Radicalizing the Legacies of the Past for the Tasks of Today

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Education in Vygotsky’s and Sociocultural Approaches: Developing Knowledge on the Ground (Table 18)

Abstract

We are witnessing an acute sociopolitical, ecological, and economic crisis, coupled with an epidemic of continuing racism, oppression, and inequality paired with a rise of social movements of resistance and activism around the globe. Yet, in our own academic institutions, there remains insufficient acknowledgment of theory production’s organic basis in broader social practice and social reproduction. We need scholarship that understands the struggles of the oppressed and exploited as processes of theory production themselves, rather than allowing theory to remain the private property of “great thinker” theorists within the academy; this critique extends to those we ourselves have cited and the works we ourselves have produced as persons whose theory construction activities are legitimated in the existing sociohistorical context. This paper aims to promote an interdisciplinary discussion of current scholarship in cultural-historical, sociocultural and activity theory frameworks (e.g., works in Marxist and Vygotskyan traditions, and affiliated approaches such as critical pedagogy) with the goal of radicalizing and decolonizing this/our scholarship. We believe that these tasks have extraordinary significance and urgency at this time, when the world is asked to nihilistically adapt to recent turns in the development of much longer-standing projects of dehumanization and unequally-distributed daily turmoil.

Recent scholarship has exposed failings and flaws of the western/eurocentric philosophical canon, and its associations with the crimes of colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and oppression. A vast body of literature has exposed the pitfalls and grave dangers of eurocentric approaches, as associated with Western imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism including epistemic violence (Dotson, 2013), systematic ignorance as the methodology of the privileged (Sholock, 2012), the hubris of the zero point (Castro-Gómez, 2007; Mignolo, 2009), and other exclusionary practices of knowledge production. These phenomena are deeply intertwined with the material relations of production that continue to oppress and exploit today (e.g. Amin, 2018; Cabral, 1966; Quijano, 2000). It is becoming strikingly clear that there is an urgent need to create/amplify connections between our scholarship and the realities on the ground, particularly the realities of activism grounded in anti-colonial agendas, struggles to reject racism as a structuring feature of life, struggles to reject various forms of violence against oppressed peoples, and workplace and community struggles against capitalism’s imperialist social relations. In this context we echo scholars who ask whether and to what extent Vygotsky’s project, related political projects, and contemporary academic works associated with these traditions, are tainted by the legacy of eurocentrism (e.g., Bang, 2016; Leonardo & Manning, 2017). In-depth and nuanced explorations are needed, including investigations into the many meanings and the complex situated history of colonialism and coloniality in their entanglement with capitalism and imperialism. If we want to join the struggles aiming to resolve today’s social crises in ways that serve the marginalized rather than reproduce old social relations, we must address their material roots in ways that challenge the persistence of colonial social relations.

Authors

• Karlyn R. Adams-Wiggins, Portland State University

• Anna Stetsenko, Graduate Center - CUNY