자기만족적 신자유주의에 대한 저항: 고통으로 하여금 발언하게 하라

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1.

OCTOBER 16, 2019

It Serves Us Right To Suffer: Breaking Down Neoliberal Complacency

by KIM C. DOMENICO
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지성인이 된다는 것은 실제로 고통이 말할 수 있도록 허용하는 진실을 말하는 것을 의미합니다. 즉, 그것은 사회의 지배적인 관점에 의해 감추어지거나 숨겨져있는 사회적 불행을 조명하는 세계의 비전을 만듭니다.

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.. That is, it creates a vision of the world that puts into the limelight the social misery that is usually hidden or concealed by the dominant viewpoints of a society.
Cornel West, Chekhov, Coltrane and Democracy


신자유주의는, 그로부터 그것이 진화 한 ‘스펙트럼’과 같이, 모든 사회적 관계를 중재합니다. 그것은 이런 사회적 관계를, 그 중심에있는 공허 속으로 원치 않는 조사를 부를까 두려워하여 감히 그 이름을 호명하지 않는 이데올르기에 복무하는, 공연적이고 안무된 거래로 환원시킵니다. 이것은 반성을 회피하는 뱀파이어 능력이 있습니다. 그 앞에 거울을 놓으면 ‘절규’와 기이하게도 닮은 셀피 사진을 얻을 수 있을 것입니다

Neoliberalism, like the ‘spectacle’ it evolved from, mediates all social relations. It reduces them to performative, choreographed transactions in the service of an ideology that dare not speak its name for fear of inviting unwanted scrutiny into the void at its center. It has the vampire ability to elude reflection. Put a mirror in front of it and you’ll end up with a selfie that bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘The Scream’.
Jennifer Matsui, Neoliberalism: The Ideology That Dare Not Speak Its Name

My recent discovery of and interest in the 19th century movement in revolutionary Russia aimed at social honesty (nihilism) stirred up an embarrassing memory. In the late 70’s, when I was in Divinity School, Orin and I were guests at dinner hosted by our loquacious friend George, a fellow div student and liberal Catholic, and his wife. The other guest, a priest friend of George’s, was feisty, not at all fearful of challenging liberal composure and putting the “religious liberal” (me) on the spot. Apropos of nothing I recall, he put to me a theological question. I no longer remember the question (maybe something like how can there be salvation if there’s no sin.) But I remember my answer: I had none. As a Unitarian liberal, I was not required to ponder theological fine points. It strikes me now that, equally, I had no notion that theology had something to do with important matters, i.e., human birth-to-death life and how people are to live meaningfully in the span of years we’re given in our time here. Here was I, cloaked in my thin agnostic apparel, in a quite superior way figuring I could do without acquainting myself with the history of all the thinking – not to mention the courage and sacrifice – that has gone into attempting to limn 그리다Supreme Value. His question caught me in my own dogmatism, providing me an opportunity to question it, which I was too fragile, too shaky in my div school status to take him up on.
As far as I knew then, and my experiences since then have not contradicted it, the quintessential liberal church – and I extrapolate from this – liberal bourgeois society as a whole -does not pertain to “life on the ground.” Just as the liberal church does not stoop to the humiliation of surrender to a particular creed, instead pretending to honor them all, liberals are allowed, inasmuch as they are inclined, to exist in a “green” zone where the problems of existence are intellectual, maybe spiritual, but never an existential-level personal “struggle”

They are freed from identifying with the human survival-level struggle for “bread” in which Kropotkin based his anarchism. The assumption works fine as long as one is not immersed in catastrophes, afflictions, torments, for which, like death, there is no solution, that is, as long as one does not suffer. As long as one can stay in the consensus bubble wherein life’s problems are resolved or potentially resolvable with the application of earnest work and a positive attitude, keeping one buoyed in the given social reality, liberalism will do.
Dan Berrigan’s words, “The difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything,” sit on my refrigerator door. The message is so simple it doesn’t easily register in the way a more eloquent, more poetic or pithier Emersonian quotation might. However, great pithy quotations from wise men or women are simply more consumables; we snack on them for that boost of good feeling gained by a knowing reference to a “higher nature” without our having to actually stoop to discover the truth of it, of who we are – another way to evade scrutiny of the void at the center.

The Berrigan phrase is particularly apt today, when I know so many people who have allowed themselves to be convinced it is better to do nothing than something; that is, who can face neither the insoluble darkness within nor without that “doing something” requires. They do not seem to realize that action, to be action, will always be “radical” and disturbing to others; it affirms individual integrity against neoliberal “equilibrium” at all levels, beginning at the bottom, within the individual, and within families. Though wrong by prevailing social standards, genuine rock-the-boat action feels deeply, unifyingly right to the individual – a sense of completeness that is inward and spiritual in nature, not dependent on corroboration from outside.

In particular, the “doing something” that’s “everything” is that true action, in the way Cornel West puts it, that ”allows suffering to speak.”
True boat-rocking action begins in the soul, in allowing the soul, the faculty that suffers, to speak. The dominant viewpoint leaves out not only social misery, but also the silent suffering of the denied soul with its craving for truth, beauty, and poetic meaning, in each individual. In our heads we think about suffering – that sad misfortune that happens sometimes to others; only by means of an alive soul can suffering be experienced, wept out in tears, transformed back into the basis for inter-personal empathy and connectedness. Only one who suffers can allow suffering to speak. This fact explains the great emptiness, the great void at the center of liberal consensus reality.
The unvoiced soul in each individual, that intimate “other,” once allowed to speak, answers to the social misery caused not by Trump, or even by rightwing extremists, but by the structures and systems that form neoliberal capitalist reality. It answers to the terrible and terrifying planetary distress, not by talk of reform and technological “solutions,” but understanding the industrial society’s way of life must undergo revolutionary change (a central tenet of the current headlining Extinction Rebellion movement). Liberal bourgeois society, in its collective refusal of suffering, allowed disasters to fester and grow over centuries while the disasters appeared to affect only “others.” Now they reach into each formerly “elect,” safe and snug suburban middle class life. In a way, this is simple justice.
However, such a justice is too terrible! We cannot bear to think of our planet becoming unrecognizable, perhaps uninhabitable, a toxified wasteland, to think of losing our fish, trees, our coral reefs, our songbirds, our unpolluted soil and clean air and water, all unthinkable. If only there had been another voice capable of reaching us in those innocent years when we celebrated with such undiluted glee every technological achievement – the wonders, for instance of electrical appliances – a voice that would have cried out from the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia that were being sheared off in order that we might have electricity! If only our imagination had allowed us to include the “others” of mountains, rivers, forests, instead of their being more excluded from our awareness (though less maligned) than immigrants and poor people!
The only authentic answer that now can be made by the liberal educated class to the current multi-level and multi-front crisis facing everyone on the planet, is to admit powerlessness; they must stop “using” the energy of outrage at the rightwing nemesis, step down off their throne of righteousness and enter their own “otherness,” which, like the miracle of grace, still exists as an option. The faux partisan political fight has no possibility of being won, and promises to change nothing, only to allow the structures and systems to continue that are bringing life on our lovely planet, the possibility of living in peace, sustainably, with enough for all, to an end. Is the fight worth it? Can’t it just be dropped, like the fight between the Sneetches with stars on their bellies and the Sneetches without stars?

In the Dr. Seuss tale, the Sneetches’ bitter and pointless enmity simply enriches the guy who owns the machines that can take belly stars off and put them on again, and impoverishes themselves. Can peace be allowed to prevail and apocalypse averted??
Maybe, though the “bad guys” are frustratingly still out there, profiteering off these endtimes, seemingly bent on Armageddon, we must peel our eyes away from the guys we hate and do what’s right – i.e, save our unvoiced souls by giving voice to them. In so doing, we might join the human world made of “others,” and allow suffering to speak.
The illusions of “green zone” safety that sustain liberal bourgeois reality succeed in one way: they constrain our true human fighting strength.

Only the identification that comes with“stooping” down, joining with the common-as-dirt “others” (sinners), including “dirt” itself, can save us, if not from looming collective disaster, then from our enslavement to the denial of suffering. This change in narrative, at first “tough to swallow,” is liberatory, the gains more than making up for the innocence lost. That is, what liberal reality vigorously defends against, shielded by its illusions, is positive, healing, liberating news from the individual’s deepest being – from his or her otherness. This primary liberation is the basis for all others: in solidarity with one’s otherness, the individual has at last the strength to contradict (disobey) the undermining and self-condemning inner voices woven into bourgeois identity, those most intimate and private enforcers for ego-syntonic自己同調性의, centralized, top-down neoliberal reality.
The souls of every man and woman raised in bourgeois liberal society register experiences of unspeakable pain, from the thwarting of their soul’s absolute need for the expanded reality of imagination-based meaning. To reclaim the full range of our being – reduced now to “consumer” and “employee” – we’ve just this one painstaking way. Neoliberalism is both the cause and the consequence of a heartless environment, of mass denied suffering. It is the diabolical system born of collective unconscious effort to avoid bringing old pain to consciousness. The result: a joined, consensus reality in which no one is or can be an “other;” no information, however dire the media news, can unsettle the willed and terrifying complacency of neoliberalism. The consequence of the mass refusal by individuals to find out if there’s more to our being than we’re given to understand in the reductionist, positivist, imagination-refusing reality (the refusal to suffer), is that trauma which is being passed on to the world, like the shit sent to Kenya in Jennifer Matsui’s CP essay.
The only way this cancer can be stopped is to stop being hosts for it, to, instead, be the true human being each person is, the soul’s immunity restored, with so much life in our being that we become a hostile environment for the messages of belittling and self-hate that are the main enforcers of neoliberal totalitarianism. I sound, even to myself, like a midway barker at the Floyd Field Days – “Step right up folks!”

but how much longer can we wait to restore immunity and regain our enlarged and strengthened being?
The memory of that long-ago embarrassment to my fragile 28-year-old identity came back to me as I contemplated the problem of liberal complacency. No doubt conservative rightwing complacency is a reality as well, but not being one of them I do not presume to speak to them. I speak to one side in the Sneetch war. At the time of the priest’s question, I was aware enough to realize he’d asked me something about which I ought to have an opinion. Without it, I was an imposter and mere membership in the exalted Yale community did not exempt me. For several more years I clung to my imposterhood, convinced as I was that this reality was all there was until the pain of upholding that illusion dragged me down, and I was forced to acknowledge the reality of “the other within.” All of us caught in liberal reality ought to pray ceaselessly to have our imposterhood 가면성pointed out!
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More articles by:KIM C. DOMENICO
Kim C. Domenico, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space), and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side. Seminary trained and ordained, but independently religious. She can be reached at: kodomenico@verizon.net.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/16/it-serves-us-right-to-suffer-breaking-down-neoliberal-complacency/

2.

SEPTEMBER 27, 2019

Neoliberalism: The Ideology that Dares not Speak its Name

by JENNIFER MATSUI
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Photograph Source: Coco Curranski – CC BY 2.0

The question, “What is neoliberalism?” invites a response similar to the old canarda false or unfounded report or story about art: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it”. Unlike art, which seldom rears its head고개를들다 outside a rarified, specially designated setting, neoliberalism is everywhere, which is why we seldom acknowledge its ubiquity, even as we endure its predations on every aspect of our lives.
If neoconservatism is late-stage capitalism on rage-inducing steroids, ranting about imaginary external threats, then neoliberalism is peak capitalism on hallucinogenic horse tranquilizers, dreaming about itself. Unlike its bug-eyed, more visibly bloodthirsty counterpart, neoliberalism doesn’t appear when the occasion demands it, but remains thoroughly entrenched in everything it touches, leaving nothing untouched or unscathed.
The word itself brings to mind a host of vague concepts that add up to little in terms of understanding just what it is exactly. Can it be described as “free market fundamentalism”, the pushing through of democratic sounding reforms to jump-start a global feeding frenzy on another country’s resources? “The stealth deliverance of violence (economic and military) under an internationally agreed upon humanitarian framework, as opposed to a boots-on-the-ground occupation” might be closer to the mark. Or maybe it’s just some guy on a mountain bike staring at sunrise in an online video ad touting “Global Solutions”.
Whatever it is, you suffer under it gratefully, perhaps dimly aware of a darker, less “tolerant” age when you could shut off communication with the outside world long enough to sleep. Or perhaps, you can’t imagine not being tethered to a radioactive surveillance device that is collating your genome sequence in order to sell you a healthcare plan, or better cater to your growing fascination with assault weapons after being told for the umpteenth time that your password is incorrect.
Neoliberalism, under the subterfuge guise of technology and “progress”, keeps you interminably on hold and demands that you not only agree to, but rather embrace its terms of service in order to proceed with a transaction it invented five minutes ago to extract more data from you. It calls this sadistic vampire process of life-depleting exsanguination, “a time-saving solution”. You seldom notice that there was never a problem to begin with, only a confounding technology to now overcome in order to do something that was once as simple as blowing your nose.
You tend to overlook its authoritarian aspects, since it always uses its ‘indoor voice’, and presents you with choices. By now you may have noticed that from this vast menu of options, there is only one outcome: Your abject capitulation to its demands to access your data, or forsake the ability to perform necessary tasks altogether, forcing you “off the grid” and into a world inaccessible by non-digital means. Good luck finding a dumpster, or even cat food cans and old newspapers that haven’t been transformed by IOT.
This phantom killer is embedded in every molecule that makes up your life. It’s everything you consume, watch, listen to, discuss, anticipate and fear. It does to you inversely what you do with its devices and apps. Soon it will be absorbed directly into your skin as 5G millimeter waves, the new generation of electromagnetic radiation that promises to accelerate internet speeds and cancer cells concomitantly. For now, neoliberalism is in the food you eat and the water you drink, or at least the lead and microplastics contained within. Contamination itself Is a “smart” solution to the loss of profits a behemoth corporation might risk through regulation. It provides opportunities for start ups to make the world a better place by addressing, or rather, profiting from health and environment hazards with more carcinogenic, poverty-inducing technology.
Even as you deny the existence of an all-encompassing, interconnected surveillance dragnet closing in and microwaving you for profit, you begin to curb your impulses around it, and refrain from expressing a desire to shit kick Siri in the vicinity of any of your devices. You never know who might be listening. But you don’t really have a problem with that. You aren’t, after all a . . . I’d better not say that, or even think it, regardless of the context, or the justified urge to do some real damage. Isn’t there software that alerts the NSA to act on hyperbolic expressions of frustration with a virtual assistant who keeps directing you to Uber Eats in California, instead of finding ‘California Uber Alles’ on Spotify? Still, you are willing to make the necessary adjustments to your lifestyle, giving up privacy, free speech and inner thoughts so that you can make use of an app that superimposes kitten whiskers on your selfie, or gain access to your own refrigerator.
The chances that you will ever holler ‘Allah Akbar’ in a crowded stadium are pretty slim, so you just accept the fact that some airport screener is laughing at what’s in your pants as you are boarding your flight to Cleveland. The NSA meanwhile, knows that you are going there to meet a hottie you met on a dating app, while her Fit Bit device knows that she’ll be dead in less than six months of Type Two Diabetes. Thanks to Google, her insurer will cite a “preexisting condition” to avoid covering the costs of treatment and burial.
YouTube, sensing that you are sad over the loss of your booty call, has already lined up a playlist of mournful power ballads, while Facebook targets you with ads for anti-depressants to help you get through your bereavement. In exchange for allowing yourself to be manipulated, monitored and humiliated in order to advance AI so that it can one day lure you and your self-driving car off a cliff, your new smartphone provides you with the perfect animated 3D poop emoji to express your present mood. Meanwhile, Tinder has already lined up a catfish in a Kentucky halfway house as your next “soulmate”.
You are not prepared just yet to hate this thing you can’t quite name (but suspect the guy on the mountain bike had something to do with) despite having noticeably aged in the time it took to download an app – just so you can flush a “smart”, crowd-funded toilet, and make the world a better place by sending its contents to Kenya. When Neoliberalism speaks, it asks (rhetorically, of course) “How can we force another country to cede its sovereignty and hand over its resources without getting the anti-war crowd all worked up”? The implied almost universally accepted answer is “Send them your sewage, along with a volunteer aid worker on a ‘gap year’ wearing a flower crown”.
If you attempt to put a face to it, you start to picture the guy on the mountain bike, now dressed in business casual giving an upbeat forecast for the launch date of a solar-powered shipping container that can transport a globally connected network of freshly harvested human waste to now “empowered” farmers in Kenya. You see him now in a sunlight drenched boardroom where a woman in a sari is deep in thought. Mathematical formulae is superimposed across her face, now in closeup, as if the magic of PowerPoint has lit her up from within.
Together they are projecting the wisdom of the ages across a curved horizon that ends in a Sierra Nevada mountain range at sunrise. In fact, they are a photo stock image, a ’simulacra rendering’ if you will, extracted from the neurons of white mice that have been subjected to near-lethal exposure to PowerPoint during clinical trials to determine their receptivity to phrases like ‘Global Solutions’ during REM cycles of web browsing.
Yes, neoliberalism is that guy, or sometimes even a woman with a name you struggle to pronounce. It is deceptively “diverse” in its packaging, despite exclusively prioritizing everything the man in business casual and his bro cohorts hold dear to the detriment of everything else on the planet. It’s green, to be sure, as in the color of money. Being a good sport, it will endure a sixteen-year-old girl with a very large megaphone scolding it for that very reason.
Just as likely, it wears yoga pants, and takes it talking points from an advanced Women’s Studies program. It might even write inspirational messages on a banana intended for a sex worker’s lunch. Unlike its neoconservative flip side, which comes more honestly represented in Dick Cheney and John Bolton, it’s hard to hate with the visceral revulsion brought on by imagining what a walrus mustache smells like.
Neoliberalism most often presents itself as your new team leader, a guy known for being charismatic and competent, upbeat and fair. Part of you knows that he’s a condescending autocrat, inventing pointless and mind-numbing tasks for you to carry out that a lab rodent would refuse on the ground of cruel and unusual punishment. As his “associate” or “valuable team member” you forgive these micro-assaults on your selfhood because it’s either that or face a dumpster that has caught fire after being “hacked by Russia”.
At least in theory, this mini-overlord, representative of the ideological framework that produced him is the opposite of Donald Trump. Glib and clever as opposed to bellicose and demented. He’s more likely to blow smoke up your ass than set off a firestorm of tweets. In practice, however, neoliberalism is more like Ivanka, unshakeable in the belief that unearned influence and privilege has the power to move mountains, or at least low-income people out of their homes, and “empower” them with the tools to oppress themselves.

신자유주의는, 그로부터 그것이 진화 한 ‘스펙트럼’과 같이, 모든 사회적 관계를 중재합니다. 그것은 이런 사회적 관계를, 그 중심에있는 공허 속으로 원치 않는 조사를 부를까 두려워하여 감히 그 이름을 호명하지 않는 이데올르기에 복무하는, 공연적이고 안무된 거래로 환원시킵니다. 이것은 반성을 회피하는 뱀파이어 능력이 있습니다. 그 앞에 거울을 놓으면 ‘절규’와 기이하게도 닮은 셀피 사진을 얻을 수 있을 것입니다

Neoliberalism, like the ‘spectacle’ it evolved from, mediates all social relations. It reduces them to performative, choreographed transactions in the service of an ideology that dare not speak its name for fear of inviting unwanted scrutiny into the void at its center. It has the vampire ability to elude reflection. Put a mirror in front of it and you’ll end up with a selfie that bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘The Scream’.

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More articles by:JENNIFER MATSUI
Jennifer Matsui is a writer living in Tokyo and a columnist for the print edition of CounterPunch magazine.



https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/27/neoliberalism-the-ideology-that-dares-not-speak-its-name/


3.
HOW NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY FUELS COMPLACENCY IN CIVIC ENGAGEMENT



January 6, 2014

By Tania D. Mitchell
Editor’s Note: This provocative post comes out of comments at the 2013 Conference of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, where I was fortunate to appear on a panel with Sarah Brackmann (Southwestern University), Corey Dolgon (Stonehill College), Tania Mitchell (University of Minnesota), and John Reiff (UMASS – Amherst). The topic was, “Democratic and Community Engagement: A General Discussion of the Neoliberal Problem.” Much of the content could be seen as building upon Mitchell’s seminal 2008 work articulating critical service-learning in the Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning. Corey Dolgon’s remarks – a challenging set of concerns that moved us to more deeply consider the social ends of service-learning engagement, as well as how to address the contexts in which we operate, domestically or globally – will appear this Wednesday.

HOW NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY FUELS COMPLACENCY IN CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Brandon Kliewer’s (2013) argument that the institutionalization of civic engagement in higher education coupled with a neoliberal ideology has stunted our ability to achieve (and potentially work for) social justice is an important consideration for those of us committed to social justice and the practice and promise of civic engagement work in higher education.
Civic engagement is most often praised as a universal good. It gets students into the community! It fulfills a needed service in the community! It creates opportunity for practical application and hands-on learning! What could be wrong? And this idea of engagement’s universal “goodness” has fueled its growth. Yet, Kliewer warns that “maintaining a civic engagement movement that does not account for neoliberalism [could undermine] the very democratic sentiments and institutions that the movement attempts to revive” (p. 73).
We do the work to connect our courses to service experiences and make cursory efforts to have our students reflect on those experiences and, more often than not, we see that work as good enough. We read the research that says that service learning improves retention, critical thinking, and promotes racial understanding. That civic engagement experiences strengthen leadership skills, improve academic performance, and foster greater citizenship. Our civic engagement practice, however, rarely interrogates the structural and ideological contexts that frame our work, it “tends not to address questions concerning the broader situation that generate the problems which then require service” (Coles, 2011, pp. 1-2).
This reluctance to question, I believe, is indicative of complacency in the civic engagement movement. I love the definition that the American Heritage Dictionary (2013) uses for complacency, “A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy.”
Complacency, by this definition, is unconscious and, perhaps worse, it is uncritical. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2013) adds that complacency comes with no desire or want for change…a sense that things as they are, are good enough. And, therefore, we can keep to business as usual.
In conversations about social justice, structural inequality, power and privilege, we often talk about oppression and the ways oppression manifests and must be challenged. Oppression is generally presented as having three levels: individual, societal, and institutional (Hardiman & Jackson, 1997). Each level reflects the different unconscious and conscious attitudes and behaviors that maintain systems of advantage and disadvantage based on social group membership. It is especially important to recognize and understand that these levels operate simultaneously and reinforce each other.
Similarly, I think the complacency that exists and inhibits the advancement of civic engagement’s justice aims also has three levels of conscious and unconscious behaviors and attitudes that operate simultaneously and reinforce each other preventing community engagement strategies from realizing the social justice outcomes that attract so many to the work.
At the individual level, complacency manifests in the egos of some practitioners. A lack of self-awareness and an unwillingness to interrogate our practice leads to assumptions of a critical pedagogy where there is none.
Complacency at the individual level also manifests in a sense of defeat or hopelessness that we see in students, faculty and sometimes community partners. It emerges from participating in the experience and not seeing the expected or anticipated change. From entering a community experience hoping for some magical transformation and being disappointed by the outcome. We get tired and frustrated and begin to ask “why bother?” believing that real change isn’t possible.
Another example of complacency at the individual level can be seen in the hesitance of faculty to engage in the political aspects of community engagement work. A fear of being seen as too radical, of isolating conservative students, of assuming our students can’t handle it. One of the consequences of the popularity of service-learning, argues Tony Robinson (2000), is its depoliticization. Faculty end up focusing more on the good deeds students do in their service placement rather than raising questions about the limits of service, the realities of structural inequality, and the more political (and perhaps revolutionary) work that would be necessary to bring about desired change.
A reliance on the efforts of the service-learning center on campus to manage partnerships or community relationships—to the extent that on some campuses faculty don’t actually know what students are doing in their service placements and have limited and often no contact with the community agencies (i.e., having never once traveled to the service site), where representatives from the service learning center are tasked with facilitating reflection on the service experience, where the service experience is merely an “add on” to an already developed curriculum is another manifestation of the complacency that limits advancing the social justice aims of civic engagement. This may also be an institutional manifestation, speaking to an emphasis on quantity over quality and a lack of resources for faculty development, but as I said these levels operate simultaneously and reinforce each other.
At the societal level complacency manifests in the work of the community agencies and schools we most often partner with in civic engagement experiences. The work that our partnering agencies do is often need-driven, not change-driven, so it can be difficult to develop community engagement experiences that address root causes of social concerns when that is not the priority of our accessible community partners.
This is also reflected in our dependence on a placement model that farms students out to sites as temporary (and replaceable) cogs in the wheel. We do this with an understanding, feeling or hope that it is easy on the organization or the students, but it is limited in impact and serves to reify the status quo.
An unwillingness to recognize the contributions of community partners as teaching partners is another example of complacency especially in regard to reconfiguring the unequal hierarchies in service relationships. Service-learning and civic engagement ask a great deal of the community partners who agree to partner with us, yet we rarely have the means to acknowledge their efforts as educators. Talmage Stanley (2013) of Emory and Henry University suggests that inviting a community partner into the classroom without extending an honorarium “extend[s] the class silences” and reifies unequal power structures and yet this is a dominant practice in service-learning.
Complacency at this level also manifests in an absence of research that looks closely at programmatic dimensions. Too much research on service-learning and civic engagement reports that “students did service as part of this class and great things happened!” rather than interrogating the pedagogical aspects of content, facilitation, and design. So, the most accessible research does not do a good job of informing the field about the specific innovations in practice that may bring us closer to desired social justice aims.
At the institutional level, the university calendar is one of the most obvious places where complacency manifests. The challenge of the university calendar, to embark on a social change project in a ten-week quarter or sixteen-week semester, to develop an experience that fosters authentic dialogic engagement is nearly impossible.
Institutional complacency can also be seen in the grant-driven realities of non-profits. Kliewer (2013) presents an effective critique of the Allstate Foundation and the implications of neoliberal ideology on the competitive grants processes that comprise the bulk of agency funding. Because our partner agencies need to be responsive to funder priorities, and because the requirements of grants often dictate the ways that an organization may respond to a critical social concern, opportunities for transformative action responsive to the issue is not always possible.
The marginalization of civic engagement as a respected way of teaching is another reflection of complacency institutionally. Junior faculty are often encouraged to wait until they are post-tenure to do community engagement work, and the bulk of service-learning opportunities on some campuses are led by non-tenure line faculty. Service-learning and community engagement takes more time and it can be difficult to invest in this kind of work if you fear it will not be respected or rewarded.
Finally, institutional complacency is also about the ways we report impact or effect. Too often impact is reduced to numbers of hours or, as in the 2011 Campus Compact annual report, billions of dollars as opposed to reporting on the transformative potential (or limits) of our engagement work. What does this communicate about what we value from community engagement work?
In 1994, Nadinne Cruz, defined service-learning as “a process of integrating intention with action in the context of a movement toward a just relationship.” The social justice aims of civic engagement work are part of our history. But, I think these struggles with complacency, perhaps fueled by neoliberal ideology, have prevented us from finding a way to fully realize the potential of this practice.
References
American Heritage Dictionary (2013). Complacency. Retrieved October 11, 2013 from http://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=complacency&submit.x=55&submit.y=21
Campus Compact (2011). Deepening the roots of civic engagement. 2011 Annual membership survey: Executive summary. Retrieved February 22, 2012 from http://www.compact.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2011-Annual-Survey-Executive-Summary.pdf
Coles, R. (2011). Cultivating pedagogies for civic engagement and political agency: Reflections for discussion of the theory and practice of democratic transformations in higher education. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation.
Cruz, N. (1994). Notes of the author, Reexamining service-learning in an international context, workshop, Annual Conference of the National Society for Experiential Education, Washington, D.C. November 11.
Hardiman, R. & Jackson, B. W. (1997). Conceptual foundations for social justice courses. In M. Adams, L. A. Bell, & P. Griffin (Eds.) Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook (pp. 16-29). New York: Routledge.
Kliewer, B. W. (2013). Why the civic engagement movement cannot achieve democratic and justice aims. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 19(2), 72-79.
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2013). Complacent. Retrieved October 11, 2013 from http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/complacent
Robinson, T. (2000). Dare the school build a new social order? Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 7, 142-157.
Stanley, T. A. (2013). “Walking a different way”: Coeducators, co-learners,
 and democratic engagement renaming the world. In A. Hoy & M. Johnson (Eds.) Deepening community engagement in higher education: Forging new pathways (pp 95-104). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Tania D. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the department of postsecondary teaching and learning at the University of Minnesota’s college of education and human development. Her teaching interests include social justice theory, civic discourse, public service, college student development and the pedagogy, philosophy and practice of service-learning in higher education. Much of her research focuses on service-learning as a critical pedagogy to explore civic identity, social justice, student learning and development, race and racism, and community practice.
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