Working Toward a De/colonizing Practice: Unpacking Transnational Narratives From the Global South

• In Event: 25.032 - Dare We Center the Transnational — the Global Majority? How the Global-Local Happens

Abstract

Objectives

In this paper I examine transnational grassroots marginal narratives of de/colonizing educational efforts in Global South countries.  I intend to show how social activists’ de/colonizing narratives intersect with larger national/global educational discourse and policy while engaging within historical, political and temporal realities of postcolonial contexts.  I trace the ways in which such narratives unpack both discourse and practices of domination, resistance, and complicity. This paper engages with concepts of education, race, power and politics and evidences the complex nuances of the de/colonizing process.

Perspective(s)

This papers draws from decolonizing and critical social justice theoretical fields.  It particularly focuses on Tuhiwai Simth’s (1999) ways of understanding decolonizing efforts and challenges within global dynamics. Tuhiwai Smith argues that globalization has always been problematic for indigenous peoples. She notes that “While being on the margins of the world has had dire consequences, being incorporated within the world’s marketplace has different implications and in turn requires the mounting of new forms of resistance.”  Drawing from the above, this paper uses a decolonizing lens to articulate new forms of resistance visible via transnational educational narratives that go beyond nation-state boundaries. As, Tuhiwai Smith (2006)  argues, "these transnational spaces are not purely national or local spaces, but are instead, spaces that are intersected by identities and moments that simultaneously speak to local, national, and global movements (p551)."

Methods

Utilizing critical autoethnography and discourse analysis (Behar, 2007), I examine the experiences and interactions of transnational educators, as well as my local-global work on educational social justice issues.  Approximately 60 educators participated in a funded project that trains critical pedagogy with a focus on gender equity. Data sources were from PD activities/presentation, reflections, biographies, self study and individual and focus group interviews (both within the US and in participants' home countries). I analyzed how the social, racial, religious and political identities and epistemologies of transnational educators (and mine) engage with structures of power and privilege within marginalized global educational contexts and ways in which they used these to work against such educational inequities.

Conclusions/Significance

Critical social justice and decolonizing frameworks pay attention to how dominant globalizing frameworks utilize neoliberal approaches that provide a narrow and hegemonic conception of social justice and tend to minimize the complex interplay of politics, history, policy, race and power. Therefore, these transnational narratives will push for a ‘defamiliarizing’ of these dominant discourses on Global South contexts, and for serious engagements with alternative, complex and more nuanced social justice efforts taking place in the Global South. The paper brings forth what grassroots transnational educational/ equity and social justice commitments look like and examines how these Global South, localized and transnational dialogues challenges and ruptures the dominant frameworks on social justice.

Author

• Sharon S. Subreenduth, University of Massachusetts - Lowell