Education as a site for the Imperial project to preserve whiteness supremacy from the colonial era to the present: a critical analysis of international education policy in Canada

ABSTRACT

Using Canada as a case study, we historically trace the imperial formation of whiteness supremacy in education from the colonial era to the current internationalisation of education in Western nations. In a global knowledge economy, knowledge has replaced resource extraction as a significant source of nation building. We argue that the internationalisation of education which is hosted by Western nations, positions English language and western education as globally superior, and perpetuates the imperial formations of inequality, hierarchization of difference and unequal rule. Drawing from scholarship on postcolonialism and whiteness, we argue that the race to recruit the best and the brightest to support the knowledge economies of the west has become a site to maintain imperial whiteness supremacy concealed in neo-liberal rhetoric while (re)producing the disparity between the global north and south, and between the global west and east.

KEYWORDS:

• Imperial formation
• capitalism
• settler colonialism
• whiteness supremacy
• international education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.