Neutrality as Curriculum: Unmasking Swiss Mythologies in Global Economic Memory

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Global lenses in curriculum studies

Abstract

This paper examines how Swiss cultural identity and neutrality are constructed through curriculum, economic memory, and national mythology. Drawing on critical curriculum theory and postcolonial analysis, the study interrogates the educational function of silence in Switzerland’s global economic entanglements, particularly its complicity in racial capitalism. By analyzing media discourse, museum narratives, and institutional policy language, it shows how neutrality operates as a form of curricular omission. The research challenges sanitized national narratives and proposes frameworks for re-centering historically marginalized knowledge in international education discourse. It contributes to transnational curriculum studies by revealing the pedagogical consequences of “neutral” national identity in shaping public memory, justice, and global economic ethics.

Author

• Meya Elizabeth Hargett, Pepperdine University