Two books about power: A comparative review
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Two books about power: A comparative review Alan Rogers1
© UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Power and possibility: Adult education in a diverse and complex world Fergal Finnegan and Bernie Grummell (eds). Brill/Sense, Leiden, 2020, 200 pp. Research on the Education and Learning of Adults series, vol.7. ISBN 978-90-0441331-3 (hbk), ISBN 978-90-04-41330-6 (pbk), ISBN 978-90-04-41332-0 (ePDF) Power, empowerment and social change Rosemary McGee and Jethro Pettit (eds). Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2020, 258 pp. Rethinking Development series. ISBN 978-11-38-57530-1 (hbk), ISBN 978-11-38-57531-8 (pbk), ISBN 978-13-51-27232-2 (eBook) This book review looks at two books about power – one mainly relating power to adult education and the other relating it to social change including an educational dimension. But they are different in tone and approach. Power and Possibility is concerned with “the notoriously diverse area of adult learning” (p. 65) as seen from a Western (European) perspective. It arose from a conference in Maynooth in Ireland,1 and the editors are aware of the limited scope of the conference as being international but not global: “The predominance of participants from the global north and the fact that it was an Anglophone event is [sic] worth bearing in mind not least because one of the themes of this book is the need to think about adult education globally” (p. 4). There are some nods to the other three quarters of the world – “the Global North sets learning priorities for the South and therefore reduces lifelong learning to basic education” (p. 32; see also p. 44 on the Sustainable Development Goals, and p. 76), and a brief section on Argentina (chapter 16). But acknowledgement of other regions is very limited: the book sees adult education as “viewed from much of Europe and North America” (p. 6). Indeed, it is specifically European, coming from the European Society for Research in the 1
The 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) was held 8–11 September 2016 at Maynooth University. The conference theme was “Imagining diverse futures for adult education: Questions of power and resources of creativity”. * Alan Rogers [email protected] 1
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
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Education of Adults (ESREA); a recent study on mapping adult education research2 pointed out that the approaches in Europe and North America are very different, and that the two arenas often do not talk to each other. The European setting is important, for, as one of the authors says, the “aim [of the EU is] to make the European ‘space’ the most competitive area in the world” (p. 56; an approach which made some members of the EU reluctant to remain within such an exploitative international bloc), and this affects the EU approach to adult learning. This collection of papers describes the way “power” has been used to subvert more humanistic approaches to adult education – mainly in policymaki
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