Making the neo-colonizer: strategies and tactics of subjectification for development

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The symposium is organized on the premise that the subjects presumed by national and transnational educational practices require scrutiny for the rules and principles that make them up as “actors” in a social field. Rather than assume the subject as the origin of change, the papers in this panel seek, in various ways, to de-center the subject as the agent of development in order to interrogate how this way of thinking about people has become reasonable, desirable, and necessary in these practices. At issue is how this kind of person's desired knowledge and dispositions implicitly and paradoxically generate the zones of development that reinscribe colonial-era divisions between having and needing cultivation, embodying and lacking health, or being civilized and backwards.

Drawing upon different geographic and topical areas of focus, the papers seek to challenge some of the cultural and social scientific practices that, historically and today, make up a particular kind of subject who possesses desired forms of knowledge and sensibilities that are hoped to bring about social progress. Rather than give national ideologies or “neoliberalism” a causal role in making particular subjectivities, the papers offer a more complex genealogy as a political sociology of educational knowledge that explores subjectification as practices of pastoral power that travel and proliferate beyond the institutional domains to which they may appear “proper” (Popkewitz, Diaz, & Kirchgasler, 2017). Tracing these mutations offers a way to understand how notions of salvation that once pertained to the afterlife are rechristened as “health, well-being . . . security, protection against accidents” (Foucault, 2001, p. 334; see also, Dean, 2018), and where the pastor is reincarnated in forms of state, philanthropy, and private-public partnerships. The practices that once purified the soul now become the basis for professional expertise—theories and practices that are to optimize life in the here and now and make possible a more predictable and orderable future.

In different ways, the papers seek to go beyond merely identifying continuities or oppositions in comparing colonial past and neoliberal present; historicizing is to make visible how concepts, theories, and practices have moved through different domains of knowledge and institutional forms without altering the relations that regulate social scientific expertise and of who and what are made their targets. Historicizing keeps in focus how political and ethical question of who people are and should be are built into the incontestable certitude of numbers and imperatives of economic management that seek to predict the future by ordering the present.

The first paper explores how girls’ education is offered as a salve to the global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence. A paradox of this discourse is that “the girl” is made up as both a victim of these forces and the vector for meaningful change. Transnational school reforms that seek empower girls in the global South deploy quantified evidence that, once naturalized as truth, shape policy, private investment, and intervention programs. Rather than treat the girls’ crisis and its evidentiary basis as axiomatic, this paper examines this crisis’ conditions of possibility, and the dangers in their attempts to optimize human potential. At issue are the ways in which technoscientific practices of Big Data in transnational school reforms may inadvertently conserve colonial residues that recapitulate evolutionary progress narratives in economic terms, reinscribing ontologies of differential life worth that exclude.

The second paper examines ‘curiosity,’ a notion that is currently being mobilized in a wide range of endeavors both in the field of education as well as in the broader field of public culture. Curiosity is assumed an innate and inherent quality of individuals: It is now a self-evident truth that human beings are “born curious” (Engel, 2011, p. 628). The purpose of the paper is to inquire into how ‘curiosity’ plays out as it inscribes modern notions of humanity, progress, and development. Of particular interest are the affective, emotional and aesthetic investments in the notion of curiosity through which the learner is fabricated as an explorer. This inquiry destabilizes the common assumption about curiosity as a boundless and harmless orientation of interest and wonder towards the unknown. While curiosity is assumed as vital for human development and social progress, the diverse ways in which it currently circulates points to its dividing practices that formulate what/whom curiosity is for and what/whom count as its subjects and objects.

The final paper considers “growth mindset” and how it travels within calls for STEM education as a springboard for launching local, regional, national, and global education policies. A common assumption is that it is a necessary ingredient in projects that would transform children into productive workers, adaptive collaborators, problem-solvers, and globally aware citizens. This paper argues that growth mindset carries residues of colonial-era techniques of self, cartography and ‘discovery’ logics, and embodiment/emotion discourses emerging in part through the development of ‘modern’ mathematics and the mind sciences. The paper explores how growth mindset has become intelligible as a concept that has quickly traveled across an array of local, national, and international contexts and produced or occluded ‘new’ spatialities of difference and desire.

Taken together, the papers in the symposium contribute to research in comparative education by shifting questions about away from the evaluative and normative questions of whether they “make a difference” to ask instead how school reforms make difference—through the notions of science they invoke, the standards of development they assume, and the comparative tactics they employ that make up some children, families, and communities as deficient. Scrutinizing schooling’s practices, strategies, and tactics challenges the givenness of human kinds that lies at the heart of the comparative social sciences. The hope is to raise urgent political questions and ethical challenges—both in terms of how the field conceptualizes its own theories and methods, and what this entails for the decolonization of educational research, policy, and practice.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Post-foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education

Chair

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas

Individual Presentations

• “Girls” in Crisis: Colonial Residues of Transnational School Reforms in Kenya - Karishma Desai, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas

• Explorers of the World: Colonial Residues in the Making of Curious Learners - Johanna Sitomaniemi-San, University of Oulu

• Affective Engineering?: Growth Mindset and Spatializations of Mind through STEM Education - Ryan Ziols, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Vanessa Andreotti, University of British Columbia