What are adult education and research for? Researching (and) the feminist imaginary

Abstrakt

As an academic teaching courses on critical theories of adult education, I employ artsbased teaching and research and facilitates community workshops worldwide. I argue that working across formal and nonformal spaces is a central part of the social responsibility of academics in adult education to work for change, and equally, stems from the conviction that theory and practice need one another. Theory enables us to see more deeply and clearly into what is taking place in the world or what we are being taught to see and to believe about the world. Theory guides both the why and how we educate, the context and intention of which is central and the diverse methods we use, which are elemental.
I wish to ask the strategic question: What are adult education and research for? How participants and students answer this question, this essay argues, depends on where they stand and their perceptions of the world and of education and learning. Everything adult educators think, say, do and/or teach is done in context. My context as a feminist adult educator is our highly inequitably gendered world. Gender is understood as central to the web of assumptions behind dominant social imaginaries that hold certain conceptual frames in place. I maintain that the mesh of recent crises has brought to light a steady rise of a global patriarchal backlash of fundamentalist and fascist agendas across the globe, threatening the gains made by women and LGBTQIA communities.
Asking what feminist adult education and research are forproduces a complex of answers, but for adult education and research the answer must be: for radicalgender and social justice change, for the disruption of patriarchal knowledge, for the fight against “epistemic injustice”, and for new imaginaries for women to make sense of and story the worlds they inhabit.
Finally, the essay discusses the aims and methods of a 5-year international SSHRC project focused on feminist imaginary as a pedagogical tool for epistemic justice and change.