Building anti-racist education through spaces of border thinking

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to identify strategies for anti-racist higher education, drawing on scholarship that locates structural racism in global and local centre–periphery relations. We first examine how the centre-periphery divide has been identified and challenged in anti-racist intellectual and political movements, focusing on exchanges and solidarity between peripheral territories. We then discuss the implications of this framework for the setting in which the authors work: Brazilian higher education. The Brazilian university sector has recently expanded through affirmative action policies that have resulted in an influx of Black students from urban peripheries. However, the dominant nationalist ideology in Brazil has historically denied racial divisions, presenting a myth of racial democracy and delegitimising transnational links between anti-racist movements. Reflecting on our own experiences and perceptions through a narrative approach, we draw out elements of border thinking that we believe can contribute to anti-racist pedagogical and institutional relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality&#47social exclusion in education
• higher education
• comparative and international education
• race
• globalisation and internationalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We acknowledge that Indigenous is a term that can be applied to Black populations, as it is in South Africa. However, here we use Indigenous to refer only to Latin American Indigenous nations.

2. As in the USA and other settings, the relationship of BLM to Indigenous struggles has sometimes been ambiguous. There is often a distance between Black and Indigenous movements in Brazil. In the limitations of the present paper, based primarily on our experiences as Black and White researchers, we are not able to represent the claims and strategies of Indigenous Brazilian movements.

3. Festa Junina is a type of harvest festival celebration involving traditional foods, mostly based on corn, and dancing; including, in this event, music from West Africa.

4. The term retail is used here to make clear that the production and wholesale of illegal drugs is undertaken outside of favelas and involves sectors of society who are not targeted in the same way by state violence.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CNPQ [438519/2018-3].

Notes on contributors

Joel Austin Windle

Joel Austin Windle is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia, and a member of the postgraduate program in language studies the Fluminense Federal University (Brazil). His research focuses on educational inequalities and cultural diversity.

Érica Fonseca Afonso

Érica Fonseca Afonso is a student at the Fluminense Federal University and a member of the Centre for Critical Studies in Language, Education and Society.