Toward a transgressive decolonial hermeneutics in activist education research

Anibal Quijano: (Dis)entangling the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum

“…Although there is limited space to discuss how these questions are being explored by sites of struggle, namely student movements in the region (Fúnez‐Flores, 2020, 2021), it is important to note that they are collectively creating educational spaces and politically organising to radically democratise university governance structures and curriculum reform. Their way of organising horizontally through public assemblies, workshops, popular education, social media and WordPress publications gesture towards possible ways to unsettle the university in material and symbolic terms.…”

“…The geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum thus constitute the enduring violent pedagogical acts that systematically subjugate and destroy other interpretations to the degree in which the colonised other views and interprets the world through the coloniser's eyes, conceptual networks, theoretical frameworks, hermeneutics, methodologies, aesthetics and ontological assumptions. The images reflected by these distorted lenses are precisely the negative representations of others (Fúnez-Flores, 2021), that is, of those on the receiving end of coloniality. In previous sections, I have made evident that structural and discursive power are intimately intertwined, thereby co-producing one another.…”

“…Carter, 2008), while others underscore social ontology and the material relations of power (Monzó & McLaren, 2014). Geopolitically attuned perspectives informing comparative and international education (Andreotti et al, 2016; Fúnez‐Flores, 2021, 2022b; Fúnez‐Flores et al, 2022a, 2022b; Shahjahan, 2016; Stein, 2021) emphasise both the material and symbolic more explicitly, utilising the geopolitics of knowledge as an analytic to address how the curriculum is instrumentalised through the internationalisation of higher education supported by international financial organisations and universities.…”

“…The geopolitics of curriculum is always already implicated in the ontological re‐reading and geopolitico‐epistemological reinterpretation of the world or social totality of the modern/colonial capitalist world system. Elsewhere, I have advanced transgressive decolonial hermeneutics (TDH) (Fúnez‐Flores, 2021), which aims to shift the geography of reason by think from and with other histories, geographies and epistemologies. Discurrere, in many ways, may be used in tandem with TDH.…”

Occupation in the Anthropocene and Ethical Relationality

“…I further drew on the theoretical methodology of transgressive decolonial hermeneutics, which aims to theorize collective action and texts in relation to context ( Fúnez-Flores, 2021 ). Fúnez-Flores (2021) describes three steps: Initially, “the primary ontological point of departure is the social totality of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system ” (p. 188). Next, “the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being ” is interpreted and reconceptualized to explore entanglements between contexts and processes of resistance (p. 188).…”