This paper examines the contribution of a group of critical curriculum scholars – among others, Michael Apple (1990), Henry Giroux, 1981), and Peter Mclaren (1986) - in the struggle for a U.S. curriculum and their commitment towards a more just society and education. The paper situates such a group of critical thinkers within a radical critical curriculum river framing a particular generation of utopia (Paraskeva, 2022; 2021). The paper frames such a generation as a substantive part of a great legacy of struggles in the field against inequality, segregation, poverty, and oppression. In so doing, the paper scrutinizes the accomplishments and frustrations of such a generation in the struggle against the epistemological privilege of positivist and functionalist curriculum impulses (Walker, 1985). In this regard, the paper highlights how such a generation coined the field politically and championed a new vocabulary, as well as their erroneous persistence in laboring fundamentally within a Modern Western Eurocentric platform to smash curriculum as a eugenic sorting machine (Selden, 1999). The paper also underlines how the wrangles between dominant and counter-dominant traditions not only could not avoid the epistemicidal nature of the curriculum but also drove the field into a theoretical involution, a regression, a dead-lock (Paraskeva, 2016; Schubert, 2017; Jupp; 2017). To address such regression, the paper argues for the need to decolonize Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant approaches and advances the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a new influential discourse (Pinar, 2013), a just approach to champion the struggle against the curriculum epistemicide; the paper places ICT as a decolonial curriculum theory turn (Andreoti. 2022). The paper ends by questioning some of the ‘silences’ produced by the critical curriculum hemisphere and calling for ‘the death’ of traditional/conventional ways to produce critical curriculum theory - Eurocentrically fully saturated - to de-link the critical theoretical out of the coloniality matrix. While honoring the rich legacy of the generation of utopia, the paper advocates the itinerant curriculum theory as a just path capable of responding to the world’s epistemological different differences (Paraskeva, 2022) 

It is a qualitative approach crafted from a post-positivist theoretical perspective. (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). It is a purely theoretical paper working within a critical-interpretivist approach (Flick, 2018; Denzin and Lincoln, 2011) that intersects and draws from a myriad of disciplines within and beyond traditional modern western Eurocentric frameworks - including political science, policy studies, curriculum theory, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, classic and modern literature, and literary studies – (Morrow, 2000) and dig extensively within non-western epistemological platforms, anti-colonial, decolonial and southern theories (Fanon, xxxx; Smith, 1999; Darder, 2017) to unpack systems of domination and oppression. Within this interdisciplinary textual analysis from pivotal work, the paper developed and unfolds different strands within critical, post-structural, decolonial, and anti-colonial qualitative approaches that all meet at the same focal point: to understand the challenges facing conventional curriculum approaches and to unpack some of the major challenges we face within curriculum theory today. It revolves around fundamental issues of social justice as it pertains to educational and curriculum theory and practice—its ideology, philosophical assumptions, moral claims, and social analysis.

The paper concludes, advocating for an alternative way to produce curriculum theory alliteratively (Santos, 2014; Paraskev, 2022; 2021; 2016); it argues the need for critical curriculum theories to detach from the absolutism of Eurocentric matric towards non-Eurocentric platforms to respond to the world’s endless diverse and different epistemologies. It unfolds a group of challenges – such as ‘why it is so difficult to construct a dominant critical pedagogy?’ Santos, (1999); ‘where are we, critical pedagogues, failing?’; ‘Why are we failing?’; ‘why haven’t we been capable of responding to the world’s endless epistemological difference and diversity?’ (Paraskeva, 2021) ‘Why the heyday of the critical is passing?’ (Eagleton, 2003) - and defines and advocates an itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as the path for such a move as it allows the radical co-presence of crucial aspects within and beyond the Eurocentric platform to edify a just curriculum towards a just world, we all wish to see. (Amin, 1989). It concludes that a just world, however, cannot be achieved without social justice. And there is no social justice without cognitive justice. (Santos, 2014)

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