Session Information
WERA SES 06 B, Cultural Hierarchies and Colonial Thinking in Education
Symposium
Contribution
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 White and western supremacies, we are told, have been replaced by commitments to diversity, multiculturalism, and legislated equality (Ahmed, 2012; Melamed, 2011), and assurances that we have reached a post-racial era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.
References
Balibar, E. & Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, nation and class: Ambiguous identities. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Delanty, G., Jones, P. & Wodak, R. (2008) Migration, Discrimination and Belonging in Europe, in G. Delanty, R. Wodak & P. Jones, Identity, Belonging and Migration Goldberg, D. T. (2006). Racial Europeanization. Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in Westernized universities. Haritaworn, J., Kuntsman, A., & Posocco, S. (Eds.). (2014). Queer necropolitics. James, J. (Ed.). (2007). Warfare in the American homeland: Policing and prison in a penal democracy. Martinot, S., & Sexton, J. (2003). The avant-garde of white supremacy. Melamed, J. (2011). Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. Mignolo, W. (2000). The many faces of cosmo-polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism. Rodríguez, D. (2012). Racial/colonial genocide and the "neoliberal academy": In excess of a problematic. Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. Spade, D. (2011). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. Walia, H. (2013). Undoing border imperialism. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation--An argument.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.