to be engaged with, then research on activist dialogue
should treat tension as inevitable throughout the process instead of either escalatory
or abnormal. Future studies, accordingly, should seek to examine the multiple ways
in which tensions themselves serve to construct contestation and dialogue.

Third, and following from the point above, understanding activist solidarity
in terms of internal consensus-oriented dialogue can draw attention away from
important dialogic functions of internal struggle and difference. As the case involving
animal rights in Aotearoa New Zealand, demonstrates, understanding ways in
which activists engage in debate with each other has important implications for how
solidarity itself is constituted and how various activist politics and issues are articulated
productively vis-à-vis each other. Indeed, the very fact that scholars and activists alike
describe contemporary forms of activism as a ‘‘movement of movements’’ (Mertes,
2004) or a ‘‘network of networks’’ (Melucci, 1996) points toward the importance of
examining how difference constitutes contemporary activist politics and the overall
contingence of activist struggle.

Co-optive perspectives on activist dialogue are keenly aware of the potential risks
inherent in dialogue when participants differ in power, resources, or status. In this
sense, researchers recognize that dialogic theories must address issues of power and
conflict. However, we would note that to the degree that dialogue aims to achieve
moments of mutual respect and vulnerability, such moments are temporary and
fleeting even in close personal relationships (Cissna & Anderson, 1994; Rawlins,
2009). The particularly fragile nature of potential dialogue between activists and their
campaign targets does not mark activism as inherently different from other modes of

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Dialogue and Activism S. Ganesh & H. M. Zoller

communication. Although we cannot assume that either activists or the groups they
target will be willing to risk genuine change, the OCA case study stresses the value
of maintaining a pragmatic hope for that outcome. The agonistic perspective allows
us to recognize the synchronicity of conflict and dialogue and stresses the diachronic
unfolding of relations over time.

Finally, agonistic perspectives on dialogue significantly challenge what one might
construe as dialogic openness itself. While collaboration-oriented perspectives as well
as critical perspectives of dialogue as co-optation tend to construe openness as a form
of consensus or vulnerability, agonistic perspectives include many more features
of openness. This article has identified several, including caution, deliberation,
unpredictability, awareness, presence, and visibility. Given that lay theories of activist
dialogue are rich and multiple, we call for more research to uncover the multiple
ways in which dialogic openness is enacted in activist practice.

Finally, we hope that this article will spark further examinations of what are
often taken-for-granted assumptions about dialogue and activism. Although we
argued for the agonistic perspective on dialogue as the most helpful for theorizing
activism as a significant source of social change, more broadly, we hope to encourage
researchers to be more explicit about their conceptualizations and the influence
of this orientation on their work. Both dialogue and activism are communication
processes that are vulnerable to valorization and denigration. Moving beyond these
dichotomous depictions may help critical studies add greater complexity to our
understanding of these processes as well as social transformation more broadly. In an
era marked by multiple crises of capital and state that threaten democratic practice,
it is imperative that communication research continue investigations into how to
deepen democracy. We hope this article contributes to the discussion.

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对话、激进主义和民主社会变化

【摘要：】

本文系统地描述了对话的各种立场及其对理解激进主义和社会变革的影响。本文描

述了对话的三个方向——合作、合并和争胜——这些方向因对话普遍性、差异的作用和

权力的概念的前提假设而有所区别。我们倡导对话的多义性、论争性以讨论权力问题和

激进主义冲突问题。这样的角度阐明了社会变革中广泛的激进策略，而不着眼以共识为

导向的方法。我们用两个人种志案例研究突出激进主义和对话作为普通理论的重要性。

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Dialogue, activisme et changement social démocratique

Résumé

Cet article offre une description systématique de diverses positions sur le dialogue et de

leurs conséquences pour la compréhension de l’activisme et du changement social.

Il décrit trois orientations envers le dialogue (la collaboration, la cooptation et

l’agonisme) qui sont différenciées selon leurs présupposés concernant l’omniprésence du

dialogue, le rôle de la différence et les conceptions du pouvoir. Nous proposons une

perspective multivocale et agonistique du dialogue qui centre les enjeux de pouvoir et de

conflit dans l’activisme. Une telle perspective éclaire une grande gamme de tactiques

activistes pour le changement social plutôt que de privilégier des méthodes axées sur le

consensus. Ces approches sont illustrées par deux études de cas ethnographiques qui

soulignent l’importance des théories de sens commun à propos de l’activisme et du

dialogue.

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Dialog, Aktivismus und demokratischer sozialer Wandel

Dieser Aufsatz bietet eine systematische Beschreibung verschiedener Positionen zum Dialog
und ihre Implikationen für das Verständnis von Aktivismus und sozialem Wandel.
Beschreiben werden drei Positionen bezüglich des Dialogs als Kollaboration, Kooptation und
Agonismus, die sich bezüglich ihrer Annahmen zur Verbreitung des Dialogs, der Rolle von
Unterschieden und Konzepten von Macht unterscheiden. Wir argumentieren für einen
multivokalen, agonistischen Blick auf den Dialog, der Themen von Macht und Konflikt im
Aktivismus zentriert. Solch eine Perspektive beleuchtet eine breites Spektrum an
aktivistischen Taktiken für sozialen Wandel anstatt konsensorientierte Methoden zu
bevorzugen. Diese Ansätze werden anhand zweier ethnographischer Studien illustriert, die die
Bedeutung von Laientheorien zu Aktivismus und Dialog betonen.

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“‘Pensando Sucio’”: Excavando Tres Matriarcas Fundadores de los Estudios de la
Comunicación

Resumen

El campo de la comunicación rara vez examina los asuntos de género, especialmente al
documentar su propia historiografía. Consecuentemente, Hortense Powdermaker, Mae
Huettig, y Helen MacGill Hughes casi nunca aparecen como de gran influencia en el
desarrollo de la erudición de la comunicación durante la era de su nacimiento entre los
años 1930 y 1960, a pesar de que estas mujeres trabajaron y publicaron dentro de los
mismos círculos de Harold Lasswell, Dallas Smythe, y Paul Lazarsfeld. Factores sociales,
económicos y políticos disminuyeron sus contribuciones en los campos que ahora
llamamos la teoría de los efectos de los medios, la economía política de la comunicación,
y los estudios de los medios. Este ensayo usa la teoría de la perspectiva feminista
epistemológica para examinar algunos de los momentos tempranos de la historia la
erudición de la comunicación, para teorizar acerca de las consecuencias de su desarrollo y
sugerir el valor del trabajo futuro de recuperación.

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대화, 행동주의 그리고 민주적 사회변화

요약

본 연구는 행동주의와 사회적 변화를 이해하기 위한 대화와 그들의 함의에 대한 여러

입장들의 체계적인 기술을 제공하고 있다. 본 연구는 대화로 향한 세가지 지향점들, 즉

협력, 흡수, 그리고 공격적방어행위를 기술하였는바, 그들은 대화의 퍼짐, 차이의 역할,

그리고 파워의 개념에 관한 가정들에 의해 차별화되었다. 우리는 행동주의에서의 파워와

갈등의 이슈들을 중심에 놓는 대화에서의 다양한 목소리를 가지고 있고 방어.공격적인

접근을 주장하였다. 이러한 접근은 동의지향적방법들을 특권화하는 대신에 사회적

변화를 위한 행동주의자들의 전략의 방대한 법위를 설명하였다. 이러한 접근들은

행동주의와 대화의 단계이론의 중요성을 강조하는 두가지 인종학적 사례연구를 통해

설명되었다.

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