Education and racial capitalism

ABSTRACT

This paper works with theories of racial capitalism to show how formal education has been produced through interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism, and colonialism. With a focus on the enduring histories of British settler colonialism, we put forward a framework for analysing the constitutive relationship between contemporary systems of education and racial capitalism. The paper discusses three connected relations: (I) the ongoing enclosures and dispossession of land and people, with which the material infrastructures of education are built; (II) the racialised divisions of labour which education systems not only create but are also premised on, and; (III) the extraction of value in and through education, normalising hierarchised life, and steeped in racial capitalism’s defining project of dehumanisation. The paper suggests that sociologies of education need to attend more fully to these relations of racial capitalism if they are to imagine beyond, and mobilise against, education’s role in sustaining white supremacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• settler colonialism
• capitalism
• dehumanisation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Leon Tikly, Derron Wallace, Zeus Leonardo and anonymous reviewers for providing insightful feedback on earlier versions/presentations of this paper. All weaknesses that remain in the analysis are of course our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For details, maps and narratives, see the database at Land Grab Universities https://www.landgrabu.org/

2. There is a growing literature on ‘off-shore’ university campuses, much of it focusing on pedagogic models and experiences (Siltaoja, Juusola, and Kivijärvi 2019; Dobos 2011). However, we were unable to identify studies that focused explicitly on matters of land acquisition, material infrastructures, and displacement/gentrification in relation to the expansion of Higher Education through international branch campuses.

3. Recent research on data infrastructures and platform capitalism in education has identified powerful corporate interests in education, such as Amazon and Facebook. However, literature to date has tended not to focus on the material infrastructures, land appropriation, and exploitation of workers involved in this expansion of education provision (see, however: McMillan Cottom,2020)

4. See for example, how a private school in settler colonial Australia was able to purchase priority use for stolen Indigenous land, otherwise deemed ‘public’: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/inner-west-school-to-spend-millions-on-public-park-upgrade-under-council-deal-20200504-p54ppe.html

5. We note here the emerging literature on the assetization and financialization of education which examines the interactions and operations of advanced capitalism and its technoscientific forms(see for example, Birchand Muniesa, 2020; Jessop, 2017). Much of this literature has not to date examined how these relations of technoscientific capitalism are interlocked with relations of racialisation, and as Tressie McMillan Cottom (2020) argues there is a need for fuller understanding of the constitutive technologies of racism and capitalism in such analyses.