ABSTRACT
The chapter details the coming to consciousness narratives of participants and argues that being conscious is a necessary condition for transformation. Identifying and recognising the discourses, practices and ways of being that perpetuate injustice enables the individual to find ways of rejecting and changing them. Coming to consciousness means having an individual or personal commitment to the transformation process brought on by being willing to constantly question the relations within our contexts and the ways in which we interact with such contexts. The chapter describes how participants’ questioning, listening, acknowledgment, acceptance and understanding of the need for change enabled them to take actions that led to transformation. I define coming to consciousness as acknowledging, knowing and understanding the power and privilege of our positionality as it is from this point that we are able to understand the delegitimising, depowering and unprivileged position of the ‘other’ and the resulting feeling of alienation, exclusion and marginalisation that such an ‘other’ experiences. I argue that therein lies the transformative potential of agency, because we are then able to understand, not only our own experiences but the experience of the other, and this will invariably affect the way we interact in the social system. I argue that it is the condition of possibility created by a reformulation of interests (discussed in the previous chapter) and the coming to consciousness that allows the agent to situate or re-position himself/herself and take action discursively or materially towards change.
