Women Social Activists of Atlantic Canada: Stories of Re-Enchantment, Authenticity, and Hope
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56105/cjsae.v27i1.3338Keywords:
social movement learning, feminist perspectivesAbstract
In this paper, we offer our analysis of the profiles of 27 elder women social activists of Atlantic Canada, profiles that were created by Dr. Liz Burge. Our goal is to honor these women and to inform, and hopefully inspire, others involved in social activism. We hope our research will contribute to the growing field of inquiry in adult education into feminist approaches to social movement learning (SML). We found these social activists’ engagements were powerfully shaped by their families’ values, initial experiences of finding voice and “speaking up”, and both formal and informal learning about effective approaches for political engagement. The stories speak to a social activism where the personal is political and the boundaries between the private and the public sphere are blurred. These women’s profiles, we argue, resist the ‘malaise of modernity’, specifically its glorification of individualism, disenchantment with the world, and retreat from political engagement. In their stories we see a process of re-enchantment that involves a search for authenticity fueled by hope.
References
Arendt, H. ([1958] 1998). The human condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press (2nd edition).
Brown, W. (2005). Feminism unbound: Revolution, mourning, politics. In Brown, W. Edgework. Critical Essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Brownmiller, S. (1999). In our time: Memoir of a revolution. New York: Dial Press.
Burge, L. (n.d.) Women social activists of Atlantic Canada: Profiles of wisdom. http://etc.lib.unb.ca/womenactivists/
Butterwick, S. (1987). Learning liberation: A comparative analysis of feminist consciousness raising and Freire’s conscientization method. Unpublished MA thesis. University of British Columbia.
Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London: Sage.
Chovanec, D. M. (2009). Between hope and despair: Women learning politics. Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood.
Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in
qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Clover, D. E., Stalker, J. & McGauley, L. (2004). Feminist popular education and community leadership: The case for new directions. In Adult Education for Democracy, Social Justice and a Culture of Peace. Proceedings of the International Gathering of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education and the Adult Education Research Conference, University of Victoria.
English, L. (2005). Narrative research and feminist knowing: A poststructural reading of women’s learning in community organizations. McGill Journal of Education, 40(1), 143-155.
Frank, A. W. (2002). Why study people's stories? The dialogical ethics of narrative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(1), 109-117.
Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the postsocialist condition. New York: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, MB: Lowman & Littlefield
Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Gouthro, P. A. (2009a). Life histories of Canadian women as active citizens: Implications for policies and practices in adult education. The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 21(2), 19-36.
Gouthro, P. A. (2009b). Neoliberalism, lifelong learning, and the homeplace: Problematizing the boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to explore women’s learning experiences. Studies in Continuing Education, 31(2), 157-172.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. St Leonard’s, UK:
Allen & Unwin.
Guignon, C. (2004). On being authentic. London and New York: Routledge.
Hall, B. & Turray, T. (2006). A review of the state of the field: Social movement learning. Canadian Council on Learning. http://www.ccl-cca.ca/pdfs/AdLKC/stateofthefieldreports/SocialMovementLearning.pdf
Hanisch, C. (1970). The personal is political. In Notes from the second year: Women’s liberation. Major writings of the radical feminists. New York: Radical Feminism.
Hendry, P. M. (2009). Narrative as inquiry. Journal of Educational Research, 103(2), 72-80.
Lamott, A. (2007). Bird by bird – Some instructions on writing and life. New York: Anchor Books.
Leggo, C. (2005). Autobiography and identity: Six speculations. Vitae Scholasticae, 22(1), 115-133.
Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiock, R. & Zilber, T. (1998). Narrative research: Reading, analysis and interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Jaggar, A. (1989). Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. Inquiry – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 32(2), 151-176.
Kvale, S. & Brinkmann, S. (2009). InterViews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Mills, C. W. ([1959]2000). The sociological imagination. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Mischler, E. G. (1986). Research interviewing: Context and narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Reichenbach, R. (1998). The postmodern self and the problem of developing a democratic mind. Theory and research in social education, 26(2), 226-237.
Reichenbach, R. (1999). After postmodernism: Education in an exhausted modernity. Available at http://egora.unimuester.de/ew/persoenlich/reichenbach/q_onlinepublikationen.shtml
Saldaña, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Stall, S. & Stoecker, R. (1998). Community organizing or organizing community? Gender and the crafts of empowerment. Gender & Society, 12(6), 729-756.
Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic – A feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The malaise of modernity. Toronto, Ontario: House of Anansi Press.
Vannini, P. (2007). The changing meanings of authenticity: An interpretive biography of professors’ work experiences. Studies in symbolic interaction, 29, 63-90.
West, N. & Stalker, S. (2007). Journey to a (bi)cultural identity: Fabri art/craft and social justice in Aotearoa New Zealand. In Clover, D. & Stalker, J. (Eds.). The Arts and Social Justice: Re-crafting Adult Education and Community Cultural Leadership (pp. 125-143.) Leicester, UK: NIACE.
Wolcott, H. F. (1994). Transforming qualitative data. Sage Publications.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors of manuscripts accepted for publication will be required to assign copyright to the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education/L’Association canadienne pour l’étude de l’éducation des adultes (CJSAE). CJSAE requests that, as the creator(s)/author(s) of the manuscript your are submitting assign certain rights to the manuscript to the CJSAE in exchange for undertaking to publish the article in print and electronic form and, in general, to pursue its dissemination throughout the world. The rights the CJSAE requests are:
- The right to publish the article in print and electronic form or in any other form it may choose that is in keeping with its role as a scholarly journal with the goal of disseminating the work as widely as possible;
- The right to be the sole publisher of the article for a period of 12 months;
- The right to make the article available to the public within a period of not more than 24 months, as determined by relevant journal staff of the CJSAE;
- The right to grant republication rights to itself or others in print, electronic, or any other form, with any revenues accrued to be shared equally between the author(s) and the journal;
- The right to administer permission to use portions of the article as requested by others, seeking recompense when the CJSAE sees it as warrented;
- The right to seek or take advantage of opportunities to have the article included in a database aimed at increasing awareness of it;
- As the author(s), the CJSAE wishes you to retain the right to republish the article, with acknowledgement of the CJSAE as the original publisher, in whole or in part, in any other pbulication of your own, including any anthology that you might edit with up to three others;
- As the author(s), the CJSAE withes you to retain the right to place the article on your personal Web page or that of your university or institution. The CJSAE askes that you include this notice: A fully edited, peer-reviewed version of this article was first published by the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, <Year>, <Volume>, <Issue>, <Page Numbers>.
BY AGREEING TO THE FOREGOING, YOU CONFIRM THAT THE MANUSCRIPT YOU ARE SUBMITTING HAS NOT BEEN PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE IN WHOLE OR IN PART, AND THAT NO AGREEMENT TO PUBLISH IS OUTSTANDING.
SHOULD THE ARTICLE CONTAIN MATERIAL WHICH REQUIRES WRITTEN PERMISSION FOR INCLUSION, YOU AGREE THAT IT IS YOUR OBLIGATION IN LAW TO IDENTIFY SUCH MATERIAL TO THE EDITOR OF THE CJSAE AND TO OBTAIN SUCH PERMISSION. THE CJSAE WILL NOT PAY ANY PERMISSION FEES. SHOULD THE CJSAE BE OF THE OPINION THAT SUCH PERMISSION IS NECESSARY, IT WILL REQUIRE YOU TO PURSUE SHUCH PERMISSSION PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
AS AUTHOR(S), YOU WARRANT THAT THE ARTICLE BEING SUBMITTED IS ORIGINAL TO YOU.
Provided the foregoing terms are satisfactory, and that you are in agreement with them, please indicate your acceptance by checking the appropriate box and proceed with your submission.
This copyright agreement was extracted with permission from the "Best practices guide to scholarly journal publishing" (2007), produced by the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ).
