Decentering (Imperial) Nation-Think: Toward Diversely Embodied Onto-Epistemologies in Public Education as Activism

• In Event: The Use of Decolonization Within Ethnic Studies, Refugee Studies, and Gender and Empire/Counter-Terrorism Discourses

Abstract

Objective
Taking AERA's general call for papers on public education seriously, this paper problematizes a deeply entrenched "methodological nationalism" (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013) or what Spivak (2012) calls "nation-think" in US education. If educators (particularly of color) can think and imagine beyond the nation-state in our quest for socio-economically and ecologically just public education, how would we respond to questions of: Who constitutes the public in public education? What public interests are considered and served in public education? What accountabilities are pursued in teaching and learning in public education? By decentering nation-think, this paper advocates for public education as activism that can engage with diversely embodied onto-epistemologies of the public.

Theoretical Framework
To think public education beyond/across/against nations is to examine how nation-states (and citizenships) have always been imagined and practiced through particular racial, gendered, heterosexual, religious, and abled bodied articulations (Anderson, 1983). Decentering nation-think reveals how the public learn to learn nation-think through current issues like anti-immigrant/refugee initiatives; black lives matter movement; ethnic studies ban; and school choice advocacy (which are implicated not only at the level of policy but also episteme). This decentering also shows how education, particularly formal education as a technology of nation-think, has rooted in humanism, produced by Enlighenment/colonial ideas, that advocate a limited version of development/civilization and educated subjects. In this process/practice of public education, to become an educated human is to learn hierarchical violences that disconnect the world and self from the Others; mind/reason/science from body/affect/spirituality (Curley et al, 2017; Spivak 2012). Remember the rhetoric of "To kill the Indian to save the child?" What complicates further is how public education now aims to prepare for consumers/workers in global markets without much rethinking about who then becomes the public in such educational practice?

Arguments and Significance
How can educators address these epistemological limitation and violence in/as public education especially when it is delivered in the form of a rescue, service, aid or development project for increasingly endarkened bodies of the US pubic? For example, public education as equal opportunities – yet, for what? (when we learn particular ways of thinking that de-humanize a vast majority of the pubic who are excluded or marginalized in nation-think)? This paper responds to these by putting forward "un-learning" somatic habituation through our own teaching and learning bodies (of color) as different public education beyond nation-think. Drawing from a long tradition of feminists of color's work on embodied pedagogy and epistemology (Ahmed, 2017; Anzaldua, 1987; Cruz, 2001; Dillard, 2012; Erevelles, 2012; hooks 1989; Mohanty, 2003), this paper theorizes how "un-learning" our somatic habituation included/excluded through nation-think can recognize and heal the wounds of historical, material, and collective violence done in the name of education on our bodies/minds; and open up more relational and diversely embodied onto-epistemological grounds for public education that (re)connects the world, self, and other. Bringing in "un-learning" in public education as activism, therefore, can reconstitute the public and do violence to imperial/colonial epistemology as this is what education is (Spivak, 2012).

Author

• Jeong-Eun Rhee, Long Island University - C.W. Post Campus