The Fundamental Inequality
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Authors
Stoecker, Randy
Issue Date
2014-11-15
Type
event
flash
flash
Language
Keywords
Inequality and Stratification
Alternative Title
The Liberal Arts in an Unequal Society
Abstract
The fundamental inequality is not of money, or education, or health care, or any of the symptomatic inequalities that we focus on in the U.S. The fundamental inequality is of power. And power operates in a necessary web with knowledge and action. Action is about successfully organizing in large enough numbers and engaging in strategic enough action to create change. And that requires knowledge. Liberal arts institutions are about knowledge--not as a static bucket of what to think, but as a process of coming to know and successfully act on the world. How can they employ knowledge as a process to combat the fundamental inequality of power? First, they need to understand their complicity in unequal social relations of knowledge production, and ways to end their complicity. Second, they need to shift their knowledge production resources to engage and ally with oppressed, exploited, and excluded peoples organizing for power. This goes far beyond the popular service learning models that may do more to perpetuate inequality than to combat it. Instead, liberal arts institutions can draw on historical settlement house models and contemporary science shop models to accomplish this, but they must also overcome significant barriers in liberal arts institution culture and curriculum.