Listening at the Edge: What Community-Engaged Work Teaches Us About Knowing
By Ben Blevins, Co-Founder & CFO, Highland Support Project
In 1987, I sat in my dean's office trying to justify six weeks embedded with a coffee cooperative in Nicaragua rather than a required summer semester abroad in Salamanca. My department chair wasn't persuaded. Legitimate knowledge, in her view, came from prestigious institutions, credentialed instructors, and an approved curriculum—one whose authority rested less on argument than on the accumulated clout of the world that had sanctioned it. What I wanted instead was to join an international solidarity brigade traveling into an active war zone to help campesinos rebuild a cooperative that the US-backed Contras had attacked twice that year. My request was denied. But the exchange taught me something important about how narrowly institutions define expertise, legitimate knowledge, and meaning.
I went to Nicaragua anyway, without the credit, on my own terms. What I found there—and what I've spent the better part of thirty years since relearning—is the subject of this post: community-engaged learning and research can unintentionally reproduce the very hierarchies we set out to dismantle, when we translate what we encounter back into our own frameworks too quickly. For a long time, I assumed the remedy was methodologically solved through a sufficiently honest reflexive memo or a well-crafted consent form. I'm less sure of that now. What I keep coming back to is slower and harder to codify: a way of listening that tolerates not knowing for longer than feels comfortable, and that lets the people I work with name the problem before I've quietly named it for them.
Arriving Certain, Learning Otherwise
In Nicaragua, I arrived convinced I could read the cooperative through a clean binary: Marxist social development versus the logic of international capital. Reality refused to resolve so neatly. The Sandinista government, led largely by Pacific coast mestizos, framed land reform as redistribution—state and cooperative ownership replacing old Somocista holdings, campesinos recast as agrarian citizens. But on the Atlantic coast and in Indigenous territories further inland, that same revolutionary government looked like just another Hispanic authority asserting claims over land it had never had standing to redistribute. Tuck and Yang's (2012) insistence that decolonization "is not a metaphor" names, retrospectively, something I lived without the words for: the revolution's map of liberation and the Indigenous map of sovereignty simply didn't overlay.
Even inside the cooperative, the categories wouldn't hold still. Officially, it was a collective enterprise aligned with state agricultural policy. The people I worked alongside wanted something quieter and more specific: ownership of their own labor and land, not membership in a state project wearing a cooperative's name.
Here's the tension I keep circling back to, and it's one every community-engaged practitioner will recognize. We tell ourselves a story about arriving open, ready to listen, committed to something other than the old extractive model. That readiness is real. What it misses is how much of our listening is still organized by the frameworks we brought with us. We hear something and, almost before we register it, we've translated it—filed it into a category, absorbed it into a theory built somewhere else. This isn't a failure of good intentions. Translation is a trained reflex, something we've spent years learning to do well, and unlearning it takes practice, humility, and a fair amount of getting it wrong first.
Two Ideas Worth Carrying Into the Field
Enrique Dussel (1977/2003) gave me language for something I'd felt but couldn't name. Two of his concepts do most of the work. Totality is a system that absorbs whatever it encounters back into its own logic, rendering the unfamiliar either invisible or intelligible only on its own terms—deciding not just what counts as true, but what counts as possible. Exteriority is what the totality cannot absorb: the lived reality and knowledge of those it excludes. For Dussel, genuine newness penetrates a closed system from outside rather than emerging from within its self-reproducing logic.
I saw this play out while facilitating a participatory research project with Mam and K'iche women in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, developing a place-based definition of obstetric violence. Conversations often turned to child mortality and to a cluster of terms—mala vida (bad life), mal de ojo (the evil eye), el asusto (shock)—describing a loss of balance. Visiting medical students filed their field notes under "local folk belief." But for practitioners of ancestral Maya healing, these are coherent etiologies: accounts of how affliction arises, whom it strikes, and why. Calling them belief rather than diagnosis isn't a neutral description—it's a totality protecting its own edges, mistaking the limits of its framework for the limits of what can be known.
I made my own version of this mistake. Trying to make Maya healing "legible," I reached for quantum mechanics as a bridge, a way to suggest these practices weren't so far from what physics already accepts. It felt generous. It wasn't. In straining to explain their knowledge, I made Western science the standard it had to resemble in order to count—a false equivalence dressed up as respect, performing the very hierarchy I meant to dismantle. Validation, it turns out, can be its own mode of dismissal. The practical lesson: resist the urge to make unfamiliar knowledge "legible" by translating it into your own discipline's terms before you've let it stand on its own.
The South as a Position, Not a Place
In Nicaragua, I noticed something else: the radical, cosmopolitan elites of the Pacific coast spoke about poverty with the same othering reflex that animated the perpetual-growth liberals they otherwise opposed. The Atlantic coast named it differently, from inside the experience, in terms neither dominant camp seemed able to register. Two opposing accounts of the same problem turned out to share a single way of knowing—and that shared way of knowing had no room for how the coast understood its own condition.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos sharpens this in Epistemologies of the South (2014) by refusing to let "South" remain a geographic label. For Santos, South names an epistemic and political position defined by exclusion and by the devaluation of knowledge produced outside the dominant center. The Atlantic coast was "South" by exclusion, not by latitude.
That distinction matters practically for anyone designing community-engaged work. An elite research university in Sáo Palo may reproduce dominant assumptions more faithfully than a community college in Appalchia where knowledge built from poverty and extraction has long been dismissed. Design engagement around geography alone, and you can walk right past the subjugated knowledge inside your own institution. None of this erases real asymmetries of power—some communities have borne exclusion far more violently than others, and that should shape our responsibilities. But Santos's framework widens the aperture: it asks us to seek out marginalized knowledge wherever dominant systems have failed to absorb it, and to arrive as learners whose own frameworks may be exactly what needs to be questioned.
Beginning From the Other's Voice
If the South names a position rather than a place, the question becomes practical: how do we encounter exteriority without quietly swallowing it back into the totality that produced our categories in the first place? Dussel calls his answer the analectic method: beginning from the other's voice rather than your own, interpreting it on its own terms instead of folding it into what you already carry.
Anzaldúa's (1987) insistence that the space between systems is where new consciousness takes shape described something I'd already felt on the Atlantic coast without having words for it. Chela Sandoval (2000) pushed this further, treating the standpoint of the marginalized as mobile—a capacity people actively use to reimagine the world they inhabit. The edge, the excluded position: these aren't places of lack. They're where theory actually gets made.
This isn't merely an academic preference for marginal perspectives; it's a response to the scale of what's failing. We are living with the breakdown of a system that can no longer sustain either social life or ecological life, and its crises grow out of the same logic of extraction and endless growth that produced the totality Santos and Dussel each ask us to question. That means cleaner versions of the same thinking won't solve them. As Walter Mignolo argues in The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011), this moment calls for epistemological transformation—a shift in how we understand knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and what futures our ways of knowing make possible. Tony Fry (2009) pushes the point further: the dominant logics of modern life are actively defuturing the world, foreclosing the futures they claim to protect. Rethinking what counts as knowledge isn't a side project—it's a precondition for any future worth designing.
What does this mean on the ground? The analectic is plainer than it sounds. It means catching yourself mid-sentence, right as you're about to explain something, and choosing to listen longer instead. Totality reasserts itself in ordinary moments: a resident's account of a problem gets recast in grant language, a partner's silence gets filled with an agenda item, "what I'm hearing you say is..." returns someone's knowledge in our vocabulary rather than theirs. The analectic asks us to trust the other's word before we fully understand it, to let partners name the problem before we name the project, and to treat our own confusion as evidence that something genuinely exterior has entered the room.
What This Asks of Us
Community-engaged learning can rightly be promoted on ethical grounds—it's good to serve, good to give back. Dussel pushes toward something more demanding: engagement with the excluded is an intellectual necessity, not only an ethical one. In his Ethics of Liberation (1998/2013), he points to Indigenous political traditions, including forms of Maya governance in which consensus comes first and leaders are expected to serve the community's will. This isn't a rough draft of Western politics. It's a complete, distinct tradition that persists not because of geography but because the totality of conquest never fully absorbed it.
Taking that seriously changes the whole posture of the work. The relationship stops running one way. Here's what that looks like in course and program design:
Begin with community-defined questions, not course-defined ones. Let the people you're accompanying set the terms of what's worth studying.
Teach students to notice when they're translating. Build reflection prompts that ask them to catch the moment an unfamiliar practice gets filed into a familiar academic category.
Treat listening as a discipline, not a disposition. Being willing to listen isn't the same as the sustained practice of doing it well. Design for the practice.
Name power, expertise, and reciprocity directly. Don't let good intentions stand in for structural honesty about who benefits.
Accept that some knowledge is not yours to extract. Not every encounter should become data, and not every insight should be converted into academic capital.
"Learning from communities" can itself become extractive when institutions value student satisfaction or publication over community priorities—a posture that matters as much within our own institutions as in the communities we set out to accompany.
An Invitation
For three decades, I've worked with the Highland Support Project alongside communities in Guatemala, Ecuador, Arizona, and Virginia. In this work, ecology, public health, education, and empowerment do not stay separate. A vented stove is also forest restoration, and a women's circle is also civic formation. Through participatory action research, communities define the questions and own what is learned. Dussel helped me name this practice as a partial enactment of the analectic—a way of letting the periphery speak on its own terms.
I keep returning to a morning years ago, in a concrete-block room outside Quetzaltenango, a pot of coffee going cold between us. I'd arrived with a plan, a clipboard, and a list of solutions I was eager to walk everyone through. I talked for a long time. An older woman across from me didn't interrupt. She folded her hands and waited, watching me the way you watch weather, until I finally ran out of things to say. Then she spoke, and it turned out she'd already thought through most of what I'd come to propose, plus several things I hadn't considered. That was the morning actual learning started.
If any of this resonates with your own work—in education, public health, design, or research—I'd welcome the conversation. Not as an offer of expertise, but as an invitation to sit with the same questions: How do we teach this without absorbing it? How do we build partnerships that let communities set the terms? Thirty years in, I'm still learning to stop talking sooner than I did that morning.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Dussel, E. (2003). Philosophy of liberation (A. Martinez & C. Morkovsky, Trans.). Wipf and Stock. (Original work published 1977)
Dussel, E. (2013). Ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion (A. A. Vallega, Ed.; E. Mendieta, C. Pérez Bustillo, Y. Angulo, & N. Maldonado-Torres, Trans.). Duke University Press. (Original work published 1998)
Fry, T. (2009). Design futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice. Berg.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press.
Santos, B. de S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630
