The hidden side of emancipation: Historicizing well-intentioned educational projects.

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The symposium interrogates how educational initiatives that claim emancipatory or inclusionary objectives often perpetuate colonial logics, racial hierarchies, and state-sanctioned epistemologies. Through four studies from Nicaragua, Chile, México, and the United States, the session examines how citizenship education, literacy campaigns, border-crossing education, and diversity initiatives, while rooted in ideals of justice, democracy, opportunity, or liberation, can reinforce asymmetrical power relations and marginalize the very communities they aim to uplift. The four studies historicize well-intentioned educational practices and provoke dialogue about the political, racial, and epistemic assumptions embedded in them. The session stresses the necessity of historicizing educational interventions and foregrounding epistemic justice in the design and evaluation of learning spaces.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Cultural-Historical Research

Chair

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

Papers

• Coloniality within a Revolutionary Project: Historizing the 1980 Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign. - Rafael Meza Duriez, University of California - Berkeley

• The politics of well-intentioned citizenship education in California - Karen Villegas, University of California - Berkeley

• The Contradictions of Opportunity: Transfronterizx Education Across Asymmetrical Border Lines - Isaac Alejandro Felix, University of California - Berkeley

• Sustaining Anti-Black Colonial Logics Through Caring Dehumanization in a Chilean School - Maria Eugenia Rojas Concha, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso

Session Organizer

• Rafael Meza Duriez, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Alicia Rusoja, University of California - Davis