Voice-and-chorus as a revolutionary force: addressing productive tensions in understanding unique individuality/voice within relational approaches (commentary on the special issue on learners’ voices)

In this commentary on the Learners' Voices Special Issue, I dialogue with its authors from a position developed in my prior works (on Transformative Activist Stance), further advancing it based in this dialogue. This position is that even though it is the chorus of voices that ultimately matters (including as a revolutionary force) – with its profound sociality, relationality, polyphony, and multivoicedness – nonetheless, every voice matters and matters in its distinct authenticity and uniqueness within a chorus. In this rendition, individuality and communality/relationality (individual voice and chorus) are meshed together, allowing for no strict dichotomy between them. Critically, the voice and the chorus make each other up, and not as fixed things or preconceived essences mechanically added to each other, but as energies merging/meshing together in a non-additive way, each changing and becoming in the process – in a continuous spiral of mutual self-and-world-corealizing. Therefore, we each need to be a voice in order for us to become part of the chorus, and moreover, to be able to hear other voices. It is with our own voice that we hear voices of others. This position has implications for engaged, activist research suggesting that taking a sociopolitical stan in sounding our voice, is an essential component of research methodologies.