Decolonial Feminism’s Ethico-Political Contributions to the Field of Education

• In Event: The Politics of Citation in Curriculum Studies

Abstract

Decolonial feminists have largely contributed pedagogical and ethical stances to exist in the world outside of structures of colonialism and pedagogies of domination. Their work has consistently disrupted disjointed understandings of geopolitics and corpopolitics, articulating the entanglements between symbolic and material dimensions of coloniality. Decolonial feminist thought and praxis has collectively created coalitional and situated theorizations, methods and strategies to fight common struggles towards the undoing/dislocation of colonial discourses (e.g. development, orientalism, modernity/modernization, etc.) and their mechanisms of production of power (e.g. subhumanization/subalternation, control subjugation) (Sibai, 2018). However, decolonial feminist thought from the Global South, in particular from Latin America and the Caribbean, has been systematically excluded from the field of education, as well as from decolonial studies in the Global North. This paper interrogates how the field of education attends and listens to the pedagogical work of popular movements. We engage the questions: What can the field of education learn from the work of popular movements, especially those linked to Black and Indigenous decolonial feminist sites of struggle? What are the ethical-pedagogical implications of engaging in dialogue with decolonial feminist thought and praxis from other geographies? We draw on the work of Betty Ruth Lozano, Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, Lia Pinheiro Barbosa, Ochy Curiel, Karina Ochoa, Adriana Guzman Arroyo, and many others to also explore and reflect upon the following question which draws on Audre Lorde’s (1979) work: If the master’s tools are not enough to dismantle, tear down, or demolish the master’s house of modernity/coloniality, then what kind of tools do we need if our goal is this destruction, this transformation, this radical change that contributes to the unfinished project of decolonization? What conceptual, organizational, and collective tools must we articulate and design so that we can build an alternative education, curriculum, and pedagogy that simultaneously creates the conditions of possibility to build a world otherwise?

Engaging with decolonial feminist scholarship has important implications for Curriculum Studies and Curriculum Theory. Attempts to enter in dialogue with the Global South in this field, although well-intended, have tended on the one hand, to reproduce anglophone understandings of curriculum, and, on the other, to reconfigure privileged regions of decolonization and establish a theoretical hierarchy privileging the English and French colonial experience. The work of decolonial scholars from the Global South, for example is often extracted, consumed, and diluted in the Global North--leading to superficial readings, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misplaced critiques of particular theoretical discourses. Practices such as the diversification or modification of syllabi to superficially include historicall excluded thought and scholarship, can still exclude and invalidate Indigenous, Mestizx, and Black knowledge production from the Global South.

Finally, in this paper we study the work of decolonial feminist activist-intellectuals from Latin America and the Caribbean to extend existing curricular and pedagogical discussions in the field of education to be politically and pedagogically effective in articulating common struggles, strategization, and political mobilization in education.

Authors

• Ana Carolina Diaz Beltran, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University