Wrestling with incommensurabilities and possibilities of social justice and decolonization in community-engaged learning

This chapter illustrates how community-engaged learning projects that have social justice aims can be in tension with attempts to decolonize. Considering two different efforts that center immigrant worker rights-one with the Domestic Care Workers Alliance and the other with a hotel workers' union, the chapter outlines three paradoxes within the interwoven relations of labor, migration, citizenship, and de/colonization in the United States. Building the analysis to how racism and colonialism are intertwined with the roots of capitalism, it contends that actualizing decolonization requires wrestling with the goals, incommensurabilities, and possibilities of projects that simultaneously advocate for better labor conditions and reinforce colonization. It challenges the reader to grapple with and be responsive to these complex realities in teaching and scholarship, with reverence for the people and lands that have maintained life and envisioned and fought for better futures.