Decolonizing the Syllabus Bibliography

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

There is a rich intellectual history to the development of anti-colonial thought and practice. In discussing the politics of knowledge production, this collection borrows from and builds upon this intellectual traditional to offer understandings of the macro-political processes and structures of education delivery (e. g., social organization of knowledge, culture, pedagogy and resistant politics). The contributors raise key issues regarding the contestation of knowledge, as well as the role of cultural and social values in understanding the way power shapes everyday relations of politics and subjectivity. In reframing anti-colonial thought and practice, this book reclaims the power of critical, oppositional discourse and theory for educational transformation. Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance, includes some the most current theorizing around anti-colonial practice, written specifically for this collection. Each of the essays extends the terrain of the discussion, of what constitutes anti-colonialism. Among the many discursive highlights is the interrogation of the politics of embodied knowing, the theoretical distinctions and connections between anti-colonial thought and post-colonial theory, and the identification of the particular lessons of anti-colonial theory for critical educational practice. Essays explore such key issues as the challenge of articulating anti-colonial thought as an epistemology of the colonized, anchored in the indigenous sense of collective and common colonial consciousness; the conceptualization of power configurations embedded in ideas, cultures and histories of marginalized communities; the understanding of indigeneity as pedagogical practice; and the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics through anti-colonial learning.

This theoretical inquiry applies threads of Sylvia Wynter’s intellectual project to scholarship in curriculum studies to consider how Wynter’s insights might urge new potential in educational theorising and practice. The central concern driving Wynter’s intellectual project is that our present understanding about what it means to be human is entrenched in epistemological legacies of colonialism that preserve a Western bourgeois genre of Man. This essay begins by detailing Sylvia Wynter’s rigorous and innovative intellectual project that reworks the category of the human. We argue that contemporary curriculum is based upon this Western genre of the human and explore the limits of multicultural curricula. Synthesising Wynter’s interrelated lines of thought – how the notion of being hybridly human calls forth a conceptualisation of humanness as a collective act – we argue that her revised category of the human is a necessary means to radically reimagine and decolonise curriculum.

A critical question in this chapter is whether the Western tradition has the intellectual resources within to transform itself and come to terms with the historical effects and traces of racism that are invested in our institutions and in our knowledge traditions. The student movement ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ At University College London (UCL) propose responses to this question pointing out the lack of awareness that the curriculum is white comprised of ‘white ideas’ by ‘white authors’ and is a result of colonialism that has normalised whiteness and made blackness invisible. This is a fundamental educational challenge that has not been addressed by the educational establishment, nor by the majority of philosophers including philosophers of education. Racism rarely figures on philosophy of education conference agendas and papers discussing the ethics of education that tend to talk in general and abstract terms neglecting issues of race or gender.

Our goal in this articleis to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”,turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may beincommensurable with decolonization.Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward“an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct andwhat is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.