POSTCOLONIALISM AND EDUCATION
MONOGRÁFICO NÚMERO 43. POSTCOLONIALISMO Y EDUCACIÓN
Coordinadores del monográfico: Dr.Gustavo Fishman y Dra. Iveta Silova. Universidad Estatal de Arizona
The last several decades have seen a resurgence of academic engagement with decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, and southern theory scholarship as an intellectual resource to confront the persisting colonial legacies in education (Pashby, da Costa, Stein & Andreotti, 2021; Silova, Rappleye, & You, 2020; Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2017; Takayama, Heimans, & Vegneskumar, 2016; Connell, 2007; Walsh et. al 2018; Muller & Ferreira, 2018). These academic efforts have made invaluable contributions to extending and deepening our understanding of colonialism not as “a monolithic structure with roots exclusively in historical bad action,” but rather as a set of contemporary and evolving ontological, epistemic, and land relations that are often maintained “by good intentions and even good deeds” (Liborion, 2021, p. 7). We situate this special issue within these ongoing theoretical exchanges and intellectual movements, calling for a continued collective (re)rethinking of the role of education - despite all of its good intentions and deeds - in reproducing the logic of coloniality and thus contributing to multiple, intersecting crises we currently face: structural inequality and injustice, institutionalized racism and patriarchy, accelerating climate crisis and ongoing threat of species extinction, among many others.
Driven by the logic of modernity/coloniality, education is directly implicated in these crises. From competitive education league tables and global ranking exercises to education transfer of ‘best’ policies and practices, much of comparative education research has served to justify the Western modernist notions of progress and development, while displacing and sometimes purposefully erasing alternative worlds and worldviews. Today, schools and universities (especially in Western cultures) remain deeply rooted in the ideals of Western Enlightenment, perpetuating the logic of human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism, while justifying the hierarchical order of being: White people of European descent over all people of color, men over women, perceived able bodies over disabled, and on and on (Martusewicz, 2018). Ultimately, the same logic of human exceptionalism sets apart all humans as superior to other living and non-living beings, justifying exploitation of nature by humans and threatening lives of everyone, everywhere.
This special issue serves as a challenge to reexamine our current preoccupation with global education trends – student achievement tests, competitive education league tables, global ranking exercises, and “best practices” – and rearticulate our research agendas in more relational, ecologically attuned, and geopolitically equitable ways. Given that even some of the most critical scholarship runs the risk of reproducing colonial relationships (e.g., by privileging contributions from English-speaking and/or Western-based academics rather than engaging with the plurality of knowledges beyond dominant languages and academic traditions), this multilingual special issue will welcome articles in Spanish, Portuguese and English that will address the following:
How should education respond to a world of shifting planetary boundaries, collapsing ecosystems, and deepening inequalities?
How might we learn from this uncertain time to construct new comparative genres that extend beyond mere reruns of Western metaphysics?
What education policies, practices, and pedagogies can help to advance for more equitable and sustainable relationships in the relational flow of life where everyone and everything – both human and non-human – are deeply interconnected?
How can de- and anti-colonial scholarship be practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world? Who benefits and who is punished by the colonial entanglements of knowledge production in comparative education?
How can the professionals and scholars in the field generate more sustainable (trans)local research practices that act as epistemic disobedience against colonialism?
