Unlearning Development: Rewilding Comparative and International Higher Education

• In Event: Has ‘sustainable development’ had its day? Interrogating and reframing the global education agenda

Proposal

When a friend invited me to spend Christmas in Hawaii, I eagerly agreed, imagining an island of pristine beaches and exotic birds from a Bounty commercial. Instead, I arrived in Honolulu, confronted with a skyline resembling Manhattan. In retrospect, my disorientation was not only about cultural difference but about modernity itself. It took me over a decade of unlearning to realize that both Soviet socialism—embodied in nuclear testing and monocrop agriculture—and global capitalism are equally destructive to human, nonhuman, and planetary life.

Over the past thirteen years, I have committed myself to this process of unlearning, a practice Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls “hospicing modernity” (2021). This involves letting go of myths of development, progress, and Global North superiority that permeate both European and Central Asian nation-building projects. My recent visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford illuminated the epistemic contradictions of our institutions: while the museum displays the remains of the extinct dodo—a symbol of extractive colonial science—it also curates an exhibition on Hawaiian quilts and island ecologies. There I encountered the Hawaiian proverb A‘ohe pau ka ‘ike i ka hālau ho‘okahi—“one learns from many sources”—which resonates deeply with my search for epistemic plurality and reparative scaffolding. The exhibition offers critical reflections on alternative ways of living and on geospatial categories that extend beyond the nation-state and capitalist frameworks. For instance, it highlights the Hawaiian indigenous concept of ahupua‘a, an ancient land division system in which strips of land extended from the mountains to the sea, sustaining self-contained communities—a practice that strikingly echoes the ultra-rich, self-contained pods of modern times.

In this paper, I propose a framework for rewilding Comparative and International Higher Education (CIHE) as both a disciplinary field and a decolonial praxis. Drawing on indigenous proverbs, a decade of autoethnographic notes and the results of my 7 year-long doctoral research into non-Western reparative philosophies of jeong (Mun and Min 2022), asar (Mun and Kudaibergen), obal and budi (Mun, Gafu, Aizuddin, forthcoming), combined with the analysis of the recent English language scholarship such as Hilary Cremin’s notion of “rewilding” (2022), I argue for an epistemically reparative CIHE that acknowledges indigenous philosophies—such as Hawaiian relational ontologies and alternative democratic steppe traditions of Qazaqliq (Lee, 2015)—as valid and vital sources of knowledge. Traditional scholarship positions higher education around research, teaching, and public good functions (Marginson, 2011). Yet universities remain epistemically undiverse, socially exclusionary, and financially unsustainable, shaped by academic capitalism and neoliberal logics (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Mun, Bamberger & Olenina, 2023).

Rewilding CIHE means not only expanding the canon to include indigenous, ecological, and relational ways of knowing, but also practicing what de Oliveira (2021) calls “hospicing modernity”: loosening our attachment to development and modernity. This involves cultivating higher education as a space of repair—where we learn from many sources, human and more-than-human—and where the work of unlearning is recognized as central to planetary survival in the Hydrocene.

Author

• Olga Mun, Oxford University