Theorizing Is/As a “Best” Practice: Decolonizing Neoliberal (Non)Sense and Putting Gayatri Spivak To Work in Education

• In Event: The Project of Decolonization: Taking on Our Sacred Discourse

Abstract

Objectives
What we take to be “common sense” is not something that just is, but rather “something that is developed and learned and perpetuated over time” (Kumashiro, 2008, p. 3). The purpose of this proposed presentation is two-fold: to use Spivak’s work toward decolonizing neoliberal logic that allows “best practice” discourses to be positioned as common sense, and theorizing as nonsensical; and to show how the application of theorizing IS a “best” practice in education.
Theoretical Perspective(s)
Currently, common sense is being shaped by neoliberal scientism— the worldwide, but uneven, convergence of the discourses of business and pre-Kuhnian views of science shaping our lives and institutions and constituting what makes sense and what does not according to a market model of classic liberalism. Neoliberal logic is reductionist; it oversimplifies, dehistorizes, and depolitizes social and educational phenomena. “Best practice” is a salient example. The power of an embedded logic is its ability to constitute what makes sense and what does not, allowing it to cover its tracks and maintain a neutral façade. This worlding (Spivak, 1985) is what makes normalizing narratives hard to interrupt and why decolonizing theories are such a potential threat. Worlding is the power of dominant discourses to colonize a world—to inscribe on that world what is knowledge, power, normal, natural, common sense and nonsense—and to cover up the colonizing even in its expansion so as to determine the conceptualization of how one conceives the world and one’s relationships . It includes a “strategy of containment” that works to keep others as the subject of power and “never the agent of articulation” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 31; see also Spivak, 1994). The press of worlding is strong but not stable or fixed. That theorizing can be a “best practice” and that “best practice” is not given but constructed by and within neoliberal logic is at once its own undoing.
Methods/Data
This is a theoretical paper that utilizes Spivak’s books, articles, and interviews. It also draws on empirical data from other research projects as examples of how theorizing matters in understanding educational practice.
Results
Theorizing is reframed as a best practice. A critique of neoliberal logic that valorizes “best practice” and devalues theorizing is provided.
Scientific and Scholarly Significance
Given Spivak’s contributions to the scholarly community writ large, she is missing in educational theory. Spivak’s work unpacks the logics that inform common sense about educational practice. Spivak’s theorizing is crucial in making clear that what makes sense in a framework is limited by the framework itself.

Author

• Stephanie Daza, Manchester Metropolitan University