The “Living Dead”: From “Deathworlds” to “Otherwise Worlds” in International Educational Development Economies

• In Event: Racial Capitalism Perspectives on Educational Inequality

Abstract

Objectives
In the aftermath of the 2014-2016 Ebola crisis, Liberia adopted the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP), outsourcing public primary schools to largely international for-profit school management firms. Presented as ushering in a new era of sustainable educational policy and development based on data and evidence, LEAP utilized a results-based funding model intended to be scaled throughout the rest of the developing world. A half decade later, in 2022, Liberia’s neighbor, Sierra Leone, adopted a similar program called the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC). Consisting of many of the same investors and actors as LEAP, SLEIC also utilizes results-based funding and corporatized management in hopes of achieving sustainable and equitable educational development. This paper examines the broader capital flows and labor regimes found within LEAP and SLEIC to understand how these policies are transforming educational landscapes, including whether they are breaking with or reproducing historic forms of economic and social inequality.

Theoretical Framework
This presentation draws on theories of racial capitalism (Beckford 1999; Robinson 2000) to critically examine the capital flows and labor regimes of the global education industry (GEI) in sub-Saharan Africa (Sierra Leone and Liberia).

Methods
This paper is based on 26 months of anthropological fieldwork in Liberia and Sierra Leone, conducted between 2018-2022. This includes over 130 interviews of local, national, and international stakeholders and organizations, observations of school and policy spaces, and analysis of policy and investor financial data. I situate my analysis within West Africa’s plantation legacies (logics, politics, and economies) to understand how the policy is extending or breaking with the historical plantation system in the region.

Findings
The paper uses a comparative case study of corporatized educational policies in Liberia and Sierra Leone to demonstrate how these policies deploy racialized and extractive labor regimes that center and reward Western expertise over local knowledge and turn indigenous laborers into under or unpaid “ghosts” occupying what Mbembe (2013) calls “death-worlds” where they are “subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the “living dead” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 92).

Significance
While the presentation focuses on these labor regimes and the capital flows that sustain them, it also looks at how communities in West Africa are resisting these models. The paper closes with a call for reparative (material and epistemic) justice in education (Sriprakash 2023) through the concept of “dis(en)closure,” which demands full transparency in investment and social/educational governance while reworking the idea of debt from an obligation to investors to an obligation to communities (Ladson-Billings, 2006). The paper thus contributes to an understanding of the importance of economic justice and social repair in educational policy and development.

Author

• Tyler Hook, University of Pennsylvania