Knowledge, Knowers, and Capabilities: Can the Capabilities Approach Help Decolonise the Curriculum?

ABSTRACT

The Capabilities Approach and the movement to Decolonise the Curriculum contain powerful intellectual and practical possibilities for changing the way societies conceive of education and its purpose. The former presents a bold set of educational aims offering an alternative to market-driven human capital approaches. The latter seeks to undo the legacy of colonialism that still echoes through classrooms across the world. Yet, despite potential affinities, little work exists exploring the compatibility of their respective theoretical commitments. This article argues that, behind the label Decolonise the Curriculum, lies a spectrum of approaches that, at their polar ends, risk becoming counterproductive in the search for educational justice. Articulating a version of Decolonising the Curriculum that avoids these pitfalls can be achieved through the theoretical insights of the Capabilities Approach and, in particular, the writings of its architects, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

KEYWORDS:

• Capabilities approach
• Decolonise the Curriculum
• culture
• identity
• knowledge
• Nussbaum
• Sen

Introduction

This article aims to contribute to theoretical understandings of the movement to Decolonise the Curriculum and its relationship to the Capabilities Approach in the context of higher education. Both invoke social justice as their professed goal, yet little work exists exploring the compatibility of their core commitments. As such, two important movements for social change remain somewhat isolated from the insights they might offer one another. At the same time, I suggest that there are areas of theoretical tension that, when probed, will help bring these two important social justice programmes into conversation. This article makes plain some of these areas of dissonance, cognizant of the fact that both are broad and diverse in their intellectual sources and current instantiations.

Social movements involve collective action to voice concerns about injustice done to a group or collectivity (Snow, Soule, and Kriesi 2008). Decolonise the Curriculum is one such movement. Ignited by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa, the impetus surrounding calls to decolonise higher education have been welcomed by many (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018; International Conference on Decolonising Our University Corporate et al. 2012). These movements are global in nature, which is no surprise given that colonialism is a feature of human history rather than an isolated event sequestered solely to one time or place. This surge of interest and activity has been driven by activist student movements across both the Global North and South and now has a clear focus on the curriculum as a specific site of decolonisation within higher education (Shahjahan et al. 2022).

Linking the movement, is a concern with the experience of knowers from historically marginalised groups, a challenging of pedagogical practices normalised in higher education and a critical approach to the knowledge produced and taught in universities themselves. Yet, despite this broad confluence of interests, there is a deep diversity in how these movements imagine the relationship between knowledge, the university, and the curriculum. In many ways, by challenging the nature of the knowledge produced and taught in universities, the movement is a threat to the very legitimacy of the institution itself. Yet, at the same time, the movement seeks to reform a key part of that institution, the curriculum. The aim of this article is to situate these issues within the capability approach to educational justice.

The Capabilities Approach is now an established approach to social justice in education (Walker and Unterhalter 2007; Hart 2012). At its core is a concern with human freedom and flourishing. Those concerned with the promotion of human capabilities ask us to consider the extent to which social arrangements allow people to do and to be the things they have reason to value (Nussbaum 2011). Typical models of economic development, such as GDP, have historically relied on aggregate well-being and therefore treat individuals as cogs or components in an undifferentiated economic utility calculator, rather than variegated individuals with rich inner lives (Nussbaum 2000). In contrast, the Capabilities Approach foregrounds the plurality of human aims, capacities, interests, and beliefs thereby providing a richer account of how people are faring. When turning to education, concerns with agency, freedom and choice continue to be central (Walker and Unterhalter 2007). For capabilities theorists, education ought to promote students’ abilities to do and to be the things they have reason to value. The curriculum, therefore, should be evaluated to the extent it promotes those goals.

Despite both movements conceiving of education as a space for furthering social justice, there are theoretical tensions that plausibly set them at odds with one another. Some critics of the Capabilities Approach have argued it retains a tacit commitment to a Eurocentric conception of human well-being steeped in assumptions idiosyncratic of Western philosophy (Argenton and Rossi 2013; Okin 2003; Stewart 2001). If credible, this charge makes the approach, at best, inappropriate as a genuinely global framework for educational justice and at worst simply in-service to the logic of coloniality. It ultimately begs the question as to whether theoretical elements of the approach are in some fundamental way at odds with Decolonising the Curriculum as a movement.

The central research questions for this article are:

• What are some of the ways the movement to Decolonise the Curriculum conceive of the relationship between knowledge, knowers, and social justice?

• How do these conceptions relate to core theoretical commitments of the Capabilities Approach?

In answering these questions, I give a brief account, in section 1, of some of the diverse historical origins of the concept of decolonisation over the last century. In sections 2–4 I suggest a spectrum of ways in which Decolonising the Curriculum manifests itself both in the academic literature and in the kinds of calls for change made by activists; at either end of the spectrum are two polarised positions which I call the incompatibility and compatibility approach. In sections 5-7, I situate the Capabilities Approach as a theoretical framework within education and social justice. I explore two core theoretical commitments that run through the work of both Sen and Nussbaum’s understanding of the approach and then assess the extent to which there are tensions between capabilities and the more polarised understanding of Decolonising the Curriculum.

Ultimately, I will argue that under the label of Decolonising the Curriculum, a range of intellectual positions exist regarding the status of knowledge and its place in the curriculum. Both ends of the spectrum, however, encounter problems that end up closing off some of their potential for transformative educational change. These problems include the reification of knowledge (in which knowledge becomes the concrete possession of groups), and essentialism (in which certain cultures or groups are constructed as sharing some common, binding attribute). The Capabilities Approach, and the conception of culture, identity and education propounded by its two architects (Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum), can help to chart a way through this terrain and demonstrate the kinds of virtues needed for a dynamic and socially just approach to Decolonising the Curriculum that prioritises openness and criticality.

From Politics to Knowledge: Background to the Movement

Decolonial ideas have a rich and diverse history, intimately bound-up with Black Power, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the struggle for indigenous rights in Australia and Africa, and the push for self-governance and autonomy across the Global South. It is no surprise, then, that Decolonising the Curriculum is served by “multiple ‘trajectories’ of decolonization, with a rich body of theorists across the globe” (Shahjahan et al. 2022, 82). The term decolonisation most commonly refers to the period after WWII in which political power was wrested from a handful of Western nations to those subject to that power (Betts 2012). It was a political movement rooted in non-domination with its goal the establishment of political communities absent subjugation by the West. However, as global, social, and economic inequalities continued to persist between the West and its former colonies, decolonisation began to be theorised in cultural terms (Betts 2012).

Such a shift in emphasis was anticipated by Fanon, for many an intellectual lodestar of the movement, who paints a picture of deep incompatibility between the systems of thought, language, and practice of the colonisers and the colonised (Betts 2012; Fanon et al. 2004). Ideas surrounding decolonisation were no longer solely preoccupied with territorial and political matters but looked to the ways that language, culture, and identity were vectors of a new imperialism. Under this view, the concept of “the West” acts as a grand conceit encompassing the rational and civilised and therefore rendering the non-West as a place of barbarism and primitive backwardness (de Sousa Santos 2007). Said’s seminal work “Orientalism” made this constructed East – West dichotomy explicit in his analysis of how the West depended, for its own self-conception, on a distorted and diminishing view of the East (Said 1979). Decolonial resistance, therefore, is concerned with addressing the power imbalances associated with the legacy of Western hegemony. As a result, it can take the form of rejecting, what is taken to be, the dominant cultural norms and knowledge of the West and rediscovering “other” cultures and systems of knowledge.

It is clear, then, that the concept of decolonising encompasses an array of diverse histories and traditions perhaps held together only by a common desire to resist domination by colonialism. Recently, there has been increased focus on curriculum and pedagogy (Sanchez 2018; Shahjahan et al. 2022). When we turn our attention to writing on the concept of Decolonising the Curriculum, it will be no surprise that there are echoes of these different approaches running through the literature. A key question in relation to this is whether the diverse streams and tributaries involved in decolonising movements vitiate any attempt to “have a common language on decolonization and thus build solidarity?” (Shahjahan et al. 2022, 101). It is to this question I now turn.

Knowledge and the Curriculum: Current Movements to Decolonise the Curriculum

It is easy to elide the differences between decolonising higher education in general and Decolonising the Curriculum. They are clearly closely aligned in dealing with the nature of knowledge, how it is produced, and how it is taught. For the purposes of this article, I take decolonising higher education to involve not just what is taught but the wider function of the university, its practices of knowledge production and its institutional operations and systems (Arday and Mirza 2018; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018). I take Decolonising the Curriculum to be a specific subset of this project, focused more narrowly on what is taught and its relationship to the history of colonialism (Le Grange 2016). This article necessarily engages with aspects of both in so far as I am concerned with how we talk about the knowledge universities produce as well as how this is instantiated within curricula.

At the heart of approaches to Decolonising the Curriculum is a concern with the nature of knowledge (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Santos 2016). Epistemology, then, is as an inescapable part of the movement as is a commitment to social justice. This often requires, inter alia, some method of redress for the persistent legacy of colonialism in the nature and distribution of knowledge produced in higher education (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Arday and Mirza 2018). Despite the popular and academic literature on Decolonising the Curriculum, “such literature remains unexamined for its assumptions, contexts, and nuances” (Shahjahan et al. 2022, 75). Whilst a singular and fixed theoretical foundation to Decolonising the Curriculum is often consciously rejected to resist reproducing a universalist colonial logic, Andreotti et al suggest there is a tendency in scholars and activists to avoid confronting how decolonial thinking involves, “complexities, tensions and paradoxes” (Andreotti et al. 2015, 22). Their point is that there must be a balance between resisting one pure, platonic conception of Decolonising the Curriculum (which for many activists and scholars would be the very opposite of decolonising) and accepting that there are describable theoretical positions within the movement. It is in this spirit that a growing corpus of work has sought to delineate some of the different approaches to the movement and tease out some of their intellectual commitments (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Shahjahan et al. 2022). In the next section I suggest there are a spectrum of views underlying the movement with two polarised positions at either end which I call the compatibility and incompatibility approach.

The Compatibility Approach

One discernible trend in the decolonising literature is commitment to consensus building and the integration of a variety of previously marginalised perspectives into the curriculum. Such a view suggests that knowledge produced and then enshrined in curricula in the West and its institutions of higher education, has developed biases that blind it to important insights available in the plethora of different intellectual traditions around the world. Andreotti et al. (2015) provide the concepts of “soft” and “radical” reform and argue that some attempts to reform curricula avoid radical critiques of structural power relationships in favour of inclusion. It therefore seeks to include those occupying marginalised social identities without any change to the general systems of knowledge production or, necessarily, the knowledge itself (Andreotti et al. 2015). As such, these approaches are wary of an “over-emphasis on the separation, incompatibility and incommunicability between Western and non-Western approaches” (Diab et al. 2020, 198). Sharjahan et al note this trend when they suggest one key meaning of decolonising is expressed in verbs such as, “enabling, centering, embedding, reconstructing, validating” (2022, 83). Here, the focus is not on the dismantling of existing knowledge but rather on synthesising knowledge with already existing disciplines (Le Grange 2016). This approach is prevalent in much of the literature in the United States and in Europe in which the focus is on ensuring the curriculum contains a “cacophony of voices” (Dennis 2018, 197).

One of the benefits of thinking of decolonising in this way is that it is attentive to the dangers of cultural essentialism in which cultures are imagined as hermetically insulated and coherently homogenised “entities that existed neatly distinct and separate in the world” (Subedi 2013, 630). Instead, it sees knowledge production as a common human project, thereby resisting the tendency of more balkanised approaches to “silence controversy” (Subedi 2013). By this, Subedi is pointing to the danger of imagining knowledge as reducible to cultural groups. To do so encourages the idea that knowledge itself is the expression of the group’s identity and therefore insulated from critique from outside its boundaries. What such a view misses, is the fact that all social groups are characterised by internal dissensus and critique as much as they are agreement.

Whilst this insight is apposite, taken to an extreme, compatibilist views can lean towards a kind of tokenism that might consider the expansion of reading lists to include scholars of colour as sufficient to claim a decolonised curriculum (Doharty, Madriaga, and Joseph-Salisbury 2021; Moosavi 2020). This might fail to take seriously the idea that the systematic exclusion of certain voices needs a systematic solution rather than palliative or cosmetic treatment. To fail to grasp this point is to cut the more transformative green shoots from the movement and stifle productive and radical change. So, whilst compatibility views provide insight and opportunity for decolonising curricula, there is a point at which they risk becoming a threat to such work. Drawing the edges of this boundary will inevitably be difficult.

There is, then, a tendency within both scholarly and activist writing that prizes consensual and iterative evolution of the knowledge universities produce and what is, as a result, taught in the curriculum. Whilst laudable, as this approach moves further towards full compatibilism, it faces a danger of political quietism, valorising the status-quo rather than openly critiquing it. Yet, whilst there is ambivalence surrounding a perceived conflation of diversity and inclusion with Decolonising the Curriculum, several scholars and student-led activist groups clearly do foreground the situation of knowers and their ability to contribute to existing academic contexts and practices. At its most compelling, the compatibilist approach can marry a strand of thinking that sees the existing knowledge produced in and by Western institutions as damaged but not beyond repair with the need to purge it of its colonialist assumptions. Instead, such knowledge needs to be epistemologically enriched by opening its boundaries and expanding its gatekeepers. It therefore takes seriously the marginalisation of some students and takes equally seriously the need to make structural changes to the assumptions that underpin the way in which knowledge is generated and how it is then recontextualised in the curriculum. At the same time, this approach must be mindful that an overfocus on inclusion risks potentially avoiding some of the politically more difficult challenges facing true educational justice. It is to versions of Decolonising the Curriculum that prioritise these challenges that I now turn.

The Incompatibility Approach

The second sense of Decolonising the Curriculum, which I call the incompatibility approach, has its roots in the more radical political movements of decolonisation (Morreira et al. 2020). These movements did not locate epistemic injustice at the level of the individual but at the level of the knowledge produced, both its method of production and its substantive claims (Santos 2016; De Sousa Santos and Meneses 2019). As such, decolonial approaches to the university need to dismantle the epistemic predilections of certain forms of Western epistemology in favour of other ways of knowing (Abu Moghli and Kadiwal 2021). These arguments are ones that reach beyond just the curriculum in so far as they focus on the methods and outcomes of knowledge production. However, at the same time, this inevitably filters through to claims about what is taught.

It is important to note here that, much like with compatibilist approaches, there are a range of views within this broad categorisation. At the more radical end exists the idea that the university and its curricula are unsalvageable, leading to the thought that we need to “exit the university entirely and construct alternatives” (Andreotti et al. 2015, 34). This is a “beyond-reform” space (Andreotti et al. 2015). Such an approach is often couched in the language of group identity, seeing the marginalised collective as the source of its own knowledge. It thereby consciously tethers knowledge to the social identities and socio-cultural context of those that produce it. Those that take a more compatibilist view are likely to be sceptical of indexing knowledge to social identity in this way (Appiah 2018). Decolonising the Curriculum, under this view, equates to the affirmation of, for example, an African epistemic identity (Mampane, Omidire, and Aluko 2018) or developing an indigenous knowledge that makes room for “our own perspectives and our own purpose” (Tuhiwai Smith and Linda 2021, 39).

Taken to its more extreme conclusion this approach to Decolonising the Curriculum, I argue, often ignores the idea that knowledge can in principle be a “non-rivalrous good” (Muller and Young 2019, 198). Which is to say that my knowing X doesn’t necessarily deny or curtail your ability to know X – it isn’t a “zero-sum property” to be bounded within group membership and distributed to the putative members of that group. At the further edge of incompatibilist approaches to Decolonising the University, there is a tendency to miss what is potentially powerful about existing academic knowledge. This is because claims arising from these sources are often seen as necessarily tainted by their historical origins in colonial injustice.

In exploring indigenous research methodologies, Tuhiwai Smith and Linda (2021) argues that a clear line can be drawn from the Enlightenment project’s notion of knowledge to the violence of Western imperialism. The classificatory system of the Enlightenment was what, for Smith, generated a concept of the human that reflected a white, male Western subject. This in turn legitimised the construction of indigenous peoples as below the true human being in the imagination of the coloniser. The very concept of the individual and human nature is, on this view, a social construction reducible to its cultural origins in the post-Enlightenment West. As Smith argues, ideas of this sort are only “real” in relation to the “system of knowledge, the formation of culture, and the formations of power in which these concepts are located” (Tuhiwai Smith and Linda 2021, 56). There is then, at best, a difference of emphasis, and at worst a polarised opposition between, an understanding of Decolonising the Curriculum as undoing injustices done to individual knowers (thereby creating more diverse epistemic communities of enquirers) and one in which the very notion of an individual knower is the source of injustice itself.

Walter Mignolo (2011), in a similar vein, conceives of the “shadow” of coloniality as the necessary counterpart to the “shine” of modernity. Which is to say that ideas that derive from Western imperialism are necessarily reliant upon violence and the abrogation of other ways of knowing. As such, claims that knowledge produced in the West transcends its contexts of production, becoming universal, are not just false, but a mechanism through which geopolitical hegemony is upheld (Quijano 2007). Furthermore, such claims are inherently “violent, exploitative, and unsustainable” (Andreotti et al. 2015, 27). For Mignolo, ideas about freedom, progress and civilisation are themselves by-products of coloniality and the domination of enslaved and indigenous peoples (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Boaventura Dos Santos, another influential thinker on the movement, suggests that the dominance of Western knowledge systems is tantamount to “epistemicide”, the thesis that Western knowledge, purporting to be universal, is in fact an aggressor that actively eradicates the valuable knowledges produced by indigenous and non-Western peoples. Santos argues that the curricula taught in universities is therefore little more than the vested interests of one dominant group over others. The knowledge universities transmit is “presented as ineluctable” (De Sousa Santos and Meneses 2019, 220) whilst in fact being little more than the epistemic outcrops of colonialism.

The point I want to make here is that, in drawing attention to the harmful and pernicious legacy of colonialism and its interrelation with the curriculum, there is a danger of glossing the diversity of thought and general epistemological dissensus that characterises much disciplinary knowledge in universities and, moreover, the curriculum. In attempting to carve a decolonial space, those that move further towards the incompatibilist approach inadvertently end up with a reified version of “Western knowledge” that isn’t responsive to areas of compatibility and affinity. There is a parallel with the dangers of the compatibilist approach mentioned above. Moving towards the compatibilist end of the spectrum results in a static view of knowledge precisely because it imagines there to be a stable category of Western knowledge that needs to be modified. In the same way, the farther end of the incompatibilist spectrum also posits the existence of a monolithic West but argues for its demolition. I argue that both end up with ossified and essentialised views of knowledge that are unlikely to achieve a dynamic and critical approach to Decolonising the Curriculum.

Ultimately, there is a difference of emphasis regarding where to locate injustice and the generation of inequalities. For the extreme compatibilists, the only issue of justice is increasing access to what is there, in so doing we have the best chance of removing whatever deformative legacy of colonialism remains. However, crucially, knowers and knowledge are separable, and the latter is not reducible to the former (Maton and Moore 2010; Muller and Young 2019). For the incompatibilists, knowledge is reducible to knowers and reflects, therefore, the “perspectives, standpoints and interests of dominant social groups” (Maton and Moore 2010, 60). Therefore, we need to either dismantle the hegemonic power of Western epistemological frameworks or develop an epistemological ecosystem in which separate knowledge systems exist in more equal power relationships. My argument has been that both approaches end up in something of a cul-de-sac because of an overly fixed view of what knowledge is. At the same time, there have been scholarly contributions to the relationship between knowledge and decolonisation that hint in the direction of my subsequent arguments, most notable the work of Odora Hopper, who tries to describe a space beyond the polarities I have tried to sketch (Odora Hoppers 2009; Hoppers and Catherine 2000).

In the next sections I situate the Capabilities Approach, a powerful and increasingly influential approach to education and social justice, within these distinctions and explore the implications for both movements.

The Capabilities Approach and Education

The Capabilities Approach is by now an established approach to social justice in education (Lopez-Fogues and Cin 2018; Vaughan and Walker 2012; Walker and Unterhalter 2007). The guiding question capabilities theorists ask is: what is “each person able to do or to be?” (Nussbaum 2011, 18). This is as opposed to questions of how much of a particular resource they command or how satisfied they report themselves to be. It is therefore a normative, political approach to human well-being that asks us to foreground the question, what real freedoms do people have to do the things they have reason to value? what capabilities do people in fact possess?

It is perhaps not surprising that the approach has found favour with educationalists concerned with matters of curriculum, knowledge, and justice (Lopez-Fogues and Cin 2018; Walker and Unterhalter 2007). Education is often imagined as fostering positive changes in young people regarding what they can do and to be within their societies (Vaughan and Walker 2012). There is, therefore, an affinity between the normative commitments of fostering the capabilities people require to lead dignified and flourishing lives, and the general educational project of expanding students’ “reasoning, criticality, imagination and reflection to form judgements about activities and lives that are worthwhile” (Vaughan and Walker 2012, 496). Capabilities theorists imagine education as a site of potential freedom; in the language of Sen, it is crucial to both well-being freedom and agency-freedom (Hinchcliffe and Terzi 2009). To be educated is, therefore, to avoid a harm and lay the essential groundwork for the development of later capabilities (Vaughan and Walker 2012). Furthermore, education is a vital tool of social justice, addressing different forms of disadvantage and inequality that would tend to proliferate absent some basic threshold of it (Lopez-Fogues and Cin 2018).

Having brought out a few of the different tensions, directions, and commitments of theoretical approaches to Decolonising the Curriculum and briefly introduced the capability approach as it applies to education, I turn in the next section to the areas of synergy and tension between the two. Sen and Nussbaum disagree on some central aspect of the Capabilities Approach: whether to specify a determinate list of capabilities, the extent to which non-human animals ought to be included, whether capabilities ought to be conceived within a rights-based framework or a consequentialist one, and the relevance of well-being as distinct from agency to name a few (Robeyns 2005). Yet, there are central points of agreement that, I suggest, help explain why the approach might struggle to accommodate some of the intellectual commitments of the further edges of both ends of the decolonising spectrum, i.e. the extreme compatibility and extreme incompatibility approaches. In making this argument, I will explore both Sen and Nussbaum’s ideas, discernible across a range of their writings, on education, culture, identity, and knowledge.

Ultimately, it is the foundational commitment to a version of Universalism (the idea that there are at least some ethical norms and claims to knowledge that exist independently of whether any particular community accepts them), and an anti-essentialist understanding of identity (the notion that cultural and ethnic identities are unstable, contested and not reducible to any one “essence”) that render the approach in tension with some aspects of the intellectual predispositions of polarised versions of Decolonsising the Curriculum. I will argue that the approach has the resources to occupy a productive space along the spectrum, avoiding the dangers of its outer edges.

Capabilities, Universalism and Decolonising the Curriculum

Martha Nussbaum has presented two book-length articulations of the Capabilities Approach to date (Nussbaum 2011, 2000). In both, she aims to outline and defend a version of Universalism that has cross-cultural bite sufficient to transcend the boundaries of the nation or group. Indeed, she is at pains to emphasise the international origins of her list of central human capabilities rooted in “years of cross-cultural discussion” (2000, 76). The central elements of this view include recognising the dignity of the person, the integrity of the body and opportunities for individual choice and agency.

In developing this view, Nussbaum is herself cognizant of the argument that we might be better off rejecting the search for a common language of values and opt for something like a “plurality of different though related frameworks” (2000, 40). She rejects this in favour of a version of Universalism because of the unsatisfactory nature, as she sees it, of the conceptual and empirical arguments that favour alternative relativistic approaches. Sen also advocates for a kind of Universalism, albeit one far more underspecified than Nussbaum. Despite not giving a definite account of what human capabilities might be, he does make clear that his notion of justice includes a commitment to “some basic demands of impartiality” and “objective reasoning” (Sen 2010, 42). Drawing on the work of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, Sen implores us to draw on the “eyes of mankind” to “overcome our own parochialism” (Sen 2010, 130). Sen’s work is, in general, suffused with scepticism surrounding communitarian tendencies to hive off communities from the kind of impartial objectivity he advocates. To do so is to risk being “swayed only by local group prejudice” (Sen 2010, 150). Sen makes the ability to reason about justice beyond cultural, national and group lines a central plank of his Capability Approach, as does Nussbaum. Therefore, we see in two of the most important capabilities theorists, a commitment to transcending the local in favour of the universal. At the same time, both would argue that this universalistic commitment is entirely compatible with locally differentiated, context-specific instantiations of what capabilities look like. Universal, under their view, does not mean identical or uniform, and it is surely likely there will be lots of ways to live, think and behave that all meet the universal standard.

How does this fit within the broad distinctions in Decolonising the Curriculum mentioned above? It is immediately clear that, under what I dub the compatibility approach, there is no necessarily antagonistic attitude towards the idea that knowledge can reach towards the universal. What distinguishes Sen and Nussbaum’s use of universal from the full compatibilist position is that they do not associate this universality with the West. Both draw an analytic distinction between the possibility of universality and existing Western knowledge and practices. This version of Universalism is a nuanced one. Neither Sen nor Nussbaum are naïve realists philosophically – that is, believers in a disembodied ego able to grasp an unmediated external reality. All knowledge is mediated by social practices. However, what they do claim is that notions such as truth, objectivity and knowledge aren’t reducible to local contexts. The human tendency towards obtuseness regarding others is likely to lead to errors in knowledge and, furthermore, the West has historically been far too blithely self-satisfied with a narrative of its own intellectual superiority (Nussbaum 2011; Sen 2010). Ultimately, whether knowledge can have cross-cultural and universal scope and whether the West is the arbiter of that knowledge, are separate questions. I take it that Sen and Nussbaum accept the former and reject the latter. They therefore distance themselves from the more complacent, Western-centric tendencies of the extreme compatibilist approach.

When we turn to the incompatibility approach, we see an initial tension. For scholars within this vein of thinking, a more radical project of decolonising is justified in part by the rejection of Universalism tout court. In Western institutions, these thinkers claim, “knowledge and truth are masked as Universalism” (Abu Moghli and Kadiwal 2021, 8). This rebuke to Universalism sometimes appears to be an attack on quite specific kinds of disciplinary knowledge, positivism in the social sciences for example, rather than “Western” knowledge per se. It is worth noting that such scepticism around universal truth, knowledge, and values is also held by many intellectual traditions within the so-called West, versions of postmodernism for example. Nevertheless, it is no doubt true that positivistic methodologies, assumptions, and research designs have been an important part of many Western academic disciplines, perhaps most notably economics and psychology. Even if the assumption of positivism isn’t a feature of all Western disciplines, many critical of Universalism suggest it is endemic to epistemic conventions of the West that there is a distinction between the knower and what is known. This fundamentally positions Western knowledge in opposition to other knowledge systems because many systems of thought outside the West do not share the assumption that knowledge “is supposed to be universal and independent of context” (Joseph Mbembe 2016, 33).

It is hard to see, therefore, how any discourse of Universalism is reconcilable with the core commitments of the extreme incompatibilist position. However, whilst there is a tension here, further work could be done to narrow the distance between anti and pro universalist positions. As mentioned above, the Capabilities Approach uses the language of Universalism in particular ways that allow it to have cross-cultural reach. This is, at least in principle, consistent with a strong commitment to plural, and diverse ways of living that recognise difference. It could turn out that incompatibilists and capabilities theorists disagree on terminology and language use rather than substantive claims. Perhaps a more cosmopolitan conception of culture, knowledge and identity might forge a way forwards (Appiah 2007).

Capabilities, Identity, and the Curriculum

A commitment to ethical universalism, however thin, is not the only feature of the approach that is potentially at odds with elements of Decolonising the Curriculum. Both Sen and Nussbaum are also keen to avoid talk of a distinct and fixed Western civilisation, culture, or knowledge. This, I argue, is for two broad reasons, firstly both have written extensively on concerns around identitarian currents in certain academic thinking and, secondly, because they share a commitment to the idea that the knowledge and values often claimed as Western, are in fact discernible in many of the world’s traditions of thought.

Both Sen and Nussbaum are committed to freedom (Nussbaum 2000, 2011; Sen, 2010). This commitment doesn’t stop when it comes to ideas of ethnic or cultural identity. Sen, like Nussbaum, argues against thinkers in more communitarian philosophical traditions who emphasise the socially dependent nature of identity, values, and knowledge (Etzioni 2014). Those at the more extreme end of the incompatibilist approach share the intuition that communities are the primary unit of value and ought to be protected and respected (Mignolo 2021). For Sen and Nussbaum, these ways of thinking about communities annul, “the role of choice in determining the cogency and relevance of particular identities” (Sen 2007, 4). Instead, group affiliations and communal solidarities only exist ethically within a framework of individual choice. Furthermore, to lionise the community is also often little more than the “shielding of old customs and practices from intelligent scrutiny” (Sen 2007, 9).

The point in relation to Decolonising the Curriculum is that both extreme incompatibilist and compatibilist approaches often rely on a clearly defined Western identity and associate this with its epistemic output and its curricula. Sen’s response is that such an identity is illusory and therefore promoting its existence, even to then critique it, obfuscates genuine global understanding and knowledge. Nussbaum makes the same point in resisting the arguments from culture that would render ideas of reason and objectivity tools of imperialism. In advocating for a renewed Socratic educational programme, she points to the “fashionable” trend of conceiving of rationality as a “male Western device” (Nussbaum 1997, 19). For her, such a view invariably leads to an anti-cosmopolitanism that sees the purpose of diversity as the affirmation of ones chosen group identity rather than the development of understanding and compassion more generally. An overreliance on fixed notions of cultural or ethnic identity ends up creating a hardened view of the individual, sculpted by their “authentic” identity rather than a potential critical reflector upon it.

Both Sen and Nussbaum have argued forcefully that to approach education and knowledge as the expression of an authentic cultural, group identity elides both the internal diversity of cultures, characterised by dissent from within, as well as the porous nature of the boundaries of cultures (Nussbaum 1997; Sen 2007) Therefore, binary thinking that pits the West against either a culturally innocent, arcadian non-West or a barbaric, primitive one, is rooted in a fallacious understanding of what different cultures in fact are. The reality is that identities are increasingly fluid, indeterminate, and hybridised as demonstrated by much recent ethnographic work (Phillips 2007). One logical outcome of the idea that cultural identity isn’t “mere destiny” (Sen 2007, 239) is that we ought to examine and scrutinise claims as they come to us rather than labelling items of knowledge “Western” or “Eastern”. In describing the roots of the Capabilities Approach, for example, Nussbaum points out that in many ways gender equality is a deeper feature of Indian thinking than American (Nussbaum 2000, 2011). Similarly, democracy has global roots entirely separable to its troubled history in and after the European Enlightenment (Appiah 2018).

We have, then, in both thinkers a hostile aversion to essentialist conceptions of culture that seek to reduce the individual to one facet of their identity and then map knowledge on top of that as a good to be owned; to do this would be to, ironically, endorse a neoliberal view of the relationship between identity, individuals and groups i.e. one based on property and ownership. I argued above that an extreme incompatibilist risks such an irony. Again, the Capabilities Approach as theorised by Sen and Nussbaum sits comfortably within the spectrum, avoiding the excesses at either pole in so far as it resists essentialist depictions of culture, knowledge, and identity.

Conclusion

This article has argued that whilst social activist movements to Decolonise the Curriculum resist singular definitions or academic origin stories, they do reflect a spectrum of views with two distinct poles. At one pole, a conception of knowledge and the curriculum that imagines a broadly functional and effective Western paradigm of knowledge that needs to open itself to other contributions and ensure those that occupy minoritized groups are not stigmatised or alienated. The danger of the more extreme compatibilist position is tokenistic approaches to Decolonising the Curriculum and mealy-mouthed apologia for the status-quo. Such a view is opposed at the other end of the spectrum by an extreme incompatibilist view in which Western knowledge and curricula represent little more than the long legacy of colonialism and capitalism and are therefore inherently incompatible with true decolonising. This view advocates a wholesale change of both the methods of knowledge production and its dissemination through the curriculum currently practiced in the West and elsewhere.

I have argued that both approaches end up with similar problems to the extent they stifle genuine criticality. This is not to imply, or even imagine, there is one place on the spectrum that “true” decolonising takes place. Rather, at the outer edges of the spectrum, there is a tendency to develop fixed views about the relationship between knowledge, culture and identity that inhibit the kind of flexibility of thinking that captures the decolonial spirit. The Capabilities Approach offers a powerful lens through which to understand the role of education in the modern world. However, in offering an unapologetically normative view of the role of social arrangements in general, and the curriculum in particular, it can’t help but take a view on many these foundational philosophical issues. Whilst it might be argued that it is possible to isolate the authors’ more substantive claims about identity, culture, and knowledge and separate them from the approach as whole, my sense is that to do so would renege on several of its core features. In exploring Sen and Nussbaum’s core ideas, I’ve suggested that their conception of capabilities can contribute to a conception of the curriculum that occupies a productive position within the spectrum of approaches identified whilst, at the same time, providing a useful conceptual tool for promoting social justice in education. These two movements are international, cross-cutting, and dynamic. Further work drawing their insights together can surely only be to the good of global educational justice and the future success of all educational institutions.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Talbot

Daniel Talbot is a PhD candidate in Education and Social Justice at the University of Lancaster. He is interested in the relationship between knowledge, culture, and identity in relation to the curriculum. He is also an Assistant Headteacher (acting) of Thomas Tallis School in Greenwich, South-East London.