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Attending to the Colonial and Racial Natures of Comparative and International Education and Development

Thu, March 14, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Brickell Prefunction

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Racial capitalism is not a variation, stage, or period in the more extensive history of capitalism; instead, it acknowledges that since the commencement of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racialized, originating social and economic worth from racial labeling and social stratification (Gilmore, 2002; Jenkins & Leroy, 2021; and Robinson, 1983/2020). Traditional research has centered on the subjugation of indigenous and marginalized people, and comparative and international education (CIE) research is no different. Takayama et al. (2016) write that “in the context of CIE, it is expressed as a belief that ‘one cannot adequately understand education (or any institution) apart from its social and cultural environment’” (p. 6, citing Epstein & Carroll 2005, 66). Interest in challenging the long held structures within the field of CIE has increased over the past decades. A growing number of authors and researchers are interested in a critical approach towards their subjects and have sought to decenter colonial structures that are perpetuated within modernity. And yet, modern implications of coloniality persist in every field of research, as outlined in Smith’s 2012 work on Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Smith (2012) sought to unpack the ways that research has been “one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized” (p. 8). Takayama et al. (2016) implores researchers to “...push this critique further and argue that the field has given little attention to the politics of its own concepts about difference, the critical role that uneven power relations play in the constitution of its comparative knowledge” (p. 3).

While Smith’s (2012) work is from the lens of an Indigenous researcher, we propose a collection of presentations that uses her framework to interrogate the level of coloniality and racial capitalism present in modern analyses of CIE. As such, we seek to unpack questions such as: Is CIE as a field too white? Are its theories and methodologies still too Eurocentric? How do we treat others as we study them? How do we accommodate differences, and how is inclusion dealt with? How might new epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies help us decolonize the field? These questions touch on a sensitive area in CIE and what we are asking is whether or not CIE is ready for its own cultural turn. By cultural turn, we mean a shift in the practice of historical analysis and searching for contested meanings and omissions. This implies that the field needs to be self-reflective and rethink the politics of education, given the relationship between structure and agency. As the field begins to reject deterministic and dualist models of society connected with structuralist-functionalism and the hegemony of Western ontological and epistemological dimensions of knowledge that are not part of Western modernity’s framework, culture consequently comes to be viewed as constitutive of and mediating social life (jules & Salajan, 2022). Such an emphasis moves away from “reifying human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism,” which has “reinforc[ed] the hierarchies of being, hindering our opportunities to acknowledge and meaningfully engage with multiple worlds and worldviews” (Silova, 2019, p. 445), toward new non-Western ontological and epistemological possibilities or what might be called pluriversal thinking which incorporates indigenous cosmos and ontologies, Southern epistemologies, and African cosmologies (Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Escobar, 2018; Mignolo, 2011).

In order for this paradigm shift to occur, (post)coloniality and racial capitalism must be interrogated from multiple perspectives, positionalities, and cultural contexts. DaCosta (2019) expands on this necessity saying, “after all, if we can’t take a complex and multiple view of the contexts of colonialism, attending simultaneously to their relationality and their incommensurability, then we are unlikely to recognize moves to decolonize cultural production when we see them” (p. 345). Without a thorough and complex investigation into the ways that colonial cultural production occurs in education, the traditional occidental structures will continue to be perpetuated. This proposed panel engages in such investigation from different epistemological perspectives, academic positionalities, and country contexts. The first presentation by Nigel Brisset and tavis d. jules addresses new development possibilities for the Anglophone Caribbean through the conceptual frame of reparations for the legacies of chattel slavery, indigenous dispossession, extractive capitalism, and their significance to the making of capitalist modernity. The second presentation by Mariam Rashid examines how methodological and theoretical refusals in the study of CIE might offer possibilities to reimagine the hierarchical, colonizing, and racializing nature of CIE. Drawing on Barad (2007), the third presentation by Cathryn Magno and Anna Becker employs the imagery of the diffracted wave to critically think and reflect about binaries, boundaries, and hierarchies and how to deconstruct or diffract those in the field of CIE to promote alternative axiological articulations, non-conventional epistemologies, and pluriverse thinking. The fourth presentation by Benjamin D. Scherrer offers practices aimed at an anti-colonial deciphering of the logics informing representations of schooling within the field of CIE. The final, fifth presentation by Irv Epstein, arguing that there has also been within the academy, a clear impetus to address the challenges of decoloniality, explores how to both embrace academic freedom values which highlight the importance of engaging in inquiry and knowledge production free from external interference, while also committing to principles of decoloniality.

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