An Introduction to the Theoretical Foundation of the Pedagogy of Action

Abstract

Beginning with her childhood in Guyana, the author traces the experiences that spurred her awareness of Marxism, colonization, and the cultural forces that shaped her ideas of gender and race. She outlines the influences of her early ideas—from Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Thomas Kuhn, to feminist writers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Chandra Mohanty. But it is Ela Bhatt and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) that were the inspiration for the HIV low-literate module, since illiterate women workers built SEWA whose very existence makes the case for modernizing the construct of the proletariat. Here the workers are not male, not literate, not white, not in a factory. SEWA did this in the 1920s, helping street hawkers grow into organic intellectuals.