The erasures of racism in education and international development: re-reading the ‘global learning crisis’

ABSTRACT

Despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination across its domains of research, policy and practice. Considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, are erased, within teaching and research, often in favour of colour-blind and technocratic approaches to ‘development’. This not only ignores the sector’s historical links to systems of racial domination, but also the current ways in which the field is implicated in producing unequal outcomes along racial lines. The authors present a re-reading of the ‘global learning crisis’ – as the dominant discourse of contemporary educational development – to demonstrate how the framing of the ‘crisis’ and the responses it engenders and legitimises operate as a ‘racial project’. The paper offers theoretical and methodological resources with which to interrogate the field’s entanglements in systems of racial domination and challenge its erasures of racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• colonialism
• global development
• sustainable development goals

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants of the research seminar ‘Questions of Race in Education and International Development’ held at the University of Cambridge in February 2018 for their valuable contributions to this debate. We would also like to thank the British Association for International and Comparative Education and the British Academy for their financial support for the event and project. Authorship order is alphabetical to reflect the collaborative nature of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform (n.d.).

2. It is not insignificant that four settler colonies – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States – initially voted against this UN Declaration. The Declaration’s emphasis on the land rights of indigenous peoples was seen to pose a threat to white territorial occupation (see Melamed [2011]).

3. See, for example, https://en.unesco.org/themes/intercultural-dialogue.

4. See, for example, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/dakar/education/learning-to-live-together/ http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/networks/global-networks/aspnet/flagship-projects/transatlantic-slave-trade/new-ideas-for-teaching-tst/; https://en.unesco.org/themes/holocaust-genocide-education/resources.

5. Relatedly, we note that methodological literature on researching the Other often re-centres white experience and reproduces tropes of white ‘vulnerability’ despite conditions of white domination. See, for example, Muller and Trahar (2016).

6. Omi and Winant argue that neoliberalism in the US emerged under Reagan from a conservative backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement; under Thatcher it was associated with a critique of the gains of the anti-racist movement in England. Neoconservatism in the US since the 1980s, they go on to explain, has been supportive of neoliberal economic policies on the grounds that it put a brake on the ‘undeserving poor’ (read, Black populations) from receiving state welfare support.

7. Goodnight (2017) offers a rare analysis of the ‘translations’ of critical race theories within comparative and international education research, examining the methodological affordances of Critical Race Theory (CRT) for understanding casteism (and its intersections with other regimes of inequality) in Indian education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy; British Association for International and Comparative Education.