De‐colonising practices: negotiating narratives from racialised and gendered experiences of education

Abstract

This paper uses feminist work on diaspora and postcolonial theory to examine the ways in which women serial migrants, who as children left the Caribbean to join their parents in the UK, experienced racialised, gendered intersections in the ‘contact zone’ of school. Drawing on narrative accounts from women serial migrants the paper argues that school was a key site for racialised subjectification, even though, as girls new to the UK, the participants had not yet come to an understanding of racialisation. Their mastery of a new school system occurred in contexts where they reported being subjected to racist discourses from teachers and other children. It was epistemically violent in that it involved learning that they were constructed as inadequate learners and undesirable femininities. As a result, they experienced subjectification and school itself as painful processes. All, however, reported agency in resisting subjection into representations of themselves as innately incapable. Their retrospective accounts indicated that postcolonial theory can illuminate how migrant children negotiate complex, racialised experiences in education and, in doing so, help to de‐colonise everyday practices.

Keywords:

• Caribbean women
• contact zones
• identities
• postcolonial feminism
• schooling
• serial migration

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the participants in the ‘Transforming experiences’ project, without whose generous contribution of time, ideas and narratives, this paper would not have been imagined. Thanks also to the two anonymous referees who read this article quickly and made constructive and incisive comments and to Pui Sin who kindly reformatted my references.

Notes

1. The ‘Transforming experiences: Re‐conceptualising identities and ‘non‐normative’ childhoods’ research programme is funded as an Economic and Social research Council Professorial Fellowship awarded to Ann Phoenix (Award number: RES‐051‐27‐0181). Elaine Bauer and Stephanie Davis‐Gill are Research Fellows on the programme.

2. Italics indicates emphasis.