John Gaventa

John Gaventa (born 1949) is the director of the Coady International Institute and Vice-President of International Development at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Gaventa received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University in 1971, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He taught at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville from 1987 until 1996.

He began to help lead a grass-roots adult educational program at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee in 1976, and was director from 1993 until 1996. He received a MacArthur Award in 1981 for his work with the Highlander Center. His first publication Power and Powerlessness: Quesicience and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley broke new theoretical and empirical ground in the study of social power, winning The Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award of the American Political Science Association, The V.O Key Book Award of the Southern Political Science Association, The Lillian Smith Book Award of the Southern Regiona Council, The W.D Weatherford Book Award, and earned co-runnerup in the first annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award competition.

While studying at Oxford with Steven Lukes, author of Radical Power (1976), Gaventa developed a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of community power that has radically transformed community power studies in political sociology and opened a path for the legitimization of participatory research in mainstream sociology and political science.

Gaventa's articulation, and empirical demonstration, of the "three dimensional" approach to the study of power has informed multiple disciplines and multiple scholars as to the nuances of social power and the processes of its legitimization; while at the same time lending significant support to the growing community of scholars and social change advocates who would find the sources and the solutions of social problems, not in the dictates or preconceived notions held by social scientists, theologians and philosophers, but in the narratives of the affected alienated populations. Such methodological subjectivity allows the framing of a social problem, and a social solution, to occur from within the group, in Gaventa's theory, empowering, better enabling, the group to take collective action in the face of an almost unlimited power by those in Authority to frame issues as non-issues in the public's mind.

Borrowing from Lukes, Gaventa identifies three analytical dimensions that are the proper study of social power, with each dimension becoming increasingly more difficult to empirically observe with traditional methodologies of political science, a situation which forces Gaventa to synthesize numerous understandings of socialization into a cogent articulation of observable processes through which symbolic production is channeled within identifiable networks and communities.

The one dimensional approach involves direct empirical observations of very openly contested public issues. It involves defining and framing these issues in terms of identifiable winners and losers, and reflects the traditional pluralist approach to the study of community power. The second dimensional involves the addition of what Gaventa refers to as the "mobilization of bias" through which cultural hegemony is both asserted and legitimized. Empirically Gaventa's contribution is development of a method for looking at the various channels through which those in positions of social power turn concerns, claims, and potential challenges about inequities in outcome into 'non-decisions'. The third dimension involves addition of the capacity to manufacture expectations of social outcomes through the manipulation of the symbols and ideology, in such a way as inequities themselves become 'non-issues'.

His publications include

• Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. ISBN 0-252-00985-1
• We make the road by walking : conversations on education and social change. ISBN 0-87722-775-6
• Communities in Economic Crisis: Appalachia & the South ISBN 0-87722-650-4
• Global citizen action ISBN 1-55587-968-3