Reproducing hierarchisation and depoliticisation: exploring discursive micro processes in global education

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the growing debates about the criticality of global education (GE). Our study responds to the critical post/decolonial debates that point out that GE remains complicit in the perpetuation of social inequalities in the world. Contrary to the macro discursive character of those studies that show that GE is complicit in the reproduction of hierarchisation and depoliticisation, our aim is to map the concrete micro discursive processes in order to find out how exactly are these processes enacted on the level of language, an academic avenue that has remained underresearched so far. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis to the Slovak textbooks on GE, our study shows how particular socio-semantic uses of language reinforce hierarchisation of social actors and depoliticisation of structural complexities and complicities. We also attempt to set our study into a broader context of debates on the self-positioning of post-socialist Central and Eastern European states. We argue that in the context of Slovakia, GE discourse re-confirms the colonial matrix of power-knowledge-being. As we point out, GE becomes a tool through which Slovakia is able to get rid of the label of the Other and position itself as the superior (Western) Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Global education
• micro discursive processes
• critical discourse analysis
• hierarchisation
• depoliticisation
• coloniality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article uses the term ‘global education’ as it is the most commonly used term in Slovakia. Despite the slightly different terminology, it mirrors the concept of ‘global citizenship education’ (GCE) that is used in the Western context by policymakers, educators and scholars.

2. The term Second World, accompanied by the First and Third World, has been widely used during the Cold War period. With the end of the Cold War, the distinction based on the systems of production and ideology has been substituted by the distinction based on development. The First World has become the ‘developed’ Global North, the Third World the ‘underdeveloped’ Global South (McEwan, 2018). Consequently, the Second World has ‘fallen between the cracks’ (Müller, 2020, p. 735) due to its ‘in-between’ position and it suffers from a ‘double silence’ (Moore, 2001, p. 118). From the view of the post/decolonial theories, the silence is caused by the ‘historical indebtedness to three-worlds theory’ (Moore, 2001, p. 116) since ‘an enormous and honorable political commitment to the Third World has been central to much in three-worlds theorizing, the ancestor of postcolonial critique’. Thus, this approach has been largely ignoring the former Second World and its entanglements with coloniality because it does not fit the traditional postcolonial dynamics. On the side of the post-communist field, the scholars are hesitant to acknowledge the post/decolonial optics because discursively, there seems to be a distinction between the former post-Soviet space that is thought to be racially and religiously different from the ‘postcolonial Filipinos and Ghanians who might otherwise claim to share their situation’ (Moore, 2001, p. 116). Additionally, many post/decolonial scholars subscribe to Marxism or are leftists, which creates another wave of reluctance since the former Second World is trying to delink itself from any connotations with the Soviet era.

3. Socio-semantic representations mean how social actors and their actions are represented on the level of semantics, i.e. the level of grammar and stylistics (e.g. whether the actor is grammatically passivated, like ‘children are taught’, or activated, as ‘children are learning’, but also on the sociological level (e.g. which status gains the social actor through activation or passivation).

4. Most recent example happened in 2022 when the delegation from the European Parliament visited a separate settlement behind a Slovak village where the Roma people live, a common example of how Roma people are (geographically) marginalised. The chair of the European Parliament Committee for Regional Development, Younous Omarjee, criticised the living conditions of the Roma minority, saying that ‘it is a shame for Slovakia and a shame for Europe that some Roma live in medieval conditions’ (as cited in Koreň, 2022). This kind of statement has directly positioned Slovakia as a backward country, a common strategy of Othering.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Grant APVV-19-0314 and by the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF) Programme no. 2021-517.

Notes on contributors

Mária Hodorovská

Mária Hodorovská is a PhD candidate at the Institute of European Studies and International Relations at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava. Her research interests are global education with a focus on socio-ecological topics and critical discourse analysis methods.

Kristína Rankovová

Kristína Rankovová is a PhD candidate at the Institute of European Studies and International Relations at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava. Her research interests are critical and postcolonial global education, and the position of Slovakia in global education discourses.