Education and Material Coloniality: Deviating From Linearity

• In Event: 49.028 - The Meaning and Matter of Materialist (Anti)racisms in Educational Research

Abstract

A step in the right direction. Two steps forward, one step back. The idea of stages and steps, of a unidirectional teleology, are so ubiquitous as to be considered by some as the nature of life itself. Education in many areas of the world is deeply shaped by this grip of linearity, most frequently manifested through language of progress and gain as in ‘closing the achievement gap,’ or making ‘adequate yearly progress.’ Within this frame of linearity, the contours of racialized materialities, as with segregation and integration, fall prey to a muted assumption of teleology, with integration positioned at the pole of desired progress. In this theoretical paper, I make explicit the material impacts that follow from implicit assumptions of progression as linear.

Although the idea of progress towards equality predominates (Perry, 2010) in the larger U.S. society and in education, even a light scratch on the surface rhetoric of this settler colonial society (Wolfe, 1996) reveals not a natural linear arc but a deep need and protection of gaps, for space between strata of human existence and research tactics to measure those gaps. Borne of settler colonial ontoepistemologies that demand and command exclusive domain over truth (Wynter, 2003), linearity is necessary as a collective settler fantasy of progress that exacts a material hegemonic hold, enabling the resettling of land and credentials as property in the hands of a few. In its ubiquity, the idea of linear progress is tyrannical, framing and winnowing all education and education research to the teleologic construct of progress and obscuring the material harms exacted upon dispossessed peoples.

To best address the possibilities and imperatives of anti-oppressive change, then, we must confront how thinking through linearity tacitly and explicitly refreshes the logics and material structures of coloniality. While other scholars in educational studies, largely thinking in concert with the complexity sciences (e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2006) have posited the limits of linearity as an epistemic frame for social science, I excavate the contours and impact of linearity as a colonial construct, one that certainly corrupts social science, but that also exacts specific material consequences on everyday lives.

Author

• Lisa (Leigh) Patel, Boston College