Waking to radical, gentle transformation: Action Dialogue with Coleen Vogel


Hilary: Distinguished Professor Coleen Vogel is an action researcher at WITs University in South Africa. Originally with a PhD in Climate Science, her work now involves her a great deal with Climate Change transitions at home and abroad. Coleen’s work has been well funded (not least by George Soros, yay!) and well connected to the big questions posed by the IPCC (international panel on climate change). Coleen was preparing for a meditation retreat when I caught up with her. We started with a sense, as Coleen put it, that our meeting is “not serendipitous.”

Hilary: Coleen what holds your attention these days?

Coleen: Like you I am thinking about what’s a good education these days, what’s my role in that. It’s not just factual absorption and the current regurgitation process, which is I think highly problematic. But unfortunately that’s the way our system is structured.

Hilary: You’re in a context, in South Africa, where I imagine there is so much is in flux. I know you’re deeply aware of the need to be in touch with the human side of change. So what does that mean for an erstwhile so-called hard scientist in South Africa?

Coleen. I’ll tell you it’s been a process. I had to leave the university for a time, it had become so upsetting. The universities are simply not thinking creatively in the midst of the massive opportunities we have now. Take data, we have access to social media. The youth need a different education. Better structured for today’s needs. When I left the university, I taught in a school, a primary school here in South Africa. It was the first time in my life where I really felt inspired. It was like the juices coming back into my system from my feet upwards. Because these little kids, they didn’t care for all the formality, the distinguished professor. They didn’t care I have a huge grant or sat on the IPCC committee. They couldn’t have cared two hoots.

Hilary: Is that part of our problem, that the normal expert model we have – where the professor is the expert – is also a very ego enhancing model. And it basically scares people. But it’s also hard, at least for some, to give up that expert role. So I want to say “good for you, Coleen.”  Though frankly I think your gender helps you not to be so caught up with your own self importance.

Coleen: Listening is a big help in this. I would say listening more to the people who we’re engaging with is really important now. People who are our clients, if you like. In Africa where the youth and in particular my university have so much energy and so much passion. But then there’s no spaces in the university for these people to actually engage, to feel heard.

Hilary: We deeply want to be seen especially when we are young. The students must feel so maddened.

Coleen. So I am starting a kind of a life coaching session with particularly women students. Just once a month. We’ll come and just share and talk about how to be educated. Because I think it’s not just factual knowledge that we needing anymore. It’s this whole person knowledge. So how to dress for a meeting, how to face a patriarchal male who’s dominating in a meeting.

Hilary: If we can put you in charge of rethinking the university, you’d invite students to go down a number of avenues, not just scIentific knowledge.

Coleen. I’d certainly include having the ability to be self reflective.

Hilary: That’s a knife to the heart of patriarchal knowledge – which yields no space to subjectivity. In fact it’s basically taboo!

Coleen: Yes, and as my daughter would say, grab a violin, you’re really waxing lyrical now!

Hilary: Yea.  We have to be solutions focused.  I bet you’re her role model.

Coleen: We don’t have the safe spaces in the universities that we need. I think the hierarchy is aware of the need to change because of the complex politics. But I’ve noticed when, for example, we try and do transdisciplinary, cross disciplinary work, the walls, get higher instead of lower. People find any excuse not to engage the terrain. The territory becomes entrenched. So, so how do we work across those to open up those spaces.

Hilary: I want to talk about liberating the Ivory Tower mentality. Though I want to be careful too, not to sound like a liberation bully – there’s a contradiction in terms! For me liberation is a really positive thing, it’s in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Basically we’d acknowledge our own experiences as Freire puts it. We’d dare to know, as Kant originally insisted. But the Enlightenment seems to have gotten kidnapped by over-eager scientific methodologists. And they won’t yield space to any other kind of knowledge, like action oriented research.  So now it’s a challenge. How do we practice transformative learning / research? Over my years as an action researcher, I’ve seen too often that while individual faculty can do this alone pretty well, it can easily get disappeared from the university system. It gets washed away. I sense it’s time for us to connect our efforts, to join across our boundaries, among universities but also to engage the communities we serve. Does that resonate?

Coleen. Yep, right on. So I’m working with quite a lot of universities at the moment. So there’s a number of platforms. Without tooting my own horn, I’m working in global change programs at fairly high levels in this country and beyond. I’ve just been made the chair of the global change program in South Africa which has millions [of Rands] to start rethinking global change efforts. Um, and then with Future Earth, I’m also working at that level. I think its all doing action research. And then finally the work that I’m doing in the city of Johannesburg, where we really try to do a co-designed process and so the city and the University are really working together. It’s very, very hard. It has to be emergent. And that’s why I’d love to come and just share and hear and learn and listen about what others are up to.

Hilary. And I bet you need to be quite disruptive in a way. You’ve got to kind of break things up. But do it quite gently. We need creative disruption of what have been very old and successful institutions of higher learning. Exhausting, eh?

Coleen. Initially, I was so frustrated. More like a missionary, you know. I’m getting older now, and I think as you get older you learn a lot more. To go more carefully maybe. And I’m just learning to just be more patient just to be in the right place in the right time with the right people. Like this conversation which is also serendipitous.

Hilary: Beautiful. And thank you for reminding me of the value of aging. When I think about inertia I think about race issues, I think about gender and power issues. I’ve written about how much shame keeps the current system together. It’s so hard to really look at the truth of what’s propping up our inertial systems.

Coleen. This very issue was very prominent in the recent conference on transformation (Seed Beds). This whole issue of dealing with the hurt and the pain of what’s going on in the African context particularly. there’s a lot of anger and a lot of pain that people are subverting, pushing down. There is no space in the university to actually just have a conversation around any of this. I am curious to have more opportunity for sharing and just basic connecting.

Hilary: We are whole persons.

Coleen: Yeah and we can have impact over lifetime. Some of the students that I’ve had the privilege of mentoring take on serious positions in government or in business. They come back 15, 20 years later. They say, it wasn’t just the factual knowledge that helped me. So I guess I don’t want to sound like, you know, too boastful, but I think we have to start creating a movement. We need a movement on this.

Hilary. I guess it’s a radical movement to acknowledge that humans are, well, human! It’d be a little funny to say this except that it’s sad to have to. I see mainstream education seems to be actually driving the natural urge for learning out of people. I really worry about that. I sense that human creativity may be the only inexhaustible resource we have if we are to tackle our potential demise as a species.

Coleen: It’s been really hard for me working in the education space as a climate scientist by training who then sees the importance of human issues. And then I have the wonderful privilege to chair the human dimensions committee of the global change organizations internationally. But in my own university it felt as if there was a kind of sabotage.

Hilary. Sounds like you do so much, good stuff, great stuff and then you don’t even get to feel appreciated. No doubt because you rattle the current inertia. How do you deal with that? What do you for self care?

Coleen. I get it, in a real deep sense, that I have to go into myself. So that it’s kind of getting me fixed so that I can then attend to others. Finding retreat space is important for me now.

Hilary. Just given how much information we deal with on a daily basis I agree we need this space. Our poor brains are at collapse with this deep multidimensionality we bring to our work now. It ain’t just the scientific facts we need to convey, it’s so much more in the work of transformative learning. I go on meditation retreat once a quarter myself. Who has the time for that. No one…it’s just that it’s a priority.

Coleen. I have enjoyed our conversation. This wasn’t just serendipitous. I think the universe brings us together at the right time with the right people. So thank you very much.

Hilary. We want you to succeed and thrive with your important work. Let me know how we can help. Hope to see you at our AR+ Transformations Gathering on Women’s Day at Chalmers University!