Peace Beyond Coloniality: Centering the Margins in Research & Inquiry

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel explores how colonial legacies continue to shape education, identity, and memory across diverse global contexts—and how dismantling these structures is essential for building peace in a divided world. Drawing on cases from Kenya, the South Asian diaspora, and transnational histories of gender and race, the panel examines how education both reproduces colonial logics and creates openings for resistance, reclamation, and liberation. The three presentations highlight how “neutral” educational policies and practices often perpetuate divisions that undermine social cohesion:

1. Undermining Linguistic Rights: Textbook Governance and Market Logics Affecting the Use of Languages in Kenya’s Primary Classrooms
This presentation interrogates Kenya’s language-of-instruction policy and the textbook market, showing how private publishers and state procurement processes systematically sideline mother-tongue education. By reinforcing linguistic hierarchies, these governance systems marginalize Indigenous languages, fragment communities, and entrench inequities.

2. Reclaiming Lineage: Migration, Erasure, and the Disciplining of Memory in the South Asian Diaspora
Using autoethnography, this presentation examines how migration, patriarchy, and Christian schooling collude to erase maternal lineages in South Asian diaspora communities. By treating silence and absence as data, the research illuminates how schools discipline cultural memory while highlighting narrative and embodied practices of resistance that restore genealogies and heal intergenerational trauma.

3. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Decolonial Pathways to Education and Peace
This presentation reframes contemporary gender conflicts in schools through a decolonial, transnational lens. It traces how colonial gender binaries embedded in education policies continue to regulate bodies and suppress diverse gender systems, arguing that dismantling these constructs is crucial to transforming schools into spaces of inclusion and peace.

Taken together, the panel argues that achieving peace through education requires more than policy reform. It demands a fundamental disruption of colonial structures that divide communities along linguistic, cultural, and gender lines. The panel offers concrete frameworks for educators and policymakers to recognize and dismantle these legacies while centering marginalized knowledges and practices that can cultivate genuine social cohesion.

Sub Unit

• Peace Education SIG

Chair

• Shruti Sheshadri, University of San Francisco

Individual Presentations

• Undermining Linguistic Rights: Textbook Governance and Market Logics Affecting the Use of Languages in Kenya’s Primary Classrooms. - Shruti Sheshadri, University of San Francisco

• Who’s Afraid of Gender? Decolonial Pathways to Education and Peace - Femi Higgins, Tangible Culture