Review Essay: Facing, Embracing, and Tracing Social Justice in Service-Learning

Abstract

Alan Tinkler, Barri Tinkler, Virginia Jagla, and Jean Strait, Editors Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2016 In the weeks following an intensification of gun violence in the United States (US), a popular Internet meme emerged in 2016--"Things are not getting worse, they are just getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil" (Brown, 2016). Penned by Black Lives Matter writer-activist, Adrienne Maree Brown, the quote quickly went viral. It offered a concise and accessible way for readers to reflect upon the history of social injustices, and implored them to summon the courage to learn despite fear of what might be found through that act of seeking. To "hold each other tight" is to value the role of closeness and relationships as a salve to the difficult knowledge that may be revealed. It is precisely this message that Service-Learning to Advance Social Justice in a Time of Radical Inequality presents. This volume, edited by Alan Tinkler, Barri Tinkler, Virginia Jagla, and Jean Strait, reckons with the indispensability of relationships and political orientations to the field of service-learning and community engagement. As with Brown's excerpt, this book reminds readers that injustice is not new, even when it is uncovered in great waves through first-hand or vicarious experience. If Brown's suggestion is true --that the most judicious response to injustice is a turning-loward one another rather than a turningaway--then this book offers a scholarly forum for such work without sacrificing a healthy exploration of resistance and critique. Service-Learning to Advance Social Justice in a Time of Radical Inequality continues the important work of stitching together the currently fragmented relationship between social justice as a concept [and sometimes as a concept that Bocci in Chapter 9 calls "superficially social-justice-oriented" (p. 272)] and social justice as a lived reality in diverse service-learning programs. Although I would like to have seen the notion of social justice explored in depth from the outset, this edited volume more than compensates for this through some authors' critical engagement with the theoretical roots and practical application of social justice in service-learning. The 15-chapter book is structured into four sections: (a) Service-learning to Reach Across Disciplinary Boundaries in Higher Education; (b) Service-learning to Support a Reimagining of Teacher Education; (c) Addressing Unconscious Bias and Racial Inequality through Social Justice and Critical Service-Learning; and (d) Service-Learning to Advance Community Inquiry. Each section contains a short introduction written by one of the four editors and briefly lays out concepts and considerations that connect the chapters. This review essay elaborates on two primary strengths of the book and raises one key suggestion for how we, as a community invested in social justice and community engagement, might approach similar volumes moving forward. First, I suggest that Service-Learning to Advance Social Justice in a Time of Radical Inequality offers readers a rich collection of critical theoretical approaches, rooted in an examination of systemic power and privilege. Here, the book faces important and uncomfortable root causes of inequities. Second, I describe ways in which the book exemplifies Brown's (2016) apt metaphor: to be an act of embrace and turning-toward. It is as much a relational embrace amongst authors as a collaborative conversation about the different theoretical and disciplinary approaches they use. Third, as a fellow scholar and practitioner who grapples with my own privileged identity visa-vis the deeply rooted structural issues that we attempt to address through critical service-learning, I suggest that social justice must not be a taken-for-granted term, as it appears to be at the outset of this volume. Instead, the ways that social justice is conceived must be traced through time and space. …