Politicization in Process: Developing Political Concepts,Practices,Epistemologies,and Identities Through Activist Engagement

Learning Politics

In the learning sciences, new work is exploring the learning opportunities made available through social action, including social movements, community organizing, and civic engagement, arguing that social action is an important site for consequential learning and identity development (Curnow, 2013; Esmonde, Curnow, & Rivière, 2014; Holland, Fox, & Daro, 2008; Jurow & Shea, 2015; Jurow, Teeters, Shea, & Van Steenis, 2016; Kirshner, 2007, 2008, 2015; Kwon, 2008; Vossoughi & Booker, 2017). There is a shared focus on community-engaged social action in social movement spaces, where sociocultural learning is purposeful and embedded in action-oriented goals of remaking the world through widespread mobilization. These studies gravitate toward questions of how participants come to understand themselves as agentic, how they construct grievances, and how they mobilize their analysis collectively to change systems of oppression. These center around questions of becoming politicized, yet they do not share a common language for articulating the learning phenomena being analyzed. While this results in findings that offer utility for different movement organizations, there is not yet a body of work that theorizes participants becoming politicized within social movements.

The types of political development that are signaled when we use “politicization” tend to be beyond the scope of these papers, because the term also speaks to the ideological development of participants. Ideology has rarely been interrogated within the learning science (Philip, 2011), and recent work by Philip, Gupta, Elby, and Turpen (2018) opens opportunities for analyzing ideological development by exploring the process as a learning phenomenon bound up in the axiological and ethical commitments of learners. This work significantly touches on questions of politicization, without using the discourse, by discussing how students learn and, in some cases, contest nationalism and militarization. It points to the significance of understanding how people learn ideology, as well as how they contest ideologies, and lays important groundwork for studies of politicization.

In other educational literatures, politicization and sociopolitical development are largely neglected as learning processes in their own right. While many studies attend to social justice curriculum and ways that teachers might integrate critical pedagogy into their work (Adams & Bell, 2016; Apple, 2014; Ayers, Quinn, & Stovall, 2009; Cunningham, 1992; Ervelles, 2000; Gutstein, 2012; Kumashiro, 2000; Leonardo, 2009; McLaren, 2015; Stovall, 2006), politicization remains a poorly defined concept in this research. Many researchers draw heavily on Freirean notions of popular education and critical pedagogy, framing sociopolitical development as the process of “reading the world” (Freire, 1970). This approach suggests that people start from their own experiences, which they share with their colleagues in order to make connections and identify patterns, which they then theorize and contextualize within the dominant social relations of the era (Arnold, Burke, James, Martin, & Thomas, 1991; Horton & Freire, 1990). Significantly, this approach necessarily activates the learning developed through political analysis, seeking to change the oppressive dynamics through collective action, which is iteratively reflected on and analyzed collectively (Arnold et al., 1991). Variations of this approach have proliferated (Allman, 1999; Giroux, 1997; Kane, 2010; Kirkwood & Kirkwood, 2011; Horton, Kohl, & Kohl, 1990; McLaren, 2015; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999), each contributing nuance and detail to a range of facilitated interventions designed to collectively produce skills for analyzing one’s experiences and cultivating a critical social analysis (Watts et al., 1999; Watts & Guessous, 2006). This type of work centers ideas of praxis, the dialectical unity of thought and action, and shares its roots with other sociocultural theories of learning in the work of Vygotsky (1980). However, in much of the ways that the work is taken up, cognitivist assumptions about learning tend to bubble up, or the relationship between thought and action is treated as a linear process, rather than a co-constituting whole (Allman, 1999, 2001; Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2017; Zavala, 2016). These recent works suggest that theorists of critical pedagogy fail to interrogate the microprocesses of political learning, and that this oversight significantly impacts our ability to analyze and theorize pedagogical practices in classrooms and beyond. The impact of this is to render much Freirean-derived work as an individual process of developing a political analysis intellectually (Allman, 2001; Choudry, 2015). To be clear, the research nearly always situates the individual in a collective learning process; it is understood as a process of community engagement, and yet the work of learning is tacitly understood as happening in the mind of individuals, rather than distributed across people, communities, tools, and environments.

Each of these areas of theory speak to different aspects of politicization without explicitly theorizing what it means to become politicized or how the process unfolds. Some address the skills involved, others address ideological shifts, and still others attend to the identity process. While each of these aspects is significant, none allow us to understand the full complexity of politicization, its collective nature, or the dialectical process through which some participants in social action become iteratively more immersed in radical politics through their collective work. By contrast, our data show how deeply intertwined each of these areas are. This demonstrates that theorizations of politicization which only attend to political concept development, for example, miss a significant portion of the collective, practice-based, epistemological, identity development processes that are going on. In this paper, we seek to address this gap, offering a theory of politicization that includes the political concept development that is so often understood as central to politicization, alongside questions of emergent practice in activist tactical repertoires and interactional modes of participation, as well as epistemological shifts and identities that evolve through engagement.

Methodology

Our investigation is influenced by Indigenous methodologies and militant ethnography, both of which center on relational accountability. Indigenous approaches to research tend to reject decontextualized notions of objectivity, instead arguing that research must be situated in the context of relationships in order to understand how we come to know, as well as how we come to the questions we research (Absolon, 2011; Hampton, 1995; Wilson, 2008). Relational accountability refers to the interconnectedness of the relationships a researcher engages in with ideas, source material, the community, respondents, readers, the environment, and other components of the research context (Wilson, 2008). Our commitment to theorizing problematics that emerge in a social movement context stems from our political engagement with activist communities and militant ethnography (Juris, 2007; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Scheper-Hughes, 1995). Militant ethnography prioritizes explicit, ongoing political commitment to the activist work that the research is bound to, as well as collective visioning, reflection, analysis, and distribution that supports partnering activists and movements. To center voices of the movement in our design, we used participatory action research frameworks (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Maguire, 1987), which situate research as a consciousness-raising and community capacity-building process, again rooted in and accountable to the community we worked with. Together these mean that our research collective focused on relationality, accountability, and capacity building—and we strove always to create relevant research that enables antiracist, feminist, and anticolonial work in the environmental movement.

Fossil Free UofT was a student-run campaign with the goal of convincing the University of Toronto to divest its endowment from fossil fuel holdings. UofT was one of over 300 universities where students launched similar campaigns under the umbrella of 350.org (Fossil Free Canada, 2016). From September 2014 to April 2016, Fossil Free UofT met weekly to plan events and coordinate strategy. Meetings lasted 2 to 3 hours, with facilitation responsibilities rotating between members. The group was comprised of undergraduate, masters, and PhD students, with 15 to 35 people attending regular meetings. Participation shifted weekly, but the group tended to be majority White, with roughly even numbers of men and women, and no openly identified trans or nonbinary students at the time.

The research collective that developed through this participatory action research process was a mix of focal participants and other Fossil Free UofT group members who asked to be part of the team (all participants in the research were invited to participate in video analysis and coding). The resulting group was made up of eight participants who were Black, Chinese Canadian, Indigenous, South Asian, and White. The multiracial and multicultural perspectives participants brought enriched the analysis by not centering the analysis of only one group and inviting multiple standpoints in the shared analysis (Grant & Luxford, 2014). Our positionality as participants in the group, but also as researchers meant that we were not only deeply embedded in the practices of Fossil Free UofT, bringing an insider perspective, but also meant that our research process was actively part of the group and the political struggles. All the authors were active in the fossil fuel divestment campaign, though we come to the questions of this research from different places. Joe is a university-based researcher and is a cis, White woman of European and Latinx heritage who previously worked as a student organizer, and for her, questions of student politicization and antiracist, anticolonial transformation come out of earlier struggles to mobilize antiracist frames in organizing campaigns. Amil is a cis, Black, Guyanese man. Lila is a cis, White woman of European heritage. Amil and Lila were focal participants throughout the study, and Joe initially invited them to be focal participants because of their different positioning in the campaign, with Amil being more established within the group, and Lila a new member. As a research collective, we worked to make the research questions, process, and results accountable to the movement. To achieve this, we discussed findings with several participants ² as they developed, shared drafts, invited feedback, and presented results publicly. We measure the validity of our findings against their utility to the movement by checking in with participants about the relevance of our work.

Methods

We started from the broad question: how did participants in Fossil Free UofT become politicized? But through our initial coding we realized we needed a more precise definition of what politicization was and how we would know when we saw it. Looking across the literatures, we were unsatisfied by the partial definitions and models that were offered because they did not reflect the richness of our data and the complexities of the transformations we traced. We thus reframed our question to ask: Within Fossil Free UofT, what was politicization?

Participation was the foundation of our analysis, and between us, we attended all of the large-group meetings, actions, and debriefs. ³ We also drew on texts, tweets, Facebook chats and posts, emails, email blasts, flyers, and briefs as documentation of the events and conversations throughout the campaign. We collected over 7000 minutes of video of the large group meetings, rallies, protests, and actions. Multicamera strategies allowed us to focus on individual participants and their talk, gaze, expressions, movement, and so forth, and when combined across all members of the group, enabled us to see how participants were interacting (Derry et al., 2010; Erickson, 1992, 2006; Hall, 2007; Heath, Hindmarsh, & Luff, 2010). The videos from the large group meetings have four camera angles to capture the interactional exchanges of participants and were stacked so that all angles could be viewed simultaneously. ⁴ Video was content-logged and coded thematically including broad pre-codes like race, gender, colonialism.

We also conducted stimulated recall interviews (SRIs), a technique of reviewing video data with participants as a tool for allowing participants to view themselves and describe their experiences from a first-hand perspective (Bryan, Bay, Shelden, & Simon, 1990; Dookie, 2015; Lyle, 2003). Focal participants were invited to pause the video and reflect on what we were seeing, and Joe would also pause the video at particular points to elicit responses. Since we met regularly, usually one-on-one, to watch video, the SRIs built relational accountability and became initial analysis sessions where we talked about what we were seeing in the videos. SRIs were conducted with eight focal participants across the 2 years and were recorded. SRIs lasted from 30 to 240 minutes and offered participants a chance to process the interactions of the group, as well as their own thinking about strategy, process, and participation in the group.

We began our coding process by compiling a comprehensive timeline of every activity that happened over the course of the research project as a way of managing the longitudinal data. We coded the timeline, highlighting moments that focal participants identified as politically important, and then combining those into one shared timeline. When we analyzed the flagged events, several patterns of interaction emerged as the significant practices that enabled the radical focal participants to become politicized while others did not. These included fights in the group, alternative spaces outside of meetings, and prefigurative practices. We analyzed the timeline to target when radical focal members became more engaged in direct action, when they started talking about race and colonialism, and when they rejected the “inside game”—the term used for negotiating with the university administration—as a strategy, because these were all moments that were legible as more radical in activist circles beyond University of Toronto. As we coded the moments on the timeline, for every incident, we went back to the video and watched collectively, making notes as to what we noticed as a way of refining our codes. Through this test coding we saw that the politicization around tactics and strategy were not happening as separate phenomenon from the learning about racialization and the introduction to Indigenous ways of knowing or feminist epistemologies. As we went through the video of the key events that had been coded, we theorized that the type of politicization we were trying to account for was not just a question of learning about race/gender/colonialism, and shifting strategy to meet those new concepts, but was a more comprehensive shift in participants’ identities and ways of knowing. While common activist ideas around politicization focus on taking up more confrontational tactics, the learning we traced only sometimes centered tactics; it often centered other collective processes. We identified four recurrent themes—participation/practices, epistemology, political analysis, and identity—which we consistently identified as core shifts at each moment. We then coded the timeline again to see if the schema consistently allowed us to account for the shifts we saw.

As we reanalyzed our work, first on the timeline, and later through coding-specific video instances, it became clear that these processes were at play in each of the politicizing moments we had coded, which gave us specific examples to test our schema on. We particularly sought counter-examples in our video data, and found that for radicalized students, while there were different gradations of their shifts, in each instance from the video, the framework helped us to theorize how transformations were occurring. We complemented this analysis by revisiting the meeting minutes, our personal correspondence, our field notes (JC) and journals (LA) from the time to build a fuller picture and poke holes in our claims. We also discussed our framework and data analysis with other research collective members and Fossil Free UofT members to get feedback on the validity of our argument. Members who gave feedback tended to agree, but not engage deeply with the paper, except to point us toward additional examples that further supported the argumentation. We received little negative feedback from the participants we will later describe as Reasonables, most likely reflecting their disengagement with our research process, rather than a lack of critique.

We also tested the emergent framework against conservative politicization, examining the politicization of more conservative members of the group, especially as Fossil Free UofT polarized. We found similar processes at play, though with different expressions. We draw on this data throughout, though more sparsely, because so much of the politicization of each camp was in response to their colleagues. Useful counter-cases came from the members who did not clearly split into one of the polarized camps. ⁵ Their learning trajectories do not clearly map with the framework we coded for, and we discuss this briefly at the end of this article.

Politicization in Process

Fossil Free UofT began with the assumption that members held shared values, and the term radical was used aspirationally and with admiration, though few members identified as rad. The polarization of this group led to the emergence of two clear camps within Fossil Free UofT: the Radicals and the Reasonables. This terminology comes from the group, where Radicals identified as such. Our use of “reasonable” comes not as a self-moniker for the contrasting set, but comes out of their talk, where they said the group needed to have reasonable demands and positioned themselves as more reasonable than their radical colleagues. There were other students who were not clearly in either camp, many of whom were the newer, more peripheral members of the community, whom we refer to as moderates, and whose learning process does not work within our framework, and thus serves as a useful example of the limitations of our framework. Radical members shifted their identities to center antiracist and anticolonial politics, direct action tactics, critiques of the state and capitalism, and the belief that they had to live their values interactionally. Radicals centered equity critiques in their work, prioritizing attention to Indigenous solidarity as a way of addressing settler colonialism and racialization, which they argued were at the root of the climate crisis, and they sought to address the root causes of injustice through their strategic framing as well as their internal processes. Their learning trajectories demonstrate a deeply social process of transformation rooted in social movement praxis. The Reasonables rejected the identity of radical, shifting from their previously aspirational identification with radicalism, to argue that Radicals alienated the public, and that technocratic and bureaucratic interventions were the most strategic response to climate change. Both camps exemplify the learning process wherein members shifted their concepts, practices, ways of knowing, and identities. We use the term radicalization not to theorize it as something separate from politicization, but for clarifying which process we are attending to, since our data suggest that the process of politicization was similar for both groups.

We theorize politicization as a collective learning process involving not only the intellectual and cognitive processes of developing a political analysis but also shifts in the practices of a group, their ways of knowing, and their identities. We consider these aspects of politicization in dialectical relationship with each other. Our data show that these different philosophies and logics were bound together; they were not learned as discrete sets of practices or ideas, and they worked together to develop strong identities that necessarily integrated an intersectional analysis (imperfect as it may have been, and constantly evolving) as a core piece of the identity as a radical. We see the processes of conceptual development, participation, reforming ways of knowing, and identity construction as necessarily related to each other, and impossible to tease apart completely.

In the next sections, we draw on ethnographic accounts of particular moments to illustrate the politicization processes in progress throughout the Fossil Free UofT divestment campaign. Each example provides a description of the dynamics of the moment, focusing on one of the four areas of politicization we theorize. While these are artificially teased apart to demonstrate the dynamics, they illustrate the ways that the politics, practices, ways of knowing, and identities of politicization co-produced each other. For each section, we highlight an instance featuring one of the processes more centrally, and then tease out how the other processes were simultaneously in play, dialectically enabling, requiring, and reinforcing other politicizing processes. These ethnographic accounts paint a picture of the political shifts and fissures that developed in the group. We took pains to choose examples that reflect the dynamics present across the data. They emphasize the collective learning processes that were enabled and iteratively reinforced through changing concepts, practices, ways of knowing and being, and identities.

Political Concept Development: Linking Local and Translocal Social Relations of Power

Political concept development is most commonly considered within discussions of politicization, where young people are brought into consciousness about social justice. We agree that this is an important aspect of becoming politicized, and our data point to expansive learning as student activists moved from critiquing individual experiences to making claims about collective, patterned relations of power, moved from local to global critiques of racialization, patriarchy, and colonialism, and scaled their analysis from the micro-interactional expressions of racism toward a critique of environmentalism. Their process of scale-making (Jurow & Shea, 2015), conscientização (Freire, 1970), and consciousness-raising (Allen, 1970; Curnow, 2013) as participants theorized the dialectical relations between local and translocal, and individual and collective enabled them to critique power relations across a variety of expressions, times, and places. However, we argue that these learning processes were always also embedded in larger transformations of the practices of the group, their epistemologies, and their evolving identities as Radicals. This is where we saw the philosophies of the politicized participants develop. They were produced through participation with others, in relation to the ways of knowing, and dependent on how participants understood themselves individually and collectively.

We documented this kind of transformation of political analysis when race first became a topic of contestation in the group, in the summer between the first and second years of the campaign when Fossil Free UofT participated in a sit-in coordinated by 350.org. Amil, Keara, and Tresanne, all people of color, found the experience upsetting, and we discussed it in SRIs and informal spaces, where we made notes. They reported that diverse participants attended trainings led by White men on staff for 350.org to prepare for their first arrestable action. According to Amil’s SRI, one facilitator suggested that getting arrested can be an emotional experience because the person getting arrested will feel disappointed in the police, who they had always trusted and respected. Another facilitator described getting arrested as empowering, conveying that if the arrest is inconsequential mentally and physically, the arrestee can come out feeling emboldened to do more frequent and riskier direct actions in the future.

During this time, participants in an emerging People of Colour (POC) caucus developed a political analysis of racialization in the UofT group and across the movement, one which scaled from their personal experiences into larger social relations, from the local politics of the group to the wider environmental movement. In the POC caucus, members critiqued 350.org’s lack of an intersectional analysis, according to the notes taken in the meeting. They criticized the 350.org trainers for centering White men’s experiences in their planning, and argued that different, more consequential and dangerous experiences of arrests were not considered. In SRIs with Amil during this time, he discussed how the POC caucus also expanded their analysis to argue that the environmental movement more broadly also neglected the standpoint of racialized and Indigenous communities in both tactics and overall framing. He moved with ease between critiques of people of color’s discomfort in the group to questions of movement-wide framing, saying

Telling someone, “The way you comport yourself, who you are, isn’t somehow dovetailing with, or good for the image”—like, that is so hurtful . . . There’s not a way to get around it. How can you be involved in a campaign if your entire reason for being in a campaign is not welcome? There’s no pulling the colonial, sort of, framing, the racist framing apart from the campaign. And it informs strategy, how you approach things, how you structure stuff. And it has consequences for the type of people you bring in.

What began as a conversation about the interactional practices of the group and whose voices were welcomed locally ended as a critique of Whiteness and colonialism enacted at the scale of the campaign and the environmental movement. This move from personal experience into system-level critiques became common among the Radicals, and maps closely with the literature around political learning. However, we also observed that this process was tightly bound to the development of new practices, epistemologies, and identities that reflected and reinforced their developing political analysis.

Practices and Participation: Go-Arounds as Disruption to Whiteness and Masculinity

Politicization was also marked by and enabled new forms of participation, both internally within the campaign, and in the form of external strategy. When activists talk about politicization, often they refer to a process of becoming more willing to participate in direct action protests, or in riskier, more confrontational tactics. Social movement theory has also theorized questions of practices and how particular tactical repertoires constrain and enable engagement in social movements (Taylor & VanDyke, 2004; Walker, Martin, & McCarthy, 2008). However, our data suggest that participation in tactical repertoires was just one aspect of politicization—one that was highly visible, but always bound up in the shifting concepts, epistemologies, and identities of participants. We argue that the practices that marked politicization were not just the strategic and outward facing modes of participation. Often the most politicizing practices—and the practices that demonstrated politicization most clearly—were interactional practices within the group meant to shift the power dynamics and prefigure other social relations. We use both practice and participation as coordinating concepts. Practices are used to signal the activity of the group, across scales, where we often use the term participation to refer to the interactional practices: who was speaking within the group, how they took up space, and how turn-taking occurred.

At the end of the first year of the campaign, a significant shift in practices began, which had significant impacts on the politicization of participants for the rest of the campaign. Several women in the campaign launched a women’s caucus to discuss their experiences within Fossil Free UofT. In four meetings over a year, they discussed how they had noticed the way that White men spoke far more frequently. Reema, a fourth-year woman of color, noted, “within this group, I feel like: yes, there’s a dominance of men in the group,” as if it was assumed by everyone in the women’s caucus, though this was the first time it was named. Others agreed. Melina, a fourth-year White woman, said, “I did notice, obviously (laughs), that there are very dominant male voices (laugh), and what concerns me about it is that they take authority.” Through this conversation, it became clear that all the women present had recognized this pattern in the group, but none had tried to disrupt it.

As this pattern was made explicit, Radicals intentionally used the practice of the “go-around” to intervene in normalized participation dynamics of the group. By speaking sequentially in a circle around the room and inviting everyone to share their ideas, go-arounds disrupted the normalized turn-taking dynamics of the group, where White men tended to speak frequently and for far longer than women and people of color. The practice traveled from the women’s caucus to the POC caucus and equity committee meetings, and back to the large group meetings, where it was used by the facilitators as a political intervention. The goal of the go-around was not only to stop the erasure of women and people of color but also to allow the concepts they had been developing as Radicals to be shared and iterated on. Some of the Radicals said the shift in who participated and how clarified their perception of the normalized dynamics as problematic. In a large group meeting, Sydney, a White woman in her fouth year, said,

In the women’s caucus, where women did have the opportunity to speak, it’s incredible how intelligent these women are. And it’s striking how little we hear women’s voices in the formal meeting setting . . . So I don’t think that assertiveness or performed masculinity should be—is inherent to any meeting, or type of communication. I think that the ways we’ve been framing it—that’s the type of voices that you hear most often.

By practicing go-arounds and making them a core practice of the spaces Radicals facilitated, the participants built an awareness of their own marginalization and the value of their own contributions when they did speak. In one equity committee meeting, Jade said that she had felt like she was not smart, and that was why she had not spoken in meetings. Jade said the shift in participation, and in particular the go-arounds, helped her to think about the practices of the group—including the rapid turn taking and domination by a few vocal White men—as barriers to her participation. This participation demonstrated politicization, and also enabled further politicization, through the iterative concept development it afforded.

Ways of Knowing: Recognizing Epistemological Assumptions and Centering Relationality

Across the social movement scholarship and activist contexts, we have found very little engagement with questions of epistemological development, though Black feminist thought, Indigenous scholarship, feminist standpoint theory, and critical Whiteness studies have long argued for attention to ways of knowing as a fundamental way of shifting power relations (Collins, 1986; Harding, 1991; Little Bear, 2000; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Roediger, 1999). We use the category ways of knowing to signal the epistemological underpinnings of what is known and done in the group. This includes how people come to know, what is considered valid knowledge, and who is a valid knower. We recognize that ways of knowing and being are impossible to extract from each other, and our use considers them as dialectically related. In the North American context, Eurowestern epistemologies dominate, but are not the only way of knowing, and for our case, consciousness of one’s own epistemological mooring was a significant shift in ways of knowing. By undermining the perceived universality of Eurowestern knowledge systems, this consciousness forced participants to grapple with awareness of Whiteness and settler coloniality. This included questioning epistemological orientations to dualism, objectivity, neutrality, “science,” time, and other coordinating ideologies of Eurowestern thought. Though this experience was not shared by everyone in the group, some of the Radicals who had been raised within a Eurowestern paradigm came to question the logic of objectivity and move toward relational ways of knowing. Each of these participants had their own experiences with Indigenous thought external to the group, through reading, coursework, and workshops on campus. Many of the Radicals also participated in other solidarity work with Indigenous-led campaigning in Toronto and in First Nations organizing that welcomed settler allies across Canada, like the Unist’oten encampment, Fort McMurray organizing around tar sands and public health, and Aamjiwnaang First Nation. These individual experiences enabled some epistemological shifts for individual members, and also spurred collective shifts as the group discussed these experiences and learned from others’ perspectives.

The Radicals began to consciously operate from more relational ways of knowing, they and Reasonables often found themselves talking at cross-purposes and failing to effectively communicate with each other. The epistemological split was made obvious in a debate late in the campaign over the “Indigenous Criterion,” a project intended to add consideration of land theft and environmental racism to the president’s advisory committee’s recommendations about divestment. Some of the Radicals spearheaded a task force, intent on designing the Criterion in a way that was accountable to Indigenous communities, and in doing so, tried to initiate relationships of solidarity which they felt the campaign lacked. The Reasonables agreed that we should reach out to Indigenous people but disagreed with the idea that we needed to do substantive consultation attentive to Indigenous protocols, understanding the Radicals’ complaint as merely the lack of mentioning Indigenous rights. The debate lasted weeks and surfaced and deepened epistemological shifts that politicized Radicals and polarized Fossil Free UofT further.

The core epistemological divide was borne out through fights over process versus outcome and questions about what constituted solidarity and relationality. The divide over process was contentious, with Milan, a White man PhD student, arguing that it was adequate to draft language and ask for an endorsement. His language, and that of the Reasonables, stressed a time-sensitive need for participation, while Radicals argued for long-term approaches not bound up in demanding that Indigenous groups on campus accept the framework of divestment. Lila criticized the Reasonables for their demands, snarking that, “it’s not like going to them with like a mail order form of like, ‘hello we would like a criteria please’.” Joe elaborated on the Radicals’ view, saying

This gives us a really clear opportunity to engage with some specific concerns but if we’re gonna do it and we’re gonna do it in a good way, we need to be very aware of, like, the settler assumptions we come into it with. Because if we roll in and we’re like “can you help us to meet this criteria, and we actually only have a week, so if you could just make these timelines?,” then we’re reproducing [colonialism].

When Joe talked about engaging in relationships with the Indigenous organizations on campus in ‘a good way’, she was drawing on Nishnaabeg philosophies of mino bimaadiziwin, which many of the Radicals were familiar with through participation in Indigenous spaces. For the Radicals, approaching relationship building with Indigenous people needed to be done according to appropriate Indigenous protocols which recognized Indigenous ontological and epistemological foundations and attempted to act in decolonial ways rather than force Eurowestern processes onto Indigenous people. They began to realize that they had developed a relational way of thinking and that the Reasonables’ worldview did not accommodate the modes of interaction toward which they now gravitated.

Identity Development: Radical Alliances and Enacted Solidarities

Across social movement studies, collective identity is often taken up as a core marker of involvement in social movements and a predictor of the repertoires of action that a participant will engage in (Holland et al., 2008; McDonald, 2002; Melucci, 1995; Poletta & Jasper, 2001; Taylor, Whittier, Morris, & Moeller, 1992). Within the learning sciences, too, identity and processes of becoming are considered major accomplishments, indicating and enabling further forms of learning (Esmonde, 2009; Langer-Osuna, 2011; Lave, 1996; Nasir, 2002; Nasir & Saxe, 2003). However, in the literature around politicization, identity is scarcely found. Identity, in our understanding, is an individual and collective process of becoming, refining a sense of self in relation to others. In this context, becoming politicized shifted participants’ understandings of themselves: who they were, what they were willing to do, who they were accountable to, and how they envisioned their place in the world. This was a collective process of alignment, distinction, and differentiation, of coming to trust and be open to specific politics, practices, and ways of knowing that certain people put forward. For Radicals, this was a shift away from mainstream politics toward an identity that many members had previously considered extreme or alienating, which they now embraced based on the community, shared practices, commitment to political philosophies, and a shared sense of what is knowable and how, through contestation against the status quo. These identities were always emergent and not fixed or coherent, and yet they served to clearly delineate the contours of the two factions and drive further politicization and polarization.

As the deadline for the university president’s decision on fossil fuel divestment loomed, the group had become increasingly polarized. Questions of alliances, solidarities, politics, framing, goals, and tactics came to a head. In a meeting described as “riding a fuckin’ bronco,” we argued about one sentence proposed for the press release that we would send out after the university’s decision. Confident that the campaign would win, the Radicals argued that we needed to leverage our momentum and include a sentence of explicit support for the other divestment campaigns on campus: the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli Apartheid, and the Black Liberation Collective’s (BLC) nascent campaign to divest from private prisons in the United States. One side argued that one sentence of support represented the bare minimum we could do for campaigns we claimed to stand in solidarity with. The other side argued the sentence would alienate the Canadian public, destroying years of work by shifting the media narrative away from climate change toward a hot-button issue.

Radicals felt a strong sense of accountability and responsibility to the other campaigns and the larger political project. As a matter of ethics and identity, they fought to support their allies on campus. Because the debate was contentious, it gave members a sense of opposition they could mobilize against and identify the problematic assumptions within their logics. The process of argumentation entrenched the identities of Radicals further because they had a sense of who they were aligned with. Thus, even when they were not yet clear on why the arguments their Radical peers made were valid, they were inclined to side with them and support their arguments. The more they argued, the further entrenched their identities became. ¹¹

While the Reasonables argued that naming BDS would be toxic politically, Radicals argued that it was an obligation, an opportunity to show reciprocity, and a chance to have some skin in the game when it came to more contentious anticolonial politics. Joanna, a White woman in fourth year, argued that, “there are a few of us who’ve felt like we should’ve been supporting [the BDS campaign] the whole time, but we haven’t because there has been disagreement,” and indeed there had been continual contestation over aligning with the sibling campaign for almost a year. As the argument continued, Radicals developed a line of argumentation that made visible some of the sense of identity and responsibility. Sinéad, for example, argued,

It kinda scares me—we’re in university now and this is the chance we have to be most radical in our pursuit of justice that a lot of us will ever get. We have time, we have the space carved out where we can be really explicit about the kind of justice we are looking for.

The principle of standing up for what you believe in was made clear. As a matter of identity, the Radicals believed that they had an obligation and an opportunity to be principled and to fight for what was right. They contrasted this with their opposition, who did not want to stand up publicly, even as they acknowledged that there was shared support for the campaign internally. Graham said,

I think we all think that Israeli apartheid is super fucked up. And, uh, that it shouldn’t exist. We want to do something about it, we generally support BDS and what they are going for. I think it’s a discussion of tactics. And saying that you’re not going to support something fully, unfortunately, I think, this is a larger critique of sorta like the liberal left movement, is to say that you’re not going to support something wholeheartedly, fully, and with unqualified support is viewed as treachery. And that’s a real problem.

This was one of the clearest lines of distinction: through the argument, Radicals came to see themselves as willing to back up their politics with action, and they saw their Reasonable peers as cowardly and complicit in reproducing racist and colonial dynamics. A vote was called, and in a split decision, 7 to 6, the group decided against including a sentence of support in a press release if they won fossil fuel divestment.

The Reasonables

During the same period where some students became radical, others moved from having a favorable view of radical politics in the abstract to specifically and aggressively arguing against radical politics as practiced by their colleagues. While their process is not the primary subject of our analysis, it was a simultaneous learning process that happened in relationship to the radicalization of the Radicals, and which also demonstrates the significance of the framework for theorizing politicization along our four criteria. As with the Radicals, their politicization was marked by dialectical shifts in their political analysis, interactional modes of participation and strategic practices, ways of knowing, and identities. While the Radicals largely rejected dominant social relations, Reasonables became more conscious of dominant relations and embraced them.

Their political analysis and theory of change moved away from the systemic analysis their radical colleagues took up, instead arguing for smaller scale, discrete approaches that would appeal to “the public.” During the fight about supporting other divestment campaigns on campus, Graham asked the Radicals sarcastically, “Do we have to solve racism to stop climate change?” The Radicals present responded affirmatively and Graham answered his own question saying, “No, I don’t think that’s true.” Across the data, we saw shifts like this, as Reasonables became less willing to entertain the multiscalar and systemic analysis Radicals put forward. Where Sam, a White man in first year, began the campaign saying, “divestment is the tactic, climate justice is the goal”, just a few months later he denied the relationship between colonialism and climate change, arguing that while climate change was a complex system, “mostly it is a product of carbon emissions, which are connected to these things, ‘cuz they are all, kind of, symptoms of people doing shitty stuff to other people.” As Radicals centred climate justice and articulated an antiracist and anticolonial framework with more specificity, Reasonables moved against it, advocating an approach that worked within the system to address narrowly framed issues.

Tactically, the Reasonables also shifted, becoming less willing to participate in direct actions. Instead, they embraced practices which appealed to decision makers as the way to deliver incremental change and rejected direct actions. At an action at the Prime Minister’s residence during the second year of the campaign, most participants risked arrest, blocking traffic, while the Reasonables decided against participating. Radicals advocated escalation, and Reasonables withdrew from those tactics. While the Radicals were outside the governing council yelling “bullshit” after the rejection, Graham donned a suit and was inside the meeting representing the campaign, speaking to the council with the group’s endorsement. His participation in the meeting called on ideas of expertise and reasoned argumentation that he and the other Reasonables had advocated. His performance of expertise relied on classed, gendered, and racialized ideas about what would be compelling to the Governing Council, as Graham had argued in earlier meetings. Graham’s presentation at the meeting represented a conscious and explicit embrace of the “inside game” strategy, despite his Radical colleagues’ arguments against the strategy as inaccessible to women and people of color.

Reasonables also rejected relational ways of knowing, and as we noted above, this became one of the most polarized points in the campaign. While there had been continual contestation over questions of objectivity, experience, and relationality, this came to a head at a retreat late in the second year. Reasonables argued explicitly that Eurowestern science was superior, despite, and a few times even because of, its roots in masculinist, Eurocentric logics. At the retreat, Reasonables argued against the emphasis on Indigenous knowledges, suggesting that, “Science has given us so much” and arguing that without Eurowestern epistemologies, North American society would devolve into “caveman times.” This talk was contentious: Radicals labeled this as White supremacist and colonial for relying on progress narratives, rooted in Eurowestern ontologies and epistemologies. ¹² The Reasonables’ rejection of this critique, committing to ideas of Eurowestern science while rejecting Indigenous ways of knowing, crystallized epistemological commitments as a component of their oppositional identity.

The Reasonables also moved away from legible activist identities. Rejecting their colleagues as extreme and alienating to the target audience (as they construed it), they embraced the reputation that they had with the administration as “collegial,” because it supported their legitimacy and helped their bureaucratic approach. While they had always advocated for the “inside game” strategy, where we would negotiate with decision makers via well-researched briefs and formal interactions, they began to reject any of the markers that Radicals felt defined activist identity. In an email after their colleagues’ oil spill simulation, a direct action that would be well within the general repertoire of environmental activists, the Reasonables labeled the tactic “bad activism” because it “turns off moderates and makes opponents feel justified.” These critiques show how the Reasonables grew more committed to their respectable identity, trying to remain palatable to the demographics that they saw as the mainstream or “the public,” in contrast to the Radicals’ tendency to identify more with marginalized communities.

For Reasonables, like the Radicals, the process was an active sense-making and self-making endeavour. Politicization was facilitated by collective engagement with colleagues who shared their perspectives, as well as in opposition to the Radicals, who they increasingly came to contest. Their politicization was marked by an explicit recognition of Eurowestern ways of knowing which had previously been understood as neutral and largely invisible. Over the campaign, the Reasonables became conscious of their ways of knowing as rooted in Eurowestern thought and verbally advocated their superiority. Their interactional practices rejected bids for equity, and they called for a return to “normalcy” where women and people of color did not create conflict “when any White guys do something White guys do, like talks more than a minute of two, or says something assertive”. Ultimately, where Radicals moved to embrace an identity as such, the Reasonables rejected this identity. They painted Radicals as extreme and unstrategic and saw themselves as measured and more likely to stop climate change via incremental reform.

The Moderates

While our framework helps us theorize the politicization of both Radicals and Reasonables, it has limited explanatory power to account for the learning of the moderates in Fossil Free UofT, those who moved between the factions or tended to stay out of the debates entirely. This group was made up of 5 to 10 members, largely people who entered during the second year of the campaign. While we readily acknowledge that they learned significantly and that their practice evolved through participation, these members did not have a coherent identity as a group that we could trace. Individually, their learning, participation, epistemologies, and identities varied widely. The moderates had greater variability in who they would align with, and in a few cases, changed alignment multiple times.

Our data suggest that the moderates were not politicized, collectively or individually, in the way we are theorizing. The participation of these moderate members highlights the importance of the dialectical relationship between the four pillars in our framework: without simultaneous development of concepts, epistemologies, identities, and practices, moderates did not fully fit into either group. Many of the moderates participated in the Radicals’ actions, like the oil spill, but in the meetings, often sided with the Reasonables. Some moderates took up a Radical identity without the politics or the practices, rejecting the equity-oriented facilitation and speaking often and for long turns despite their awareness of gendered and racialized dynamics. Others took up some of the politics of Reasonables, adopting the discourse of “alienation,” without ever aligning with the Reasonable identity publicly. Others took up the identity of Radical but rejected parts of the identity that were important to the Radicals and contesting the practices and conflict that emerged.

This raises interesting questions for us, as analysts, about how and when someone becomes Reasonable or Radical—when does it count, and when does it not? These questions also circulated among some of the Reasonables, who felt that they were radical and felt snubbed or disincluded by the labels, which they felt were applied unevenly. Several of these participants reported feeling that their own politics were being policed by the Radicals, gesturing to long-standing critiques of radical activism as having little space for dissent. However, this line of argumentation served to further alienate those participants from the Radicals, since part of the Radical identity, practice, and worldview hinged on actively challenging what they saw as oppressive dynamics which marginalized their ability, as women and as people of color, to participate in the daily life of the campaign. Thus, we can see in the practices and epistemologies of the moderates a gulf where they did not align with the collective shifts of the Radicals, because they did not understand those shifts as having salience in the same way the Radicals did.

The evidence of the ways in which moderates participated in the group is helpful for highlighting several of the assumptions we make in our analysis. First is that politicization as we theorize it is a collective phenomenon. The moderates never became legible as members of either the Reasonables or the Radicals and did not advocate for a centrist frame sui generis. While we can trace trajectories individually, in our data moderates never demonstrated concepts, practices, epistemologies, and identities that were legible to the politicized parties. Furthermore, this shows that the four criteria of our framework work together dialectically. Without all aspects working to co-constitute politicization, the shifts in individual practice or politics did not seem to be compelling to their peers as evidence of belonging. While moderate members were often welcomed into Radical spaces, if they did not do politicization in the ways their colleagues did, they were unlikely to be considered rad, even if they considered themselves to be radical. Finally, moderates help to demonstrate that politicization was not a destination, but a process, with shifting markers based in politics, practices, worldviews, and identities. Some of the people we identified as moderate moved back and forth between factions across the campaign. As the Radical identity changed, it became less attractive to a few of the moderates, and their participation in the Radical spaces changed. All of these processes required learning; not all would be considered politicizing according to our framework, which looks for dialectical shifts between and across participants’ political concepts, practices, epistemologies, and identities.

A Framework for Politicization

For Radicals, politicization was about learning political concepts that were critical of dominant social relations of power, shifting away from dominant Eurowestern epistemologies toward more relational theories of knowing and being, and changing the interactional modes of participation as well as the strategic practices that they were inclined to take up. For Radicals, politicization was a process of shifting practices to reflect and reinforce the politicized concepts that emerged. These were aligned with and continually reshaped the ways of knowing in the collective to further develop intellectual critiques of power and dominance, which in turn created and reinforced identities where activists understood themselves as radical and continually shifted their participation, practices, ways of knowing, and political philosophies to be aligned with their identities. Their process centered anticolonial, antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist concepts, practices, ways of knowing, and identities.

Being in relationship with others who identified as and were identified by others as radical made it possible for those identities to become specific, salient, and desirable, rather than an abstract label. That shift in desire to become, and the process of remaking practices, frames, and epistemologies in order to become recognized as a radical activist was significant in shifting individual members’ relations to the dominant practices and the members in positions of mastery within Fossil Free UofT. This was not mindless mimicry or indoctrination, but intentional engagement with the ideas, practices, and epistemologies associated with what other Radicals did. The identity gave participants a sense of possibilities they might orient toward, which practices they might try on and play with, and which ideas they might try to explore and develop. Not all aspects of the identity stuck, and not everyone adopted the same practices and politics; there were varied levels of commitment to the identity, and it depended on the spaces they were in. On the whole, though, we saw the group shift in its shared identity, politics, and epistemologies, such that when we look at the last rally, the practices, the frames, and even the people representing the group look markedly different than they had eighteen months prior.

Fossil Free UofT allows us to trace the politicizing processes of student activists involved in a fossil fuel divestment campaign. This case shows that politicization was not just about knowing the concepts or having skills to analyze the local and translocal; it demonstrates an expansive, situated type of learning that involved epistemological, activity, and identity shifts. They were a continually evolving joint production, which created reinforcing loops of accountability to the ideas, to the people, to the ways of knowing, and to the identity of radical activists. Politicized participants became able to articulate their political critiques through dynamic participation in community. Their process was simultaneously one of developing practices that met their goals of enabling fuller participation and undermining the dynamics of dominance that they problematized. The practices enabled rich contexts for political development, which were embedded in, and co-produced the epistemological shifts members experienced. The practices also opened up new ways for Radicals to understand themselves as radical, developing practice-based identities that further entrenched their commitment to the sets of ideas, practices, and people in the radical spaces. In this way we have demonstrated that politicization was not only cognitive, based on a particular political analysis, but a comprehensive shift that simultaneously shaped the epistemologies, identities, practices, and political philosophies of participants. In the process of becoming politicized activists, we have traced expansive learning and transformation that holds the potential to shift how theorists think about learning, politics, and ideology, and— more significantly—lays the groundwork for activists and educators to design for spaces that support political learning across all of its interwoven axes.