Reframing Threat: A comparative analysis of attacks on education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Repression. Fear. Intimidation. Unfortunately, these terms describe many educational contexts across the world. In recent years, students, educators, schools and education systems have been the targets of aggression and intimidation in countries as varied as Colombia, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States, among many others. These attacks have taken a range of forms: schools under direct fire from armed confrontations or school shootings; teachers persecuted for teaching inclusive content to their students, discouraging youth involvement in armed groups and illicit markets, or just going to work in settings marked by conflict and insecurity; university students threatened, abused, expelled, arrested, or delegitimized for exercising the right to free expression and peaceful protest; and systematic efforts to defund public education, debilitate teachers unions, and censor or militarize curricula, that in turn have created climates of uncertainty, precarity and repression. While the modalities, aims and effects may vary contextually, there is a recurring pattern: the right to education is under threat.

Attacks on education have received varied attention in education scholarship. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) defines ‘attacks on education’ as “any intentional threat or use of force—carried out for political, military, ideological, sectarian, ethnic, or religious reasons—against students, educators, and education institutions”, as well as any situation in which armed forces and non-state armed groups use schools and universities for military purposes (GCPEA, 2023). While this definition encompasses a wide variety of attacks, GCPEA and scholars of education in conflict and crisis tend to limit their focus to situations of direct violence in settings affected by armed conflict, thus excluding attention to attacks on education in the Global North or transnational threats (Kapit, 2023), as well as forms of intimidation and harm that do not include the direct use of force, such as the systemic undermining of public education, progressive education movements, and academic freedoms. Attention also tends to center on reporting incidents of attack, with limited analysis of how attack operates as a broader process of intimidation and repression. In contrast, scholars from other subfields of education draw on the term ‘attack’ to refer to the broad range of efforts to curtail public education and progressive movements. This includes attention to recent offensives on teaching antiracism in schools, aggressive anti-gender lobbies, and pervasive neoliberal reforms (see for example: Kuhar & Zobec, 2017; Barder et al, 2023). This alternative usage considers modes of attack other than direct force, drawing attention to the deliberate use of intimidation and coercion to shape education policy and practice, and it also broadens the geographic scope. However, this usage tends to lack conceptual clarity and hence has limited analytical nuance.

Engaging both conceptualizations of attacks on education --the intentional threat or use of force, and the systemic and symbolic forms of intimidation and coercion-- invites a widening of the conversation and calls for integrated analysis of the varied direct and indirect ways that aggression and intimidation are employed to control and limit education. This raises questions that benefit from comparative analysis: How are attacks on education mobilized in diverse settings? What are the aims, motivations and underlying logics that drive and sustain them? How are attacks from diverse geographic locations connected? How do their effects travel across contexts? And, how are they resisted?

In this panel, six scholars come together to reflect comparatively on the conceptual parameters and material effects of attacks on education. Drawing on case studies, the panel offers rich qualitative analysis of military attacks on school premises and its unexpected consequences in war zones in Eastern Colombia, attacks on dissent against official dogmas in Russia and the U.S., repression of student activism across the globe, and the ways in which intimidation and threat shape teacher experiences in Colombia and Ecuador. Collectively, the panel sheds light on how diverse forms of threat to education intersect and align, and draws attention to the entanglements that shape and sustain attacks on education today. Increased understanding on the nature of contemporary threats to education will contribute to greater clarity on the forms of resistance and reframing needed to ensure resilient educational alternatives.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• Maria Jose Bermeo, Universidad de Los Andes

Individual Presentations

• What Rests Behind Events: A critical analysis of “Attacks on Education” - Diana Rodríguez-Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• The Subtleties of Repression: Understanding University Student Activists’ Experiences of Violence and Suppression - Amy R Kapit, Scholars at Risk; Lauren Berntsen, Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH)

• “They Are Teaching Me to Love Motherland”: A Critical Analysis of Acquiescence and Complicity in State Violence - Elena Aydarova, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Traces of symbiosis: Teacher positionality amidst criminal intimidation and bureaucratic inertia - Maria Jose Bermeo, Universidad de Los Andes

Discussant

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota