Invoking insurgent decolonial praxis in CIE through a theoretical dialogue with Ndlovu-Gatsheni

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Black Feminist and Decolonial Practices of Resistance in Education

Proposal

In this presentation, we draw on global south decolonial theorist and scholar of epistemologies, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni to deploy insurgent decolonial praxis in Comparative and International Education (CIE). Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s scholarly work is an inspiration that kindles for us a different way of doing Comparative and International Education (CIE) and international development. A rendering and relational epistemic provocation demanding of us to refashion the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical workings of CIE as a field of study and more broadly, how knowledges are constructed and produced within the context of black Africa. We consider Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s suggestions that this moment we are witnessing—pronounced stages of capitalist formation, ecological precarity, and colonial logics underpinning the global knowledge system—requires a radical shift; what he articulates as a form of radical decolonial turn. Although decolonization has been an ongoing process in black Africa Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018; 2020) rearticulates the urgency and agency for a renewed form of radical decolonial turn, more specifically, stoking fires for scholars to join in the “struggles, for the completion of the unfinished business of decolonization” (p. 18). Thinking with/through the work of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s conceptualization of epistemic freedom and working with his two texts, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization and Decolonization, and Development and Knowledge Production: Turning over a New Leaf, in this presentation, we conceptualize insurgent decolonial praxis in the context of CIE and development.

The field of CIE is historically rooted in Eurocentric perspectives, perpetuating colonial legacies, and reinforcing unequal power dynamics in educational research, praxis, and policy. In the last few years, some scholars have begun to highlight the problematic and colonial history of CIE that continues to dictate several critical issues in the field. In introducing the 2017 Comparative Education Review (CER) special issue, “Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education,” Takayama, Sriprakash, & Conell chronicled the profound colonial legacies that have guided narratives in the field since its inception. In part of their critique, they problematize the engagement of the “other” and the uncritical focus on “difference” in Eurocentric knowledge production. Several scholars in the same CER issue examine the embedded coloniality in CIE’s knowledge production structures, exploring a wide range of issues from the critical analysis of Global North higher education as a site of epistemic dominance in CIE (Stein, 2017), to the challenges and opportunities of decolonizing intellectual productions in teacher professional development in Pakistan (Khoja-Moolji, 2017). Other emergent scholarly works that followed, continue to highlight how the field, through its many collaborative actors and agencies, is deeply entrenched into the epistemic frameworks and knowledge ecologies of the west, yet globally, we operate within a pluriversal world. Ali Abdi (2019) problematizes the current composition of CIE as “highly mono-epistemic in its historical, cultural and postcolonial contents and intentions”. He argues that, even the teaching of CIE is therefore reduced to shallow discourse on what is happening in the developing world. (p.3).

In this paper, we add an African perspective to the global south scholarship that’s emerging in the rethinking and reconstruction of the field. As authors, we seriously take heed the CIES 2024 call “the power of protest” to take on rebellious decolonial praxis. We do this to protest the field of CIE and international development’s continued clutch onto the holdovers and institutionalized technologies of colonial imagination and subjugation. To breach, protest, and reconsider the logics emboldening colonial and racial logics in CIE, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, 2020) offers that it is imperative to rethink the processes of how western modernity positions people from black Africa out of place within the global knowledge system, but also, in relation to how knowledge is produced about black Africa and her/their people. Decolonization, he argues, functions to distort and rupture onto-epistemic hierarchies and racial logics that institutionalize, privilege, and legitimize euro-american/western knowledge systems. In arguing for a radical decolonial turn, Ndlovu-Gatsheni woos black Africa to turn over a new leaf (Fanon, 1967, 1968) and refashion ways of dismantling the -isms that dismember the African personhood from her/his/their ways of being through processes of radical decolonization (Nandy, 1983; wa Thiong’o, 2009a, 2009b).

We are black immigrant scholars and graduates of CIE with over three decades of combined work experiences in CIE and international development as well as deep roots in former British colonies (two of us from Kenya and one from Zimbabwe). Both Kenya and Zimbabwe have been fertile terrains for CIE and its actors. We have walked these terrains—often racialized, colonial, hierarchical, oppressive, and centered on whiteness and its ideologies. We are also not naive to how the field reproduces the racial other onto-epistemologically. We understand CIE’s modus operandi in forwarding a narrative of difference and hierarchies in relation to those whose knowledges count, and who has currency within its apparatus–in the US where we are both currently located and in our home countries. In our insurgent decolonial praxis, we aim to exercise our epistemic freedoms. Yet, we understand and acknowledge that we are also entangled into the complex operations of CIE in manifold ways—as practitioners, researchers, and educators. In occupying positions of epistemic and pedagogical protest, we acknowledge that “as educators, our identities and positionalities, while not determinant, do affect our pedagogy of knowledge (re)production” (Brissett, 2020,p. 577).

We take Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s provocation in this paper, firstly to offer a critical reexamination of research methodologies, theories and frameworks in CIE, and center the voices of African and other global south theorists. Secondly, guided by Ndlovu Gatsheni’s theorizing of a decolonial turn, and drawing from our own experiences in the development field we emphasize the importance of examining the role of aid from the global north in perpetuating neoliberal and neo-colonial praxis in the field. Finally, we push for an insurgent decolonial praxis that moves away from and beyond the normative conventions of CIE; the western modern thought, by addressing the need for CIE scholars and practitioners to critically reflect on the biases and privileges that influence their work and positions in the field.

Authors

• Nyaradzai Changamire, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Mariam Rashid, Vassar College

• Martina Achieng Amoth, The University of Massachusetts Amherst