Crisis, Voice, and the Public Square

Voice, and the sense of being heard, is in crisis, with growing voicelessness among those navigating political concerns within the everyday. This book turns to early childhood teachers as a microcosm for examining how marginalized voices speak up, employing Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism to attend to prosaic, relational encounters where meaning unfolds. The investigation encountered a paradox: communities seeking to be heard and heeded can silence their own from within, as much as from beyond the public square. Readers are invited to trace the strategies and spaces that enable political voice, and to consider what it might mean to listen, as well as speak.     

Fiona Westbrook, Ph.D, Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand. Fiona is a senior lecturer in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she explores the intersection of political voice, dialogue, and visual pedagogy. Her research attends to the everyday, including conversations, gestures, silences, and encounters that shape experiences of voice and voicelessness in education. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic philosophy, Fiona explores how educational communities respond to one another in ways that are unfinished, layered, and full of possibility. She is particularly interested in how the strategic intent of words, images, and postdigital forms can open up or close down voice and dialogue. Her research speaks to questions of democratic participation, crisis chronotopes, and the visibilizing of marginalized voices. Fiona also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (VJEP).