Scholars of linguistics, communication studies, literary theory, political science, philosophy, feminist scholarship, and queer studies, have done significant work on silence and other forms of strategic ambiguity employed by participants in interactive contexts. While intriguing, strategically ambiguous communication—a sophisticated means by which individuals, in registering the power dynamics and interactive norms of a given context, simultaneously express and protect themselves—operates per se outside the limits of visibility and legibility. Examples of this phenomenon take place in adult education research and practice, both spontaneously and even in preplanned forms. Students may choose not to respond (or to respond differently than expected) when prompted by a teacher, or when participants in a research study choose not to answer a particular question on written or in conversation-based data collection processes (e.g., Entigar, 2025). Such cases can evoke a disruption to the communicative process whereby those in power (teachers, researchers) ask and those subject to this power (students, research participants) may be forced to reckon with their de facto onto-epistemic and ethical authority in meaning making. At the same time, the intentional creation of opportunities for individuals to contribute agentively and creatively, including in strategically ambiguous ways, can gesture toward a novel politics of learning which refuses to accept the tacit normative enclosures of our work. 

I suggest that while approaching strategic ambiguity in communication is complex because it is difficult to observe—let alone analyze and interpret—we might consider that such difficulties to be an invitation for different thinking. Interweaving women of colour feminist scholarship, critical social epistemology, legal studies, performance theory, and applied linguistics, I call for a calibration of the lens by which we approach the silence of participants in the learning process. Reflecting with new eyes upon strategically ambiguous communication in education—of which silence is but one example—can shed light upon ongoing harms enacted upon learners, particularly those whose ways of being and knowing are subsumed to established educational norms as well as the white cisheteropatriarchal and settler colonialist norms which continue to inform our work. We might, in doing this, begin to reckon with our unilateral onto-epistemic and ethical authority as academics and practitioners to speak for silence and other forms of strategic ambiguity when we make claims about its meaning, which can have immediate and far-reaching consequences. 

I will present my conceptual, empirical, and community-based work on silence (Entigar, 2020, 2025), including where I have failed to apprehend—by which I mean both “to understand” and “to arrest or enclose”—silence. As a community-based adult practitioner, a researcher exploring student silences, and a queer and trans community group facilitator, I bring examples of how I have encountered, prepared for, and employed silence in activities of belonging, healing, and possibilizing different collective futures. This discussion will provoke thinking about the ethics and politics inherent to pedagogical and methodological decision-making in adult education as we let in silence, as storyteller, as soothsayer, as Tiresias and as trickster and imagine possibilities for our work with those like and different from us. 

Study #1 (2018): multiphase qualitative inquiry using surveys, focus groups Study #2 (2024): multiphase qualitative inquiry using surveys, focus groups Study #3 (2026): multiphase qualitative inquiry using surveys, interviews

This discussion will provoke thinking about the ethics and politics inherent to pedagogical and methodological decision-making in adult education. It will generate innovations in teacher training/education, classroom practice, research design, and university-community partnership building in relation to adult education with transnational people (who may be racialized and/or multilingual and may be subject to precarious status or forced displacement), LGBTQ+ people, and/or people with disabilities.

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