Vocalizing Silenced Voices

Reviews / Votes

"Vocalizing Silenced Voices gives readers a clear and urgent sense of what hegemony means and how it operates to maintain racially unjust social relations. In this book, Lea, Thapa, and Hines take us through their work attempting to make visible and disrupt cultural hegemony on a university campus. While their work uncovered wrenching stories of pain, silencing, and anger in a sea of white apathy, the authors also offer strategies of hope."University Monterey Bay, Member, National Academy of Education

Christine Sleeter
Professor Emerita, California State University Monterey Bay, Member, National Academy of Education "An important and timely book based on a decade of ethnographic studies with students, faculty, staff, and community members by The Hegemony Project. The authors not only detail the history and presence of cultural hegemony and its strategies and tools -- such as racism, whiteness, white supremacy -- used to silence those critical voices that demand change and thereby threaten established socio-economic structure but also provide counter-silencing strategies to interrupt silencing and make all voices heard. A must-read."

Ana Cruz
Professor of Education, St. Louis Community College. "As censorship regimes ramp up today, it's important to remember that educational institutions have long functioned to silence diversity and criticality in various ways, even as such hegemony has always been contested in ways both obvious and not. In Vocalizing Silenced Voices, Lea, Thapa, and Hines provide us with a timely and practical framework for understanding who, how, where, and why institutions silence, as they humbly invite us into their own journey of creating spaces of resistance and movement building, showcasing through a rich tapestry of student voices that anti-oppressive education is messy, yes, but doable and enlivening as well."

Kevin Kumashiro
Author of "Surrendered: Why Progressive are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education" "As politics rage within and outside the academy, this book lays bare the conscious and unconscious strategies used by anti-democratic, authoritarian individuals and groups who attempt to silence the voices and actions of social justice advocates, including education, ethnic studies and liberal arts students, faculty, staff, nonprofit workers and community members. The authors identify how whiteness, white supremacy, social caste and other powerful ideologies, interwoven with socio-economic structures, maintain gross inequities. They provide knowledge that is essential for the foundational work of pre-service and practicing teachers and the above actors, who struggle to meet the needs of their constituencies. I recommend this book and the dialogue to which it contributes about how we can build a more critically conscious and structurally just society."

Theresa Montano
Professor, Chicana/o Studies, California State University Northridge.