Centering Marxist-Feminist Theory in Adult Learning

Abstract

Using feminist extensions of Marxist theory, this article argues that a Marxist-feminist theory of adult learning offers a significant contribution to feminist pedagogical debates concerning the nature of experience and learning. From this theoretical perspective, the individual and the social are understood to exist in a mutually determining relationship, with a social world conceptualized as active human practice. The primary theoretical task is then to rearticulate the central relations of adult learning theory (the individual, the social, and experience), which necessitates a dialectical formation of social difference and oppression. This allows for an examination of the reification of experience as a core relation of adult learning theory and a reimagining of feminist praxis.

When Gender Training Backlashes: Participants’ Resistance and the Fragility of Commonsensical Feminism

“…Although material aspects are of crucial importance for how hegemonic power operates, not least in the Gramscian tradition (cf. Carpenter, 2012), pedagogical interventions of the kind focused on here are foremost seen as being a part of a discursive struggle (although they might have more material implications in the long term). The neo-Gramscian perspective on adult education practices applied in this article emphasizes the need for popular educators to establish "new regimes of truths" in Foucauldian terms (Brookfield, 2004).…”

Conceptualizing Learning in the Climate Justice Movement

“…Still other scholars, such as Carpenter (2012), operating from the premise of dialectical historical materialism, argue that “Marxist-feminist theory offers a radically different articulation of difference and experience than CRT or Feminist arguments around of ‘interlocking’ or ‘intersecting’ forms of oppression” (p. 21). That is, “ .…”

“…Thus, in our analysis, we do not hold for the primacy of identity or social class, nor the unique positionality of race, gender, Indigeneity, or other axes of oppression. As such, we do not subscribe in particular to a democratic–socialist (Brookfield & Holst, 2010), Marxist–feminist (Carpenter, 2012; Carpenter & Mojab, 2011), CRT (Closson, 2010), antiracist feminist (Gouin, 2009), nor Indigenous decolonizing theoretical perspective. Instead, we employ elements of these different theoretical traditions to conceptualize SML as these theories help us understand how larger structures of global capitalism, patriarchy, racism and colonialism shape the contexts, processes and possibilities of adult learning in the climate justice movement, as well as whose learning, knowledge and ideologies are privileged, and what interests are served.…”

The Dialectics of Praxis

“…The theorization of experience as the object of critical inquiry and learning is embedded within the largely problematic of praxis (Carpenter, 2012). Within nondialectical conceptualizations, experience is held at a distance from consciousness, as an object of inquiry that can be 'known' only by being separated from the 'knower.'…”