The Social Justice Turn: Cultivating “Critical Hope” in an Age of Despair

Abstract

Recent global headlines about suicide attacks, xenophobic rhetoric, systemic gun violence, and the continued displacement of those fleeing civil war and environmental catastrophe have foregrounded social justice issues pertaining to race, nationality, socioeconomic status, religion, and a host of other factors. We suggest in this paper that the pervasive despair of our current historical moment has necessitated the urgent development of the conceptual Justice Turn in service-learning. This move uses as a foundational starting point three trends that have been consistently marginalized but are gaining momentum in our field: a) critique of the field's roots in charity; b) a problematization of White normativity, paired with the bolstering of diverse voices and perspectives, and c) the embrace of emotional elements including tension, ambiguity, and discomfort. Finally, we offer critical hope (Bozalek, Carolissen, Liebowitz, & Boler, 2014; Freire, 2007) as a conceptual space in which service-learning as a field may simultaneously acknowledge the historical and contextual roots of current despair, while using this affective element as a pedagogical and curricular means to engage service-learning more intentionally as a vehicle for social justice goals. It was grounds for despair. On September 2nd, 2015, a three-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi washed ashore on a Mediterranean beach. The drowning was not an unusual occurrence in the region, as news articles and witness reports had many times made second-page international headlines, warning of the exodus out of Syria, and calling alarm to the deplorable conditions of human trafficking boats. What made Alan's story front-page news, however, was the graphic imagery that quickly invoked in citizens around the world an emotional connection to this victim of civil war and structural inequality. Alan, one child of thousands lost to a circumstance positioned firmly in a larger web of structural restrictions and political conflict, became every person's child in the global imaginary. Countless public figures saw in Alan a child they knew and loved; former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recalled the moment he and his wife saw the photo, and it evoked memories of their own son at that age (The Canadian Press, 2015). Social media forums erupted with the hashtag #Alankurdi, mourning his death and the circumstances leading up to it, forming support groups for Syrian refugees, and organizing protests. The notorious photograph rendered the Syrian conflict and its consequences more than a distant polit ical story; for many, Alan became an intimate personification of a civil war, and the face that ignited ethical debates about--among other things--who is granted the privilege of mobility, who has the power to patrol borders, what it means to work for social justice, and to what degree each individual, organization, and government is responsible for taking action when humans suffer. These questions, catalyzed by the death of a child, became the raison d'etre of this article. In tandem with the hateful rhetoric of far right parties in Europe and elsewhere, and popularized xenophobic responses to the global refugee crisis, the death of Alan Kurdi implored to ask what the field of service-learning and community engagement can and ought to do in light of this emotionally charged, highly divisive historical moment. Service-learning is ideally positioned to put a human face to issues of inequality and human suffering; notions of mobility, power, privilege, and responsibility are especially vital to this field in a time when the global events of 2015 and 2016 have caused a heightened sense of urgency and a widening political divisiveness between constructed binaries of black and white, migrant and refugee, police officer and citizen, right and left politics, Republican and Democrat, and more broadly, us and them. High profile suicide attacks in Lahore, Brussels, Ougadougou, and Nice (to name only a few), escalating racialized police brutality, mass gun violence, the polarizing rhetoric of political campaigns here and abroad, and the rising rate of political and environmental refugees, have all profoundly shifted the landscape in which service-learning in higher education operates, and therefore must influence how we respond as educators, scholars, practitioners, and citizens within a field that continually navigates border crossings of all sorts. …