Despite decades of legislative work advancing progressive frameworks, educational reforms towards democratic and sustainable goals, and the turn to diversity training in organizations, everyday interactions remain problematic. Institutional design is only a fraction of what effectively sustains an ethical and just coexistence. Divisive, discriminatory, unfair, and ecologically unsustainable ideas and behaviors continue shaping decision making, social dynamics and digital interaction. Transforming harmful behavior and unjust conditions that affect historically marginalized groups—along lines of gender, race, ability, class, and sexuality—requires educational and community practices that adequately engage critically not just with norms and laws, but with attitudes and beliefs. The need to resist these conditions has been for decades paired with the broader call for unlearning racist, sexist, gender-normative, ableist, classist and anthropocentric biases and prejudices that hold these issues in place. What prevents these educational efforts from translating into sustained transformation?

I propose to present a critical analysis of how "unlearning" has been conceptualized across three scholarly traditions—Organizational Learning, Transformative Learning, and Decolonial Feminist scholarship, based on the literature review of my PhD research. The metaphors each tradition uses to describe unlearning or transformation reveal distinct and partially shared assumptions about human agency and motivation. I suggest that transformation's central difficulty, both in theory (particularly in the tradition inaugurated by Jack Mezirow) and in many activist and community practices, resides in approaching change as the direct or automatic effect of exercising critical reflection (a cognitive task) individually or collectively. This framing allows scholars to theorize transformation without confronting what prevents us from taking it to action. If unlearning and actual resistance to injustice and discrimination are to be feasible and durable, we cannot ignore the strains and emotional ambivalence that change entails: the risk it poses to the benefits (privileges) we get from them one way or another.  

Supported in Laurent Berlant and Sara Ahmed’s work and other feminist and postcolonial authors, I propose the most insidious obstacle to people’s everyday commitment to justice isn't achieving adequate norms or understanding of systemic injustices. The decisive step lies in tackling the investments and grounding all of us, in the broad variance of positionalities, with small or large privileges, already have in such unequal structures. 

Actual change would force us to negotiate our belongings and relinquish the advantages we enjoy in an unequal world, but traditional transformative education literature seems to lack a robust account of change to address this motivational complexity. In evading the social entanglements that protect privilege and postponing the empirical question on how to overcome this resistance, theoretical framings leave us with high hopes but no adequate tools. My analysis foregrounds what two of these traditions systematically exclude: the tight relationship between positionality and identity, between structural positions and privilege as lived investment. I argue transformation requires confronting these tensions, and propose a redefinition of agency as situated in our everyday investments, relationships, and belongings. These grounds for action and motivation must be recognized but also held accountable if we are to move on towards viable frames of solidarity and coexistence.

This paper is a critical literature review analyzing representative debates within three scholarly traditions addressing transformation of deep-seated beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors: Organizational Learning, Transformative Learning, and Decolonial Feminist scholarship. I examine 30+ key texts spanning five decades (1970s-2020s) from Anglo-American adult education, organizational studies, and critical theory that have shaped how 'unlearning' and 'transformation' are conceptualized and studied empirically in the scenarios where the theories apply these concepts. The selection focuses on foundational texts (Mezirow, Becker, Ahmed, Spivak), influential critiques, and contemporary developments that represent central debates within each tradition. The analysis maps how each tradition accounts for: (1) conditions enabling /hindering transformation, (2) what is being transformed (target beliefs, attitudes, behaviors), and (3) metaphors describing the transformative process. As a result, it reveals distinct assumptions about human agency and motivation in the scholarship. The analysis discusses as well the limitations on the concepts of “change” involved in the different disciplines studied, and challenges the role of instrumental rationality and prevalent ideas about human aversion to change. The paper inspects thus the limits of the theories to address complex emotional, societal, and political matters that need to be tackled for the transformation of prejudices and discriminatory behaviors to occur. This includes unpacking the tight relationship between privilege as structural position and privilege as lived investment, and the emotional ambivalence involved in relinquishing advantages.

The critical analysis reveals a series of dominant assumptions about human cognitive skills, agency, and motivations that run in the background of organizational and transformative learning particularly, but are present as well in the feminist decolonial tradition. By privileging cognitive critical reflection as the driver of change, and relying on voluntarist approaches to human psychology (as the metaphors of unlearning make evident) these frameworks treat transformation as primarily epistemological, leaving untheorized the emotional, strategic and relational aspects of change. At the same time, transformation is often positioned as a task for the subaltern (who have direct stakes) to change societal structures. Scholars repeatedly evade the question of how discrimination is intertwined with privilege, overlooking how strategic investments render privilege and prejudices simultaneously acknowledged yet insurmountable. This way, the cognitivist-voluntarist frames of thought applied in institutional settings fail to deliver changes in behavior and social practices, while politely reproducing critical discourses and leaving unfair structures intact. What can possibly motivate relinquishing privilege in an unequal world? I suggest cognitive critical reflection needs to be explicitly situated within socialization, emotional aspects, strategic investments, and cultural belongings within the pedagogical frame itself. The paper closes with a proposal of redefining agency and rationality informed by critical phenomenology, contemporary affect theories, and critical sustainability education (Berlant, Di Angelo, O’Sullivan), where the question of disinvestment and emotional ambivalence is directly confronted. Only by theorizing this motivational complexity can transformative education move beyond producing well-meaning discourse while leaving unjust structures intact, and deliver actual change.

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