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.
I am a doctoral student in adult learning and leadership at Kansas State University, working on adult learning and the formation of critical consciousness through themes such as Gramsci's hegemony, Christian nationalism, rural political formation, the study of whiteness in its beneficiaries, agonistic democracy, epistemic justice, critical and popular pedagogy, information infrastructures, platform ownership, and how people judge credibility, especially in the the current so-called "post-truth" era.
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
Social epistemology of adult learning, hegemony, and the politics of knowledge
Research Interests
- Adult learning and the formation of critical consciousness
- Gramscian hegemony, with attention to common sense and good sense as pedagogical objects
- Christian nationalism, rural political formation, and the study of whiteness in its beneficiaries
- Agonistic democracy, epistemic justice, and the conditions that precede deliberation
- Critical and popular pedagogy in the Freirean and Highlander traditions
- Information infrastructure, platform ownership, and how people judge credibility
- Qualitative methodology and mixed methods research
Recent Publications
Borders, D.S. (2026). Pre-dialogic agonism: Adult learning, hegemony, and the epistemic crisis of “post-truth.” Adult Education Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/07417136261449815 Opens in a new tab
- Argues that dialogue across deep political difference presupposes conditions the post-truth diagnosis leaves unexamined, and reads those conditions through Gramsci and Mouffe as a problem for adult education rather than a problem of information literacy.
Upcoming Presentations
Pre-dialogic agonism: Hegemony, adult education, and the epistemic crisis of post-truth. American Association of Adult and Continuing Education 2026 Conference, October 5-9, Chatanooga, TN.
Manufacturing Merit: Tiered AI Access in Education. 2026 Heartland AI Symposium, November 10-12, Manhattan, KS.
Research Projects
Trust and Distrust in Political and Social Information
A hermeneutic phenomenological study of how adult men in rural Kansas navigate trust and distrust when they encounter political and social information. Following van Manen’s three-reading approach, I am using cycle-based coding as described by Saldaña. Ten participants have been interviewed, transcribed, and analysis is underway. Coding runs in QDA Coder, an Obsidian plugin I wrote for the project.
Consciousness and Political Trajectory After a Rural Evangelical Upbringing
A quantitative study of adults raised in rural evangelical households, fielded through the population's own networks. The instrument measures the formation itself, current political and religious commitments, and which domains of belief changed and at what age, across the full range of where people from that upbringing end up. Latent profile analysis over the consciousness measures looks for patterned mixtures rather than a single left-to-right dimension: racially critical but economically conventional, anticapitalist but colorblind, and whatever else the data hold. The work follows QuantCrit commitments, mapping a terrain rather than claiming to measure political consciousness as such. Instrument development is underway; fielding follows IRB.
Compiling the Inventory: An Archive-Based Autoethnography
A memory-work study of my own material archive as the record of one movement out of rural evangelical common sense. Journals, letters, messages, sermon and Bible study notes, school and church artifacts, photographs, and playlists are cataloged, dated, and laid across five domains of formation, then read for what they document and what they cannot. Following Haug, pivotal episodes are written in the third person without interpretation and then analyzed for what they omit, whose voices carry authority in them, and which vocabulary they are written in. The sharpest material comes from where the documents and the memory disagree, which is where retrospection can be caught curating. In progress.
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.