Space, Place, and Race: Addressing Settler Colonialism at the Roots of Education

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This session engages decolonizing research scholars from the United States and the Global South to articulate the manifestation of racism in their specific space, and to further demonstrate the transformative praxis individuals implement based on local epistemologies in dismantling racism and creating places in their communities for the liberation of individual as well as society. This session highlights that transformation through education begins with the individual, but involves society as a whole, liberating both together—and that education as well as its decolonization must be undertaken both locally and globally.

Relevant Research Traditions:

Western epistemic traditions…claim detachment of the known from the knower…. They are traditions in which… the knowing subject is thus able to know the world without being part of that world and he or she is by all accounts able to produce knowledge that is supposed to be universal and independent of context…. This hegemonic notion of knowledge production has generated discursive scientific practices and has set up interpretive frames that make it difficult to think outside of these frames… [and] also actively represses anything that actually is articulated, thought and envisioned from outside of these frames. (Mbembe, 2016, 32-33).

As African scholars such as Mahlapahlapana Themane (2019) and Achille Mbembe (2016) noted, epistemic traditions carry with them assumptions regarding the relations of subject and object and notions of truth that are often left unexamined. One consequence of this lack of critical reflection is the global racist social order (Curry, 2017; Delpit, 1995; Henry, 1996; Wilson, 2022) in education characterized within the U.S. by an unconsidered Whiteness (Frankenberg, 1987) in curriculum, pedagogy, administration, and research that parallels similarly unconsidered norms of the Global North that continue to shape systems and practices in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. There is a continuity between racism at home and colonialism abroad, long identified as part of the lived experience of minoritized groups in the U.S. such that, in the words of Carey et al. (2009), “the construction of whiteness and the phenomena of European colonialism are fundamentally interconnected” (p. 1). The result of the operation of racism and Whiteness inside and outside the Global North limits or even eliminates voices and viewpoints other than those of the dominant group, a process Paraskeva labeled epistemic suppression and epistemic colonization leading to epistemicide (p. 272).

Recognition of the link between the forms and practices of racism in the Global North and those of colonialism in the Global South is not new, of course; Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere observed in 1975 that,

I sometimes suspect that, for us in Africa, the underlying purpose of education is to turn us into Black Europeans--or Black Americans. I say this because our educational policies make it quite clear that we are really expecting education in Africa to enable us to emulate the material achievements of Europe and America…. We have not begun to think seriously about whether such material achievements are possible. Nor have we begun to question whether the emulation of European and American material achievements is a desirable objective for Africa. (Nyerere, 1975, p. 3)

Nevertheless, Nyerere continued his essay by calling for the establishment of human liberation as the ultimate goal of education—“liberation through the development of man as a member of society” (1975, p.6). Nyerere’s statement is key because it does not remove the individual from society; rather, the individual and their liberation is part and parcel of the broader liberation of society. This session therefore engages decolonizing research scholars from the United States and the Global South to articulate the manifestation of racism in their specific space, and to further demonstrate the transformative praxis individuals implement based on local epistemologies in dismantling racism and create places in their communities for the liberation of individual as well as society. This session highlights that transformation through education begins with the individual, but involves society as a whole, liberating both together—and that education as well as its decolonization must be undertaken both locally and globally.
• In what ways can scholarship from the oppressed communities in the United States and the Global South contribute new narratives about the manifestations of racism in the global context?
• How can these narratives inform transformative praxis and policy change?

Relevance to the AERA 2024 Theme:
The AERA 2024 theme designed by President Howard calls for “a global conversation on race, racism, and its redress…long overdue for the world’s largest education research organization.” Inspired by this theme and Du Bois’ (1903) approach to theorizing racism globally by attending to its local manifestations, this session brings together decolonizing scholars from the United States, Africa, Asia, and Latin America to 1) reveal their local racialized realities stemming from the settler colonialism at the root of education inequity, and 2) reimagine new practices to deracialize educational spaces and reconstruct humanizing places for decolonization. Bringing together scholars who can speak to a wide range of subaltern perspectives will provide direction toward dismantling racism and colonization on a global scale.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Katrina Liu, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

Speakers

• Kakali Bhattacharya, University of Florida

• Zhu Qian, Duke Kunshan University

• Noliwe Rooks, Brown University

• Natalee Kehaulani Bauer, Mills College at Northeastern University

Discussant

• Norma A. Guzman, Texas A&M University - Kingsville