A subaltern perspective for a borderless future

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Mapping pedagogies of hope and resistance in a borderless future

Proposal

Phillips and Schweisfurth (2014) argue that “learning from the experience of others” may be the single most important purpose of comparative education. This argument connotes hope and denotes challenges. Recently, this objective has acquired new meanings, there is an academic enthusiasm for “South-South Cooperation” (Jules, & De-sá-e-Silva, 2008) and there are new efforts to decolonize the field and other social sciences (Mignolo, 2000; Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2017). However, comparative education has a long road to learn from the subaltern studies experience. There is still ground to cover to integrate the arguments and approaches of the subaltern school of history (Dube, 1999). This paper poses agency as a problematic characteristic of global-south modernities. Consequently, a borderless future calls for advancing research on the agency of immigrants and the role of education in this process. This conceptual paper uses a subaltern studies approach to explain how modern agency can be conditioned by corporatism and clientelism, and limited by inequality and poverty in any side of all borders (Eisenstadt & Lemarchand, 1981; Incisa, 1981; Kaufman-Purcell, 1981; Mastropaolo, 1981).

Author

• Yver Melchor, Loyola University Chicago