Decolonial pedagogy and the ethics of the global

Abstract

An ethical and democratic globality, and the kind of education that would contribute to it, are only possible in the context of a recognition of the relations of power that have shaped history, and in particular the political, cultural, economic, and epistemological processes of domination that have characterized colonialism and Eurocentrism. Imagining an ethics of the global in this context means articulating a decolonial perspective. Starting from recent work in philosophy and cultural studies, this paper describes key principles of such an orientation to globality, and develops a reconceptualization of education in the context of this framework. The article proposes in particular a curriculum against domination, oriented against the epistemic and cultural violence of Eurocentrism that underlies the politics of content and knowledge in education, and a pedagogy of lovingness, committed to building global solidarity based on non-dominative principles of coexistence and kindredness.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• decolonial theory
• ethics
• Eurocentrism
• globalization
• pedagogy

Notes

1. This means I do not draw on work that is concerned solely with particular local contexts, or on scholarship that does not have significant implications for ethics or epistemology.

2. Of course, this very emphasis on ontological imbrication, in the context of a disavowal of difference and domination, itself constitutes a violent mode of assimilation, as I describe below.

3. This problem in care theory has been commented on in educational scholarship in terms of racial difference (see Thompson, 1998); in the context of globalization these inadequacies are perhaps all the more glaring.