Decolonial Thinking to Crip Education Policy and Practice: Lessons From the Education RESET Project

• In Event: Beyond Normal: Cripping Policy and Practice to Construct Liberatory Educational Possibilities

Abstract

Purpose
The paper presents findings from the Education RESET (Renewal and Technologies for IncluSive Education fuTures) Project and by merging post-structural tools, decolonial thinking and crip theory aims to a) critically engage with education policy as connected with the notion of State as a Global North formation, and their relation with a certain performative norm originated in the Global North; b) present how two school communities in the Global South can contribute to rethink normalized and Eurocentric understanding of education policy and modalities of doing and being in education through an analytical framework that merges decolonial thinking and post-structural tools c) expand cripistemologies and crip theory through decolonial thinking.

Theoretical Framework
The paper intersects the use of post-structural tools, in particular Foucault’s governmentality and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, with crip theory and decolonial thinking to disrupt the normative processes underpinning education policy and their exportation to the Global South. Reflecting on the Eurocentric origins of the norm and the project of modernity, the paper expands crip theory through decolonial thinking by dismantling the mundane operations of racism and disablism in mainstream schools and sets forth decolonial and crip practices from local expertise, histories, and culture. By problematising the foundations of the project of modernity, it follows assemblages’ flows and lines, and challenges the disabling and racist spaces of schooling, the performative times, and the logics of classification, decoupling, slowing down and enabling new processes of becoming for a decolonised and socially just enactment of disability policies. By cripping the process, it ‘moves beyond the center’s imaginary and tap into the diverse imaginaries of the global South, which present very different ways of conceptualizing impairment and disability’ (Shattleworth and Meekosha, 2012, 362), cripping and resetting disability as a Global North concept, overcoming policy divisions and categories typical of the modernist and normalising education project, and interrupting policy reformulations of exclusions along racist, ableist and classist descriptors.
Methods and Data Sources
In the context of the Education RESET project, the paper presents two accounts from the Global South, an association based in the South of Italy that works with schools to contrast school dropout; and a non-governmental organisation in Malaysia that provides holistic care and education for children from disadvantaged, refugee and migrant communities. It uses ethnographic methods including participant observation, 20 semi-structured interviews with educators, administrative and psychological personnel, 2 focus-groups, images and fieldnotes to present practices that the organisations developed during the pandemic and changed the ways of working towards more inclusive directions, enabling a rethinking of educational relations with learning, schools, the territory.

Findings and Significance
Expanding crip theory and convinced that ‘a crip reading of Empire is undeniably possible ‘ (Hardt and Negri, 2000 in McRuer, 2006, 47), findings illustrate a new way of understanding education policy and practice by looking into the othered places, beyond the centrality of mass modern schools, and seeking to find new connections and subjective experiences through ‘experimentation before ontology’ (Rajchman, 2001, 6), cripping education policies and advancing desires for multiple ways of being-in-common that respect local expertise, histories and ways of being.

Author

• Francesca Peruzzo, University of Birmingham