Considering Refusal in Method and Theory within the Study of Comparative and International Education

• In Event: Attending to the Colonial and Racial Natures of Comparative and International Education and Development

Proposal

Thinking with the concept of refusal, I elucidate how methodological and theoretical refusals in the study of CIE might offer possibilities to reimagine the hierarchical, colonizing, and racializing nature of CIE. The presentation argues that CIE is complicit, complacent, and conspiratorial on many fronts, including in the re/production of Otherness and white supremacist logics through its actors/agents in the so-called global south. Decolonial, Indigenous, and black feminist scholars offer that refusal demands taking a political viewpoint on the colonizing nature of knowledge production (Campt, 2019a, 2019b; Nxumalo, 2021; McGranahan, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2014; Zembylas, 2020). Refusal is a move, a practice, and an action necessary for rejecting the hierarchically ordered world—socially, economically, and politically (Zembylas, 2020). Through the concept of refusal, I aim to demonstrate approaches that scholars in the field of CIE might espouse, away from the colonizing forms of knowledge production. In part, I offer generative and liberatory forms of method-making that offer possibilities for alternative ways of producing knowledge while acknowledging and centering the ways of being of those positioned outside the global system of knowledge production. As a black scholar in the field, a migrant from East Africa, I identify an urgent need to move away from what is in CIE to what could be/ought to be. Given this urgent call to action and in line with CIES 2024 theme “power of protest,” I ask, what might refusal present and extend to those working in the field of CIE and international development more broadly? How might the concept of refusal unsettle colonial processes of knowledge production continuing to shape CIE globally? For me, these queries mark a turn towards otherwise ways of being in CIE, thinking differently and mapping work in CIE with scholarship and practices attuned to the decolonization of the field. These questions contour my thinking as I become curious about what refusal might generate if engendered methodologically and theoretically in the study of CIE. The operational dictums and structures of the field of CIE are anchored on approaches that re/produce and dis/possess the global majority through forms of racial capital formation. Similarly, the field has played a significant role in the silencing of non-western epistemologies through many actors within and beyond the confines of the academy. Yet it continues to churn out its graduates and professionals primarily educated in/by the West, to address the social problems in the so-called global south. As a methodological example, I demonstrate how opacity can be enacted to acknowledge that which has the right to be left alone or remain hidden from view. In other words, disinvesting from approaches that inscribe numerical value to people’s lives while documenting their pain and brokenness (Tuck, 2009)—currency for the ‘survival’ of CIE and the international development complex. [459]

Author

• Mariam Rashid, Vassar College