Transnational Coloniality and Whiteness in Postsecondary Entrepreneurship Education in Iran

• In Event: Coloniality, Racialization, and Othering in Higher Education: A Study of Myanmar, Iran, China, and the United States

Abstract

Entrepreneurship (education) has been embraced by national governments and international development organizations in the past few decades for its roles in promoting economic development and in addressing different global and local challenges, including gender and racial inequalities, youth unemployment, and poverty (e.g., ILO, 2008; OECD, 2015). In this regard, universities have increasingly been recognized as key sites and means for the
cultivation of entrepreneurial mindsets and as central to national and global entrepreneurial
ecosystems (Audretsch, 2014; Urbano & Guerrero, 2013; GEM, 2009). In the same vein, in the Islamic Republic of Iran and since the country’s Third Five-Year National Development Plan (2000-2004), multiple entrepreneurship centers and departments have been established at universities.
Derived from a larger longitudinal and multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2015-2020 in Iran, this paper examines how the transnational discourse of entrepreneurship education, is (re)articulated in an entrepreneurship course at a university in Tehran. It thus situates everyday entrepreneurship teaching and learning practices within a trans-local network of pedagogical practices (e.g., learner-centered pedagogy), global pro-market discourses (e.g., the stress on the entrepreneurial university and subjectivities), and racialized, gendered, classed, and geographical regimes of differentiation. The study particularly draws on and contributes to the growing body of post-colonial research concerned with the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being in modernity’s discourses of “progress” and “development,” and in the arena of higher education in particular (Andreotti et al., 2015; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Quijano, 2000).
This paper particularly investigates the complex ways through which the discursive practice of entrepreneurship education (re)produces and performs racial differentiations, divisions, and hierarchization. In this regard, it examines how the contingent entanglements of coloniality, Orientalism, Whiteness, masculinity, and the privileged status of English language shape the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the experiences of entrepreneurship learners. As these discourses come together in a so-called learner-centered pedagogy, paradoxically, they work to establish the centrality of the absent/invisible English-speaking, male, white subject living in the US or Europe and the inferiority and deficits of the non-English-speaking, non-white, non-entrepreneurial subject in Iran.
Given Iran’s unique position within the international community, the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist discourse of the Iranian State in the past four decades, and the attempts both within and outside the country in the past four decades to limit its inclusion in the contemporary globalization processes, it provides a unique setting for exploring if and how trans-national higher education discourses are re-articulated and how they work to produce racial differentiations and hierarchies. In so doing, the study contributes to growing research on the relations among coloniality, race, and higher education (Ahmed, 2016; Shahjahan et al., 2022).

Author

• Mariam Sedighi, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author