Are we all in this together? COVID-19, imperialism, and the politics of belonging

The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic can be traced to stressful virus-animal-human interactions associated with habitat degradation caused by natural resource extraction in China (Arora & Mishra, 2020; Bonilla-Aldana et al., 2020; O'Callaghan-Gordo & Antó, 2020). Its spread across the globe followed the rhythms of transnational capitalism. Its impacts on health and well-being reflect and deepen social inequalities at local, national, and international scales (Ahmed et al., 2020; Ali et al., 2020; Pirtle, 2020; Roberts, 2020). Its mitigation provokes public and private responses that tend to centralize power, necessitate social control, and undermine the equitable redistribution of wealth, ensuring the maintenance of global consumer capitalist systems that promise plenty, but promote poverty and harm (Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020; Navarro, 2020; Nunes, 2020; Ortega & Orsini, 2020; Short, 2020; Sobande, 2020). This hinders systems and practices of social belonging that embody justice, equality, and care. In all these ways, the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark manifestation of imperialism in action.

Along with critical scholars of settler colonialism and global “underdevelopment,” we conceive of imperialism as a process of social organization characterized by: centralized political power over large, ever-expanding territories and populations; grossly unequal distribution of material wealth; unrestrained exploitation of natural resources and people's labour; and ideological enforcement of and justifications for these patterns and activities (Barker, 2009; Chilcote, 2002; Frank, 2004; Irogbe, 2005; Leroy, 2016; Teltumbde, 2017; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Veracini, 2014). This definition of imperialism enables critical analysis of how the supposed “end of colonialism” following the Second World War did not mark the end of imperialist social practices (nor the end of colonialism, for that matter). Instead, it helps us perceive how imperialism has reinvented itself in the post-war era by legitimizing a “world system” of nation-states, multilateral organizations, and transnational corporations (Wallerstein & Wallerstein, 2004). Cloaked in discourses of “democracy” and “freedom,” this system is rooted in systems of socio-economic exploitation and subjugation that facilitate the cornering of political power and material resources. Accordingly, its dominant, governing players normalize practices of social belonging through unjust regimes of categorization and control. The COVID-19 pandemic is conditioned by these socio-historical processes, and it also exacerbates them, affecting human experiences at all scales of existence. Accordingly, it is crucial that responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are based on critical analyses that offer alternatives to norms and practices of social belonging that sustain imperialism. Such an analysis would require attention to how norms of inclusion and exclusion are produced along lines of ethnicity (race, caste), class, gender, sexuality, and ability, among other categories. The alternatives must address the conditions of and possibilities for global movements of people across national borders as well as the challenges of intercultural communication. The articles included in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry offer powerful conceptual and empirical insights into how we might do this.

In her article titled “When Difference Comes with School: In These Antibrown Times,” Ligia “Licho” López López offers an effective starting point for this conversation, drawing attention to how (and what) differences are made in schools. The paper challenges readers by demonstrating how schooling in settler colonial nation-states is premised on, produces, and exacerbates exclusive racial differences. Writing from the perspective of colonized “lands, their inhabitants, non-human entities, beings, and modes of engagement” (p. 207), López López demonstrates how schooling in present-day USA and Australia is rooted in what she theorizes as “antibrownness.” The paper conceptualizes antibrownness as the ideological justification of white European subjectivity as normative humanness through the definition of “brown” Indigenous-Aboriginal subjectivities as sub-human aberrations. Antibrownness has been a driving force behind projects of colonial modernity from the 15th through the 21st centuries, and has emerged as a foundational organizing principle of the world system of nation-states we inhabit today. López López's conception of antibrownness resonates with and moves in parallel to critical understandings of antiblackness that trace foundational principles of global modernity to the ideologies and practices of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery (Hartman, 1997; Hudson & McKittrick, 2014; Sharpe, 2016). Together, both ideas enable us to understand how assumptions about differences in white, brown, and black “genres” of humanness are foundational to settler colonial social institutions. Accordingly, ideas of belonging in modern, settler colonial societies are always-already accompanied by socially constructed differences that valorize the white European norm. This strongly shapes racio-cultural understandings of whose lives do or do not matter, and whose lives do or do not deserve protection. The disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 cases and fatalities among Indigenous, black, and working-class racialized communities throughout the world reflects these phenomena (McLaren, 2020; Russell, 2020; Smith & Judd, 2020; Tsirtsakis, 2020).

López López illustrates the dynamic production of difference through her ethnographic engagements with students in elementary school classrooms on settled Ho Chunk land (present-day Wisconsin, USA). Through two carefully detailed accounts, she shows how students draw on broader cultural understandings of colonial difference to engage with the school’s official literacy curriculum. Specifically, she reflects on how students’ engagement with popular media produced by the Disney corporation shapes their understandings of normative white personhood (and non-normative, non-white otherness), and how this in turn influences their engagement with literacy readers in school. In the article, López López effectively suspends the otherwise hegemonic colonial gaze that typifies academic writing by narrating and analyzing the students’ actions from the perspective of Ta Moko, the sacred markings that the Maori wear on their faces. When the students themselves encounter a story about Moko in the book they read together, Ta Moko becomes both the object through which the author illustrates the production of difference as well as the perspective from which the process is analyzed and, in fact, re-narrated. In this way, the “Moko story” serves as an analytical framework that reveals how learning in schools is premised on and furthers Indigenous/Aboriginal erasure. At the same time, the author and the teacher collaborators engage students through guiding questions that spark curiosity about colonial differences. This pedagogical and analytic approach is decidedly counter-imperialist and opens spaces to resist desires to categorize and control.

López López's empirical analysis points in two directions for drawing connections between schooling, imperialism, and COVID-19 in settler colonial contexts. First, the work highlights how schooling in settler colonial contexts by default produces racialized differences, pointing us to how COVID-19 exacerbates these differences. This includes differences in access, engagement, inclusion, learning experiences and outcomes, and the social benefits associated with them. Second, reflecting on how resistance to racialization in schooling can disrupt the production of difference points us to efforts that can mitigate COVID-19 harms in equitable and caring ways. Growing concerns around deepening educational disparities due to the pandemic, and ongoing debates and uncertainties associated with school reopenings, highlight the urgency for curriculum scholars and educators to pursue both lines of inquiry (Flack et al., 2020; Haeck & Lefebvre, 2020; Sheikh et al., 2020; Van Lancker & Parolin, 2020; Vermund & Pitzer, 2020). This work also requires paying attention to the production of difference beyond race, including gender, sexuality, and even age categories.

LJ Slovin’s article, “What Grade Are You In? On Being a Non-Binary Researcher,” further contributes to López López's insights by offering an analysis of how schooling in settler colonial settings is premised on, produces, and exacerbates exclusive gender differences linked to age categories. Slovin explores how schooling in Canada promotes notions of citizenship that are both gendered and rooted in imperialist discourses of childhood and adulthood. Slovin illustrates this by examining several interactions in which staff and students did not recognize them as an “adult” during their ethnographic research on gender non-conforming students' school experiences. Despite the fact that the author satisfied legal and age-based criteria for adulthood, both students and teachers often failed to recognize them as such, and this confusion was linked to the author's embodiment of gender and sexuality. When they asked staff and students about the reasons for this misidentification, they learned that their lack of formal authority, youthful appearance, and visible non-binary gender performance contributed to these impressions. To understand why this happened, they analyzed methodological questions about school-based research with youth through the lens of critical theories of adulthood.

Slovin argues that their identification as a non-adult in their school research site reflects how whiteness, capitalism, and cisheteronormativity define criteria for adult citizenship in settler colonial societies. These include, “leaving home, living independently, gaining financial security, getting monogamously married, and having children” (p. 227). Adulthood, then, is not a biological inevitability conditioned by aging alone. It is also a prescriptive, socially constructed, normative category imbued with the power to define (and deny) personhood. The equations of adulthood with legally recognized personhood by dominant social groups have resulted in non-normative, non-white, non-cis-hetero-gendered others being defined as non-adult and non-citizens or non-persons who need to be disciplined and/or patronized. Slovin's analysis reveals that like racialized differences, differences associated with gender, sexuality, and age also “come with” schools and the broader institutions of settler colonial societies. Here too, notions of whose lives matter and are deemed worthy of affirmation and protection come into play. Conflicts and controversies associated with the provision of social care during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal these tensions and underscore the significant differences that age makes in who is impacted by the pandemic and how.

Discourses about the COVID-19 pandemic are deeply age-striated. Socio-political considerations of infection, illness, and morbidity deploy age-based categories such as children, youth, adults, and “the elderly.” While there certainly is a strong correlation between biological maturity and harm due to COVID-19, articulations of the social significance of this fact are shaped by systems of power. State-promoted directives to mitigate the pandemic have mobilized discourses of responsible citizenship that appeal to non-elderly, able-bodied adults to “do the right thing,” usually without any regard to the experiences, opinions, and desires of those who inhabit “non-adult” age categories. These “right things” are inevitably oriented towards the sustenance of consumerist-capitalist economic activity and social relations. This involves calculations of necessary risks that factor relationships between age, gender, race/ethnicity, and illness. Two social domains in which these dynamics are starkly visible are the administration of long-term care facilities for the elderly and in debates around the reopening of schools.

COVID-19 has been tragic for large numbers of elderly residents of long-term care homes (retirement homes) in the Global North. The numerous outbreaks and high fatalities in these spaces demand serious reflection on the social need and desirability for these specialized, age-striated institutions. This reflection must critique how capitalist notions of economic productivity are implicated in this phenomenon, for instance, in terms of how many long-term care facilities are for-profit companies, or in terms of how eligibility for long-term care (retirement care) is rooted in economic non-productivity. It must also question how such care is regarded as a safeguard for the potential economic productivity of working adults. Another serious problem associated with this phenomenon is the high incidence of COVID-19 illness and fatalities among health support workers, many of whom are racialized women from low income households (Bouka & Bouka, 2020; Das Gupta, 2020; Ebinger et al., 2020; Nguyen et al., 2020; Rimmer, 2020; Shippee et al., 2020). The experiences of these care workers demonstrates the disproportionate distribution of negative impacts of the pandemic on already marginalized persons and the scapegoating that accompanies demands for greater social protections and benefits (Chakelian, 2020; Haines & Bogart, 2020; McIntosh, 2020; Tungohan, 2020; Walker et al., 2020).

Current debates about the reopening of schools during the pandemic also reflect the deployment of similar social categories. At a broad level, the reopening of schools is being actively linked to economic recovery, both at the level of the system as a whole, as well as at the level of the well-being of households and communities. School staff, which is largely feminized, have found themselves caught between the desires to extend social care and support to communities in just and humane ways, with directives that effectively require them to regulate and discipline bodies in spaces that are not safe. Guidelines about wearing masks and other protective body coverings as well as norms for the resumption of learning activities at school have also been devised on the basis of infection risk calculations associated with age. Slovin's analysis underscores how imperialist social categories and relations cause harm and injustice, inviting us to consider further how to confront events like the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that challenge rather than perpetuate established orders.

While López López and Slovin analyze how ongoing imperialism shapes schooling in settler colonial societies, Sally Bonet and Ashley Taylor examine the educational dimensions of public policies that condition imperialist power relations nationally and internationally. Their article titled, “I Have an Idea!: A Disabled Refugee’s Curriculum of Navigation for Resettlement Policy and Practice” presents the life history and resettlement experiences of a disabled, Iraqi refugee living in the USA, whom they call Samir Omar. The authors analyze how imperialist violence and exclusion shape experiences of social belonging in a settler colonial state (the USA), in nation-states associated with centuries-old legacies of imperialism (Iraq and Syria), and in situations of imperialist confrontation between nation-states (the US occupation of Iraq in 2003). Through the lens of critical disability studies, they observe how imperialist power relations render Omar as a “disabled” person. They argue that US military activity in Iraq, civil war in Syria, and ableist-individualist refugee resettlement policies converge to transform Omar’s life from a physically constrained but socially enriched experience, to a situation of economic precariousness and social alienation.

In his exchanges with the authors, Omar presents a nuanced, insightful critique of imperialist expansionism and refugee policies by reflecting on his own experiences and those of other refugees. Central to this is his analysis of the inadequacy of ableist and individualist notions of “self-sufficient citizenship” that inform refugee resettlement policies. Observing that self-sufficiency is grounded in interdependence, Omar argues that disabled refugees ought to be allowed to resettle with their families and that resettlement policies be oriented towards notions of citizenship that emphasize social participation. Bonet and Taylor argue that Omar’s critique amounts to a “curriculum of navigation” that emerges through negotiations with the “normative curriculum” of refugee resettlement as negotiated between the UNHCR and the USA. It offers alternatives for more just and inclusive practices.

Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s (2017) conceptualization of “debility,” Bonet and Taylor argue that individual and social debility are intentional (rather than accidental) consequences of imperialist politics. This approach offers a powerful perspective to analyze the spread of COVID-19 and policy responses to it. Before it was declared a pandemic with serious consequences to the existing global order, COVID-19 spread internationally along the routes of globalized capital and labour. It was regarded as a manageable risk, likely to cause negligible debility as an unfortunate but necessary price to pay in the pursuit of economic prosperity. The rapid contagiousness and unpredictable health outcomes among privileged social groups internationally shifted the discourse of risk and debility related to COVID-19, leading to the declaration of a pandemic. We point this out not to dismiss the ill health and suffering of people directly affected by COVID-19, but rather to critically analyze the political dynamics involved in responding to the pandemic. Key here is a consideration of when, how, and whose “abilities” are affected by COVID-19 and what precisely is the economic impact of these “debilities.”

Despite significant variations in planning, implementation, and effectiveness, national and international COVID-19 mitigation policies are based on remarkably uniform discourses of economic harm and recovery. These discourses express preoccupation with “going back to a normal world,” where the predictability of endless productivity, profit, consumption, leisure, and upward social mobility are ensured. Quarantine restrictions, economic relief packages, and reopening plans across the world reflect these desires in different ways. Central to these interventions are the notions of “economically productive, socially desirable citizens” and, by extension, notions of excluded others. This is most starkly reflected in the experiences of persons classified as “migrant workers” across the world, who have fallen outside the purview of policy responses to the pandemic. Whether we think of seasonal farm workers from Central America and the Caribbean in Canada, or the entire spectrum of skilled and unskilled informal rural workers in urban India, it is clear that the extant global order, pre- and post-pandemic, requires the debility and disposability of undesirable non-persons to sustain itself (Bhoi, 2020; Haley et al., 2020; Verma, 2020). Bonet and Taylor's paper offers not only conceptual tools to name these realities, but in evoking and highlighting Samir Omar's “curriculum of navigation” also suggests potential avenues for discovering and advocating for just and humane alternatives.

Importantly, these alternatives require a rethinking of how knowledge is produced and even how we come to know in ways that account for different experiences, perspectives, and ways of being in the world. This is not a new or even a radical insight for curriculum scholars, yet the challenge of how to engage across differences remains. In the final article in this issue, Wisam Abdul-Jabbar offers an analysis of the relationship between the politics of social belonging and intercultural exchange. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the historical constitution of global society through the rise and fall of empires, which should inform our understanding of and response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its broad scope, Abdul-Jabbar’s work builds on specific aspects of the previous three works in different ways. In his article, titled “Al-Kindi on Education: Interdisciplinary Curriculum Theorizing and the Intercultural Minhaj,” Abdul-Jabbar focuses on the intellectual legacy of 9th century Arab philosopher Ishaq Al-Kindi. Abdul-Jabbar argues that Al-Kindi’s efforts to legitimize philosophy as a valid pursuit in Islamic intellectual traditions is a pioneering example of intercultural curriculum theorizing in complex imperialist circumstances. The article situates the flourishing of Al-Kindi’s scholarship within a broader context of political reorganization in the Abbasid Caliphate (Islamic state), headquartered in Baghdad (present-day Iraq) in the 8th and 9th centuries CE. To regulate the administration and expansion of the Caliphate on the basis of a sound understanding of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad’s edicts, the Abbasid rulers supported and encouraged intellectual activities that promoted a rationalistic view of Islamic theology and philosophy. This political-intellectual climate enabled Al-Kindi’s growth as an intercultural, interdisciplinary scholar.

According to Abdul-Jabbar, the overriding concern of Al-Kindi’s scholarship was the pursuit of universal truth through intellectual and cultural syncretism, rather than epistemicide and one-sided assimilation. Accordingly, he made systematic attempts to reconcile Islam with Greek philosophy, catering to the demands of both religion and philosophy, which he argued were two sides of the same coin. The author argues that Al-Kindi’s prodigious intellectual work amounts to the creation of a pluralistic educational perspective, a Minhaj (the Arabic equivalent for curriculum), marked by gratitude, openness to epistemological exchange and transformation, the pursuit of interdisciplinary understanding, and a departure from Majlis (mosque-based learning about jurisprudence and revelation from sacred Islamic texts alone).

Abdul-Jabbar justifies the significance of this inquiry by pointing to the role of intercultural intellectual exchange in shaping flows of material and social histories across the world. He points to how exchanges between Greek and Islamic intellectual-scientific traditions shaped experiences of the European Renaissance, which in turn shaped the emergence of (colonial) modernity in Europe (Al-Khalili, 2011; Gutas, 1998). Awareness of such histories, facilitated through intercultural, interdisciplinary exchanges, can play a crucial role in addressing seemingly unsolvable conflicts between fundamentally opposed political communities. In particular, Abdul-Jabbar highlights the usefulness of such ideas for resolving the conflicts between “the West” and “the Middle East” witnessed in contemporary times.

Although Abdul-Jabbar does not explicitly critique how imperialism harms possibilities for just, equitable, and caring social association, in Al-Kindi’s time or subsequent eras, he does highlight how pursuits of syncretic intercultural exchange are never entirely free from dynamics of power and control. This is a sobering reminder of how efforts to envision and enact responses to pressing social problems of our time, like COVID-19, are constrained by imperialist social realities, even when interested in non-deterministic, multi-sided exchanges. Perhaps the best example of this is how the global pursuit for a vaccine in the interest of protecting life is driven by international exchanges of information, but also conditioned by international geo-politics and the interests of capital. It is also reflected in the contradictions that inform debates about “reopening” social institutions like schools, community organizations, government offices, businesses, and transit facilities. In these conversations, we observe tensions between the desires for social action that could ease ill-health, suffering, and injustice, and moves to preserve aspects of the status quo that inequitably and unjustly perpetuate social harms.

Collectively, the articles published in this issue offer us a poignant reminder that identifying, naming, and undoing imperialist logics and practices in social life needs to be a core concern of curriculum studies scholarship and the practice of education in contemporary times, within and beyond schools. As discussed throughout this editorial, these explorations assume special urgency and significance given how the COVID-19 pandemic reflects how imperialism continues to order social life in the contemporary world. The authors in this issue contribute different entry points for this reflection and invite us to move towards critical, desirable alternatives. López López demonstrates the transformational potential of suspending the colonial gaze. In using the “Moko story” as a conceptual framework and an interpretive tool, she demonstrates how we might engage with the world around us with curiosity and care, resisting the urge to other, categorize, and control. Slovin embodies the courage to ask questions of social systems that exclude them. Instead of withdrawing from social exchanges in response to being seen as a non-adult owing to their gender nonconformity, they engage with criticality and openness. Bonet and Taylor's work is a powerful example of how enabling social conditions for marginalized persons to develop and articulate critical analyses of social systems is crucial to counter imperialism in all forms. This needs to be accompanied by social processes that enable these ideas to be translated into action. Abdul-Jabbar exhorts us to resist the desire to dominate, and pursue social change through synthesis of perspectives and ideas. These alternative approaches can promote responses to social problems in general, and COVID-19 in particular, that enable conditions for lasting well-being and social equality.

Disclosure statement

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