Knowledge and racial violence: the shine and shadow of ‘powerful knowledge’

Abstract

This paper offers a critique of ‘powerful knowledge’ – a concept in Education Studies that has been presented as a just basis for school curricula. Powerful knowledge is disciplinary knowledge produced and refined through a process of ‘specialisation’ that usually occurs in universities. Drawing on postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, we show how powerful knowledge seems to focus on the progressive impulse of modernity (its ‘shine’) while overlooking the ruination of colonial racism (its ‘shadow’). We call on scholars and practitioners working with the powerful knowledge framework to address more fully the hegemonic relations of disciplinary specialisation and its historical connections to colonial-modernity. This, we argue, would enable curriculum knowledge that is ‘powerful’ in its interrogation of racial violence, rather than in its epistemic reproduction of it.

Keywords:

• Racism
• epistemology
• disciplines
• colonial-modernity
• decolonising the curriculum
• powerful knowledge

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Guest Editors, as well as John Beck, Lyn Yates and Fazal Rizvi for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. The authors are responsible for the argument presented here, and any limitations or insufficiencies in the analysis.

Notes

1. As Helen Ngo (2017) has recently discussed, processes and practices of racialisation also contribute to racialised bodies feeling not-at-home in body and lived environment, reminding us of the paradoxical effects of domestication that Hage points to.