Methods Make Their Subjects: The Colonial Residues of Educational Research

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Racial Capitalism, Coloniality, and the State’s Colonial/Imperial Educational Projects (Table 2)

Abstract

This paper challenges the methodological directive in critical educational studies to “follow the money” (Ball, 2012), which treats the logic of capital as the prime mover in education reform. Yet this approach assigns an essence to capitalism that conceals more than it reveals, making obstacles to capitalism’s expansion subsidiary to its universalizing narrative. This paper proposes an alternative approach by historicizing these research methods themselves, making visible how the logic of capital marks differences and exclusions as merely cultural, local, or reactive. This approach directs attention to the coloniality of ongoing efforts to construct political subjects through education, offering a postcolonial approach to studying educational reforms beyond the logic of capital, focusing instead on how methods make their subjects.

Author

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison