Against the Epistemicide: Toward a Nonabyssal Curriculum

• In Event: 42.024 - Postnationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Implications for Leadership and Curriculum-Making

Abstract

This paper examines that the Western Cartesian Modernity model as a hegemonic model with its arrogant claim to address global social issues is not just moribund, it is dead. The paper claims the twentieth century as ‘the last Eurocentric century’. Relying on the work of key decolonial thinkers (Sousa Santos, 2007). The paper denounces the way Western eugenic curriculum of modernity created an abyssal thinking in which ‘this side’ of the line is legitimate and ‘the other side’ has been produced as ‘non-existent’. In so doing curriculum as we knowing is part of the ‘epistemicide’. The paper argues for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011), that will help create new avenues to understand the field in the light of the classes within and beyond Eurocentrism, paying attention to other epistemologies beyond the Western framework.

Author

• Joao Menelau Paraskeva, University of Massachusetts