Decolonial education and geography: Beyond the 2017 Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference

Abstract

This review is inspired by the recent resurgence of grassroots movements aimed at the decolonisation of education. The departure point of the paper are the numerous, recent academic responses to campaigns such as Rhodes Must Fall, Why is My Curriculum White?, Why Isn't My Professor Black?, and #LiberateMyDegree. Following from there, the narrative is divided into two sections. The first part reviews theoretical approaches to decolonial education, especially those rooted in the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality paradigm. The second part analyses the ways in which geographers have applied these ideas to our discipline. The review pays particular attention to the 2017 Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference, curated under the “Decolonising geographical knowledges” theme. I argue that as geographers, we have to continue reflecting on the meaning of decolonial praxis, especially in relation to geographical education, beyond the recent conference. To these ends, the review concludes with seven specific questions for geographers to consider in the near future.

Back to the Source: Moving Upstream in the Curricular Rivers of Coloniality

“…Modernism/coloniality and the decolonial turn are now creating a theoretical upheaval most notably in such academic departments as Environmental Studies (Domanska, 2015; Singh, 2018), Education (Funes-Flores and Phillion, 2019), Geography (Stanek, 2019; Vannini, 2015), Ethnic Studies (Sandoval, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Wynter, 2003), Sociology (Grosfoguel, 2008) and Women’s and Gender Studies (Braidotti, 2018: Haraway, 2016a), but spilling out across academia judging by the number of conferences and workshops currently being offered internationally. The authors of this article have been involved with the decolonial turn in their lives, teaching, and scholarship for years, and during the last 5 years have revised our teaching approaches given the flood of new papers and books on the subject of coloniality and decoloniality.…”

This Moment is the Curriculum: Equity, Inclusion, and Collectivist Critical Curriculum Mapping for Study Abroad Programs in the COVID-19 Era

“…Increasingly, SAPs at predominantly White colleges and universities are addressing Black students’ decolonial (Dei, 2019; Stanek, 2019) and collectivist worldviews (Lee & Green, 2016; Swaidan et al, 2008). Black women faculty are often the creators and facilitators of these programs (Dillard, 2020; Dillard et al, 2017; Green et al, 2017).…”

“…In other words, I reached the self-realization that my mis education in Kenyan schools primed me not only to comprehend but also to use my lived experience as a text for teaching others how curriculum functions as a necropolitical apparatus. “Decolonial education for a pluriversal world is inevitably linked to the politics of knowledge production in modern/colonial times” (Stanek, 2019, p. 4). Thus, the questions that I raised for our curriculum planning team were as follows: How do we dis engage from curriculum as a necropolitical knowledge system that reinforces the state’s right to hierarchize humans and determine which racialized, classed, sexed, gendered, and otherwise marked bodies may live and which must die?…”

Reflecting on Geography higher education in Sri Lanka: Unpacking/releasing the hegemonic burden…

“…My acceptance of the TIBG invitation to reflect on “Geography Today in Sri Lanka” with a focus on “University Geography,” had, I felt, automatically placed me within the larger debate on decolonising geographical knowledge and Geography in Higher Education that had taken place in Anglophone Geography (Jazeel, 2017; Stanek, 2019). Though sceptical about implementing decolonising pedagogies in Geography given the predominance of Anglophonic Geography in the rest of the world, I engage in this commentary raising two issues: how well we have been able to inculcate a geographical perspective through our pedagogical practices, and to what extent it is a “Sri Lankan Geography?” These are timely issues to be raised within the context of decoloniality and within the larger debate of intrinsic versus instrumental value of higher education in social science in general and geographical education in particular 1…”

“…In this commentary, I reflect on the journey of disciplinary Geography by tracing its beginnings and directions, though very briefly, and commenting on the challenges ahead while being mindful of the broader issues that have been raised within the decoloniality debate (i.e., Bhambra et al, 2018; Esson et. al., 2017; Halvorsen, 2018; Jazeel, 2014, 2017; Stanek, 2019). In essence, I interrogate the geographical nature – lack of geographical thinking and absence of Sri Lanka – of geographical higher education at the undergraduate level in Sri Lanka.…”