“At the risk of bruising friendships, I also ask that we think fully about theories of change that rely on raising awareness or raising visibility. This theory of change assumes that people are unaware of an injustice or issue or illness or social calamity, and that in making them more aware, we ready them to take appropriate action. It is a theory of pre-change. It assumes that people will generally do the right thing with the right information. It anticipates that the reason for inaction thus far is missing information, or lack of depth of understanding of the significance or need.
Raising awareness is a cousin theory of change to documenting change—both often rely on circulating narratives and tropes of the mutilated body, the broken spirit, the flooded neighborhood. Images of destruction compete for dollars on Facebook, to wrench the most sympathy for donations, for charity, for compassion, for hashtag solidarity, for newsworthiness, for value, for mattering. There is no relationship between the evocativeness of the photograph and the amount of the donation that goes to those in need. There is no relationship between the story of loss and the supplies that come.
So much of what we do to compel change relies on raising awareness. But what if we—as communities, as collectives—were to disbelieve awareness as change? What if we, as Indigenous peoples, as people of colour, as disenfranchised peoples, believed that our own awareness, our own knowing, is enough to make change? What if we did not wait for others to also know but are inspired by our own knowing? What if we hold true that we are the ones who need to know, and not others? What if we believe that we are the ones who can make change, and that others are not more powerful than us to effect change? These are radical questions that throb at the heart of what gets taken for granted as the work of social justice, of organizing, of public scholarship. [...]
In this neoliberal, settler colonial moment, it can be so difficult to imagine other theories of change. It requires a sort of mental yoga to even remember other theories of change. In our book, Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change, Wayne Yang and I created a list of other popular theories of change and I can never remember what was on the list. I have to look at the list to remember, because raising awareness and documenting damage figure so prominently in my imagination.”
—Eve Tuck, “Biting the University that Feeds Us,” in Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education
