Interrupting the Coloniality of Knowledge Production in Comparative Education: Postsocialist and Postcolonial Dialogues after the Cold War

Abstract

This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the "emancipatory project" of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a nonhierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of "different worlds," thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held the promise of opening new dialogues between the formerly separated three worlds. However, soon after 1989, this space closed and the possibilities for dialogue became subsumed into broader globalization debates, positioning the post-socialist region of Southeastern/Central Europe and its education systems on a "journey" towards the West and (re)directing knowledge flows from West to East and North to South (Silova 2014). This closure is symptomatic of a well-established tradition in comparative research to use the West as a single yardstick for understanding the world. 1 Ranging from modernization theory to world culture theory to postmodern theory, the discussion of non-Western education systems is often framed as "an aberration to the European 'norm' either in respect to their origins or to the extent to which they demonstrate 'postmodern' characteristics" (Tikly 1999, 617). While offering an interpretation of broad trends associated with globalization processes, the preference for Western-centric theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches (re)produces a familiar yet inevitably one-sided image of the world. At the same time, it homogenizes the multiplicity of non-Western realities, devalues epistemic differences, and overlooks alternative interpretations (Connell 2007; Takayama et al. 2016). We are thus painfully reminded that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the foundation of modern knowledge production remains both "territorial and imperial" (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2009, 206; se...

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