Hesford

Hesford, Wendy S. "Global/Local Labor Politics and the Promise of Service Learning." Radical Relevance: Toward a Scholarship of the Whole Left. Ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale and Steven Rosendale. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 183-202.

Hesford reviews the implications of the globalized and corporatized university, including consumerist models of curriculum and pedagogy, calling upon her audience to interrogate how ASL accepts/rejects exploitative labor practices. ASL provides labor as well as value for both higher ed and community agencies and we should be aware, Hesford writes, of how specific programs impact labor and material realities. E.g., she explains how her students provided volunteer labor to a shelter that had formerly relied upon public moneys. Do ASL programs facilitate decreased state funding for social services? Further, one year the shelter failed to garner a grant for funding labor during the summer (when it felt the lack of student labor). Hesford wonders if her students would be better off protesting at the state capital or continuing to provide the services/labor. Unpaid interships at private corporations effect local economies, providing free labor for the company and taking paid work from an employee. ASL, likewise, enters into labor-based relationship with worksites. Further, the service work remains feminized--a dynamic we often fail to question. Being reflexive isn't enough, for reflexivity doesn't necessarily address these material relationships.

Himley

Himley, Margaret. "Facing (up to) 'The Stranger' in Community Service Learning." College Composition and Communication 55 (2004): 416-438.

In feminst and po-co studies, 'the stranger' is one who is fetishized and/or feared, and "haunts the project of community service learning" (417). Even ASL projects rooted in reciprocity (a la Cushman) contend with power assymetries--the need to exploit, even if just to get a story (ethnography, for example)--but we nonetheless need to keep envisioning projects that foster social justice. The dilemmas have no answers, but we need to keep encountering the stranger nonetheless. The stranger "reveals the power assymetries, social antagonisms, and historical detriments that are all too often concealed by discourses of volunteerism or civic literacy" (417).

Welch

Welch, Nancy. "'And Now that I Know Them': Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course." College Composition and Communication 54 (2002): 243-263.

Welch says that writing/composing is crucial for any ASL course because the process of discovery encompasses not only intellectual discovery but also ethical-civic discovery. But further theoretical frames are necessary to push ASL students beyond default subject-object relationships ('I'm the agent helping a helpless object'). Goal: composing a subject-subject relationship. She turns to feminist object-relations theory, which "pinpoints a crucial ingredient in that relationship: the ability to recognize others as subjects whose lives both overlap and exceed one's own" (248).