Half a century after the formal decolonization and desegregation of much of the world, the official narrative of many state governments and international organizations is that the cultural hierarchies that justified colonialism, racism, and imperialism (Mignolo, 2000; Silva, 2007; Wynter, 2003) have since been eradicated. White and western supremacies, we are told, have been replaced by commitments to diversity, multiculturalism, and legislated equality (Ahmed, 2012; Melamed, 2011), and assurances that we have reached a post-racial era (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). According to Goldberg (2002), such claims of racelessness represent an attempt to transcend inequities and supremacies without grappling with the histories that produced them and the structures that continue to support their reproduction. Contra these official narratives of racelessness, counternarratives document the rearticulation of these hierarchies, which has manifested in rising anti-immigrant sentiments in both North America and Europe (Balibar, 1991; Delanty, Jones & Wodak, 2008), the growth in global security apparatuses, increasingly punitive punishments, and draconian border policies (Walia, 2013) as well as vigilante and state violence against racialized, poor, and gender non-conforming bodies (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014; James, 2007; Martinot & Sexton, 2003; Spade, 2011). Meanwhile, austerity measures and global economic policies and sanctions punish the already vulnerable. Even as the promises of continuous economic growth and faith in capitalist markets have become increasingly untenable for the majority of the globe’s inhabitants, the notion that there is no alternative has also maintained its strength in dominant discourses and continues to inform the policy of many if not most governments.
Educational institutions operate both as central sites for the reproduction of these hierarchies, as well as potential spaces for their interruption (Grosfoguel, 2013; Rodríguez, 2012). This panel addresses how the legacies of colonization and their enduring effects on the devaluation of non-Western knowledge and ways of knowing can be understood in relation to pedagogies and practices of education.