Description

In Our Hands: Community Accountability as Pedagogical Strategy

This article suggests community accountability as a pedagogical strategy and provides case presentation and analysis of its application in a university classroom. The practice of alternative responses to violence emerges from the critiques of the limits and failures of criminalization responses to violence and their potential effect to further expose survivors, aggressors, and communities to violence. The class and facilitators moved to painfully reconcile the aggressor’s own history with colonial, racial, and intimate violence and his accountability to sexual violence. As the classroom/community navigated from collusion, to outrage, to fear, and then to self-determination, it remained committed to a practice of accountability that humanized all participants in the process and centered the voices of survivors while aiming at social transformation and healing. This article explores the ways in which community accountability strategies build and extend liberatory and critical pedagogical approaches. It presents a discussion of the intersections of multiple forms of violence that shape the experiences of Latinas and Latinos with violence and accountability.

community accountability, criminalization, liberation pedagogy, critical pedagogy, violence against Latinas, Latinas, Latinos, violence, community violence, sexual violence, college violence, praxis

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 37, No. 4 (2010-11): 76-100.