Third-Space Practitioners: Women Educating for Justice in the Global South

This article builds on qualitative research with 13 women (9 from Canada and 4 from Asia and Africa) doing international adult education in the Global South. The author examines the cases in light of the postcolonial literature of Bhabha, Spivak, and Khan, giving special attention to their theory of third space. The 13 participants are third-space practitioners who challenge the binaries of North/South, religion/development, and local/global. As development workers and educators, these women trouble existing categories of identity to practice progressive politics in the public sphere through third-space strategies of ritual, listening, negotiation, and subversion. This article’s main contribution is to show how these adult educators use and practice this radical position within the shifting (postfoundational) sands that are so often denounced as apolitical, noncommittal, or lost in linguistics.