Wrestling with Paradoxes of Social Justice and Decolonization in Community Engaged Learning

Studying and enacting decolonization requires considering its contestations, for there is much at stake. Not only do the movement of people and resources, access to jobs, housing, and health care, and surveillance and enforcement of borders lie in the balance, but so does the imagination that animates these realities. The nuances of decolonization become more accessible for students when paired with community engagement.

We center two community engaged projects as pedagogical opportunities that allow for 1) disrupting colonial institutions and 2) wrestling with intersecting contradictions of labor, migration, citizenship, and decolonization. One partnership is with a domestic workers alliance advocating for a domestic worker bill of rights that would guarantee much needed higher wages for workers yet potentially create financial hardship for elders and people with disabilities who rely on caregiving services. The second features a hotel workers union in Hawai‘i that primarily consists of immigrant laborers fighting for improved working conditions in a context where reliance on tourism conflicts with efforts toward Native Hawaiian sovereignty.

Both projects feature difficult paradoxes. Immigrant worker rights are easy to align with on the surface (everyone should be paid a living wage!), but become much more complex when examining the interlocking issues and changes required to support this position, such as migration and migrant worker policies, claims to indigenous sovereignty, and the concept of nationhood itself. We highlight the ways in which these projects can probe sociological questions around labor, migration, citizenship, and decolonization.

While community engagement projects nor educational institutions are in-and-of-themselves decolonizing, we utilize la paperson’s (2017) idea that decolonizing efforts have always disrupted colonial structures from within. As such, the featured projects relocate the source of knowledge and power to immigrant laborers; invite students to join in social movement building; and can move all workers toward deeper solidarity.