Moving Beyond Capital: Decolonizing Cultural Capital Arguments in Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Education in a Postcolonial World

Abstract

This paper engages decolonial theories with cultural capital debates in Education with hopes of reframing, or in a sense decolonizing, the conversation of Chicana/o cultural knowledge and its value within the racialized atmosphere of American public schools. This paper argues that by retaining the cultural capital debate, we prevent exploration of alternative ways of viewing Chicana/o cultural knowledge and are forced to conform critique within a specified field. Through putting decolonial theories in conversation with both Bourdieu’s model, as well as those who have used his model in defense of minority students, I shall demonstrate the problematics of equating knowledge to capital as well as the limitations of the Bourdieuian cultural capital framework in understanding Chicana/o marginalization in education.

Author

• Michael Singh, University of California - Berkeley