Graduation Ceremony 25
Tuesday 15 December 2015 at 1630hrs – Jesuits Church Valletta
Graduand’s Speech
Maria Brown
I am honoured to be conferred the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Malta
and to represent fellow graduands. It is indeed a very special day to me, also because, today,
my father, who is sitting here with us, turns eighty years old. Please allow me to give him
special thanks for having been a foundational influence in my pursuit of formal education; and
– together with my family - inspirational to my research interest in the sociology of adult
education and the resourcefulness of communities.
In fact, as a PhD candidate, I researched the potential of non-formal adult education in
community settings. I started off with the aim to see if and how adult education may address
vulnerability as commonly understood – or rather, as I gradually discovered, as I had always
misunderstood. In other words, I was researching vulnerability as the antonym of power.
Ironically, while I was struggling with preparing a powerful defence for my study, I stumbled
over the work of research professor Brené Brown. One of the numerous yields of her thirteen
years of research on vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame is a manifesto that –
speaking again of antonyms in the same context – is entitled The Manifesto for the Brave and
the Brokenhearted [sic]. It starts like this:
There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers [sic]
Than those of us who are willing to fall
Because we have learned how to rise1.
Rising to effort and achievement unite all of us present here today: Academics; people who
fulfil significant roles in the lives of graduands and graduands. In one way or another, all of us
put ourselves out there; willing to invest our time and energy to make a contribution we
believe in; willing to have our work judged; “willing to fall”2. We showed up - and - to some
extent - this implied putting down our defences. In other words, it implied becoming
vulnerable.
1
Brown, B. (2015). Manifesto of the Brave and the Brokenhearted [sic]. Retreived December 7 2015,
from http://brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/RS_Manifesto.b_8x10.pdf
2
Brown, B. (2015). Manifesto of the Brave and the Brokenhearted [sic]. Retreived December 7 2015,
from http://brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/RS_Manifesto.b_8x10.pdf
Eventually, the findings of my own doctoral research confirmed that, not only there is no
escape from vulnerability because “we are all, or can all be vulnerable”3 but also that escape
from vulnerability is not recommended. In this sense, vulnerability translates to opportunity.
Yet, where does this leave us? Where do we go from here? Some of the opportunities that
may sprout from vulnerabilities are indeed worrying. To mention one example, when
widowed at just 21 years of age, Zehra Duman emerged as a recruiter of jihadi brides using
apps to send encrypted messages4. Hence, as testified by this and other current events,
vulnerability may be an opportunity that beacons terror; as well as our terrified responses to
that terror.
My doctoral research delved into how education – and more specifically adult education – is
pivotal to experience vulnerabilities as opportunities - particularly when engaging with
Otherness, with what is strange and unfamiliar. As education professor Gert Biesta argues,
when this occurs within an educational (and not just a learning) context, we get an
emancipatory opportunity for coming into presence5.
This approach antagonizes another type of so-called ‘adult education’: The type that frames
the call to pursue efforts and achievements on a lifelong basis; yet, only to fuel what social
policy analyst Tony Fitzpatrick refers to as the “hedonic treadmill”6 that hooks us on to the
challenge of “an unwinnable race...”7.
To be fair, one definition of the term ‘challenge’ is “to prove or justify oneself” 8. Yet the
genuineness of context within which we are being asked to prove ourselves is highly arguable.
Indeed the maxim that urges to ‘get out of one’s comfort zone’ is increasingly being deployed
as - what Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, who have expertise in strategic grassroots
activism, call - ‘a control meme’9. In other words, a catch phrase that has gone viral to
reinforce an oppressive status quo. For what comfort would we be getting out of in the first
place when many of us embark on lifelong learning, particularly in adulthood, in vain hope of
overcoming pre-existing difficulties? In this sense, lifelong learning is not emancipatory
education, but simply an exploitative ladder to climb up what Fitzpatrick refers to as a
3
Brown, M. (2014). Between domestication and liberation: A Freirean community-based educational
intervention in Malta. Unpublished Ph.D. in Education Thesis. Malta: University of Malta.
4
Chambers, G. (2015, March 31). Islamic State widow Zehra Duman lures new jihadi brides to Syria with
encrypted messaging apps. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved December 8 2015, from
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/islamic-state-widow-zehra-duman-lures-new-jihadibrides-to-syria-with-encrypted-messaging-apps/story-fnpn118l-1227286819055
5
Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder: Paradigm
Publishers.
6
Fitzpatrick, T. (2011). Welfare Theory: an introduction to the theoretical debates in social policy.
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 10.
7
Fitzpatrick, T. (2011). Welfare Theory: an introduction to the theoretical debates in social policy.
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 38.
8
Oxford Dictionaries. (2015). British and World English. Oxford University Press. Retrieved December
8 2015, from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/challenge
9
Reinsborough, P. & Canning, D. (2010). Re: Imagining Change: How to use story-based strategy to win
campaigns, build movements and change the world. Oakland: Creative Commons Non-Commercial
License.
“downward escalator”10 of institutions that - constrained by the Post-Fordist brunt of
globalisation and marketization – are increasingly resourced by a fragmented, peripheral,
precarious, secondary labour market model, that constantly depreciates the value of our
efforts and achievements, and in so doing, our dignity.
This is why, at this point in my life, I crave challenges that are genuine because they are
emancipatory11. In this regard, my doctoral study draws on the sociological analysis of Tom
Inglis’12 that distinguishes between empowerment – that implies improving one’s condition
within the existing system – and emancipation – that is, “struggling for freedom by changing
the system”13. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argued, it “is not possible to be unfinished
beings, such as we are, conscious of that inconclusiveness, and not seek. Education is precisely
that seeking movement, that permanent search”14 for alternatives. And as David Livingstone
and Milosh Raykov put it, once alternatives “begin to be seen as needed, the previously
inevitable can become intolerable”15.
Therefore, allow me to take this speech as an opportunity to invite you all, particularly
concurrent and future decision-makers here today, to join me in expressing greater concern
about the need for our society to challenge our vulnerabilities in a genuine and emancipatory
manner. I believe this needs to be addressed with immediate effect and starting from our
immediate contexts: Our families, our communities, Maltese society and, last but not least,
our University. Because we should, but also because we can. For I concord with Freire also
when, in attributing historicity to human beings, he explains that,
It is living the dialectic of being able to and not being able to that satisfies my presence
in the world, of a being that, at the same time – and for that reason – is the object of
history, and once self-recognized as such, can come to be the subject of history 16.
Thank you.
10
Fitzpatrick, T. (2011). Welfare Theory: an introduction to the theoretical debates in social policy.
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 10 (italics in the source).
11
Informed by Bauman, Z. (1995). Making and Unmaking of Strangers. In The Bauman Reader (pp. 200
- 217). Oxford: Blackwell.
12
Inglis, T. (1997). Empowerment and Emancipation. In Adult Education Quarterly, 48(1), 3 – 18.
13
Inglis, T. (1997). Empowerment and Emancipation. In Adult Education Quarterly, 48(1), p. 2.
14
Freire, P. (2007). Daring to Dream: Toward a pedagogy of the unfinished. Boulder. Paradigm
Publishers, p. 87.
15
Livingstone, D.W. & Raykov, M. (2012). Economic and educational inequalities and support for occupy
movements: Some recent international and Canadian evidence. APCOL Working Paper #9. Toronto,
ON: Centre for the Study of Education and Work, University of Toronto, p. 5.
16
Freire, P. (2007). Daring to Dream: Toward a pedagogy of the unfinished. Boulder. Paradigm
Publishers, p. 85.