Feminist Collaboratives and Intercultural Inquiry: Constructing an Alternative to the (Not So) Hidden Logics and Practices of University Outreach and Microlending

Abstract

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois Community-university partnerships are places where universities are trying to create reciprocal relationships that are publicly responsive to localized people and priorities. Yet prominent and pervasive patterns for community-university partnerships that engage college students in “real-world” work often re-inscribe reductive work and working relationships at this borderland (Herzberg; Long, Fye, and Jarvis; McKnight). While service-learning scholarship has long warned of invoking hierarchical doer/done-to logics, more recently, in response to globalization, universities have turned to public-private partnerships aimed at fostering the growth and viability of business interests, most notably through initiatives and partnerships that support social entrepreneurship and microlending services. Public-private partnerships can seem like an ideal marriage if we venture that the broad goal of education is to benefit all learners in ways that enable them to participate fully in public life and economic life. And yet, in an era of globalization and fast-and-fastercapitalism, we increasingly find these two goals complex, elusive, and at odds. The school-to-prison pipeline with its ties to surveillance industries, immigration detention centers, and the prison-industrial complex is one example (Alexander). The profit-seeking education industry that increasingly sponsors the promotion of evidence-based products in public and private schools is another (Anderson and Herr). Even humanitarian efforts attempting to engage youth as “change-makers” in local or transnational public life often cast would-be armchair activists as either consumers or entrepreneurs. In an era of globalization, public-private partnerships often tip too easily toward privatization, where global processes of consumption, production, and migration complicate the conditions and consequences of engagement in public life. Like the logic of service, the logic of activist capitalism underlying social entrepreneurship and microlending can threaten the ideal of a deep democracy where the goal is not to bring people from the margins to the center but instead to “destabilize” the hegemonic core (Dhaliwal 44). In this piece, I interrogate the “new morality” of activist capitalism that universities are embracing in response to the “new work order” of fast capitalism, globalization, Feminist Collaboratives and Intercultural Inquiry: Constructing an Alternative to the (Not So) Hidden Logics and Practices of University Outreach and Microlending