Tracing and Remembering Connectivities: Coloniality and Elementary Teacher Recruitment in Senegal

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Subjectivities (Table 3)

Abstract

This paper traces how the recruitment of elementary school teachers in Senegal sustains coloniality. Framing teacher recruitment as a colonial technology (paperson, 2017), I explore the ways in which it perpetuates coloniality, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, drawing on theories of de/coloniality and narrative inquiry. I employ Rhee’s (2021) concepts of connectivities and rememory to notice fragmented, ignored, and fragile connections and hauntings that linger in the stories told about the recruitment process, including those found in official policy documents and those told in private and public about, to, and by future teachers. Through attending to affective connections to hierarchies in teacher recruitment, I trace how the past/present/future co-exist in the ways that coloniality is sustained and resisted.

Author

• Rachel Lockart, Augustana College