Close, yet so far apart: Bridging social movement theory with popular education

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Adult Learning is a great opportunity to bridge two areas of scholarship that are in close proximity to one another, but have generally failed to establish systematic dialogues and exchanges. These domains, of course, are comprised of educational scholarship devoted to the study of ‘adult’ and ‘popular’ education on the one hand, and sociological scholarship on ‘social movements’ on the other. While the study of popular education 1 has thematic proximity to the social movement literature, it is not a terrain of systematic research and theorising by social movement scholars. A recent search of the terms ‘popular education’, ‘community education’ and ‘adult education’ in both the titles and keywords of two leading social movement journals over the past two decades, for example, yielded zero hits 2. On the other side of the equation, while scholars of popular education may frequently invoke terms such as ‘social movement’ and ‘activism’, the tools of social movement theory are rarely put to use within this literature (cf. Kilgore, 1999). That these two literatures are so close, but so far apart is rather astonishing given their overlapping concerns for issues of resistance, solidarity, democratisation and social transformation. In this essay, I briefly address the gap between social movement studies and popular education studies, and then proceed to engage in some initial bridge-building work by discussing the concept of ‘free space’ (Groch, 2001; Polletta, 1999; Polletta, & Kretschmer, 2013). In particular, I suggest that by theorising community-based sites of popular education as ‘free spaces’, scholars can better investigate the ways in which the participants within these sites engage in educational practices that actively promote the reproduction of movement-based strategies, tactics, meanings and identities. From such a conceptualisation, researchers can explore the question of how local-level sites of popular education bolster the broader-level influence of social movements in society, thus shedding important light on the socio-political outcomes of popular education programs.