Derron Borders
Education | Scholarship | Organizing
Hello and welcome! My name is Derron. I'm an educator, scholar, and organizer who cares deeply about humans and our collective liberation.
Hailing from Ohio, my interests and career have carried me across the Atlantic to Western Europe, all the way to the Intermountain West and the Great Basin, to Upstate New York, and to the rolling Flint Hills of Kansas.
My educational background is in languages and linguistics, the scientific study of language, and in college student development. I've worked within higher education institutions for over 15 years teaching, building and supporting communities, strategically creating inclusive spaces and advocating for historically excluded populations, and designing instructional and digital learning.
As a doctoral student of adult and continuing education at Kansas State University, I study how adults learn the common sense a social order hands them, how some of them elaborate good sense out of it, and how people judge what is true inside an information infrastructure owned by a handful of individuals and corporations. My work joins social epistemology to adult learning theory, with attention to Christian nationalist formation and to the political economy of algorithmic media.
When not working, studying, or doing research, you can find me volunteering and organizing, tending my plot at the community garden, reading epic fantasy fiction, crafting, playing cozy video games, and studying and discussing linguistics and language.
Education
My teaching is grounded in dialectical praxis, the unity of critical reflection and material action. Education is never neutral. The classroom sits inside the same apparatus that conditions what counts as knowledge, and teaching either reproduces that order or works to transform it. I treat learning as the working through of real contradictions in students' material conditions, developing both the consciousness that grasps the relations beneath appearances and the collective capacity to act on them. My practice draws on Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, bell hooks, and Frantz Fanon, and on the longer tradition of movement-based political education in which study is bound to organization. Feminist, decolonial, Marxist, and critical race theories inform this work, held together by a materialist commitment to changing the conditions that produce oppression rather than only the ideas that justify it.
I'm currently developing an open source model for community political education and adult learning, called The People's Free School.
Scholarship
My research sits at the intersection of social epistemology and adult learning, examining how a hegemonic order uses material conditions to govern what counts as legitimate knowledge and how adults come to break from it. Working from dialectical materialism, Gramsci's theory of hegemony, and Freire's pedagogy of praxis, I treat common sense as curriculum: the taught, lived, and largely unspoken account of the world that a social order deposits in the people it forms, and the account that settles in advance whose testimony is credible and what evidence is admissible.
My current research attempts to create an account of formation detailed enough to explain movement: how a framework gets assembled in a person, what makes it visible to them as a framework rather than as the world, and through what relationships, communities, and practices they build something more coherent in its place. Gramsci's good sense names what gets built, a more coherent, materially, and historically self-aware framework on the far side of contradictory consciousness.
A second line of inquiry takes up the same question in its present technological form. Most adults do not veryify most of what they know, so believing anything at all means judging sources, and those judgments now happen inside an infrastructure that is owned, designed, and monetized by a small number of individuals and corporations. I am interested in what makes a claim feel true and a source feel credible under those conditions, and in how the design and economics of information systems shape the field of claims a person ever encounters. Political economy keeps that analysis on ownership and design rather than on the credulity of individuals. It also extends Gramsci's account of civil society, since the institutions through which consent is organized now include the platforms.
Together these lines aim at a theory of adult learning that treats knowing as materially and collectively conditioned at every point: what a person is handed to believe, what they are in a position to check, whom they are in a position to trust, and what it takes to revise any of it. The question underneath is who controls the means by which a society comes to know things, and what conditions allow adults to learn against them.
Organizing
My organizing treats theory and practice as a single movement. Collective action builds the material counter-power through which a dominant order is contested, and study bound to organization is how a movement develops the consciousness to wield it. I center the leadership of those most impacted by systemic oppression, building coalitions across struggles for racial justice, economic equity, housing, and climate.
Through direct action Opens in a new tab , political education Opens in a new tab , and grassroots organizing Opens in a new tab , I work to create spaces where people develop critical consciousness, practice democratic participation, and exercise power together. This is where my research and my practice meet. The reflection anchored in material conditions and joined to action that I study as a theory of adult learning is the same work that political education does inside a movement. My organizing draws on abolitionist frameworks, Indigenous sovereignty movements, and traditions of radical organizing across the Global South.