Towards a decolonial curriculum of human rights education in Palestine

Abstract

The politics of knowledge economy have long governed the process of spreading the United Nation's universal culture of human rights into diverse contexts. This article examines the strategies utilized in introducing and operationalizing the UN's normative discourse of human rights through integrating an ideological model of Human Rights Education in the Gaza Strip. This is through the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and its education provision services in Gaza. In particular, I apply an abridged version of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, from a discursive psychological viewpoint, to generate an understanding of identity construction within the wider context of the continuing Israeli settler‐colonial project in Palestine. The aim is to challenge the particular subject position of Palestinian learners as advocates for human rights, which they cannot claim through the UN's highly bureaucratic and standardized tools. In this context, a decolonial response is indispensable for addressing the role of the politics of knowledge production of human rights in regulating the learners’ subjectivities while ignoring the intricate geopolitical and historical factors that shape the learners’ identities. Therefore, the article contributes to decolonial research by examining the UNRWA as a modern and hegemonic institution that guards and delivers a decontextualized HRE curriculum in Gaza.

Psychology as a site for decolonial analysis

“…Other articles consider the colonial violence of modern individualist ways of being that might otherwise appear unproblematic. These include a comparative ethnographic analysis of interactions between green industry and Indigenous communities in Brazil and Norway (Normann, 2022), discourse analysis of United Nations curriculum for human rights education in Palestine (Albhaisi, 2022), and a mixed‐methods investigation of the modernity/coloniality of love and care as a function of religious participation in Ghana (Osei‐Tutu et al., 2022).…”

Decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study

“…In contrast to the disciplinary decadence or “fetishization of method” (Gordon, 2014, p.81) that often characterizes mainstream psychology (see, e.g., Wilson, 2005), the contributions are methodologically pluralist. They include quasi‐experimental comparison and quantitative analyses of survey data (Dutt et al., 2022; Osei‐Tutu et al., 2022; Rivera Pichardo et al., 2022), as well as thematic analyses of video transcripts (Burrage et al., 2022), Foucauldian discourse analysis (Albhaisi, 2022), ethnographic‐styled participant observation (Lukate, 2022; Normann, 2022), and other techniques of qualitative research (e.g., Ficklin et al., 2022). As Atallah and Dutta (2021) note in their contribution to the second installment of the special issue, “Far too often, disciplinary criteria and standards of academic excellence work to silence critical questionings by colonized people” (p. 3).…”

“…Relatedly, hegemonic articulations of HRE promote a modern individualist construction of civic identity as a citizen of the world with allegiances to a global community, at the expense of solidarities with and obligations toward more local forms of community. Finally, hegemonic constructions of HRE articulate a decontextualized form of tolerance that “reduc[es] human suffering into feelings/differences, and shift[s] the focus from the issue of justice to … attitudes of respect and sensitivity” (Albhaisi, 2022, p. 156). By promoting a modern/colonial model of HRE that focuses on individual rights abstracted from political and historical contexts, the curriculum contributes to the “normalization of the status quo and the continuation of the Israeli settler‐colonial project” (Albhaisi, 2022, p. 159).…”

“…The papers in this section extend this tradition. When NGOs create human rights curricula for Palestinian refugee learners (Albhaisi, 2022), they draw on the modern/colonial individualist tools of psychological science that whitewash and sanitize structural racism by representing it as equipotential, individual prejudice (see also Dixon et al., 2010; Hammack, 2011; Malherbe et al., 2021). When people across the world turn to psychologists, pastors, or other counselors for relationship advice, the wisdom they receive rests on modern/colonial individualist constructions of love and well‐being that prioritize mutual exploration, self‐expansion (Aron et al., 2013), and pursuit of high‐arousal positive affect (Tsai, 2007) over more enduring, broader solidarities that afford peace of mind and assurance of support (Osei‐Tutu et al., 2022).…”

“…In another article, Albhaisi (2022) applies Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to a United Nations Human Rights Education (HRE) curriculum for Palestinian refugee learners in Gaza. Her analysis reveals modern/colonial individualist elements in several features of HRE.…”