Toward a Decolonial Ethics in Human Rights and Peace Education

This article argues that interventions in HRE and PE that aim to decolonize understandings and praxes of peace and human rights will inevitably have to address the issue of decolonial ethics. Decolonial ethics imagines a set of ethical orientations that confront conventional assumptions about culture and history and challenge the normally uninterrogated consequences of coloniality (which is an enduring process that is still very much with us today, as opposed to colonialism which is understood as a temporal period of oppression that has come and gone) and Eurocentrism in disciplinary discourses and practices. Although both HRE and PE have historically claimed an ethical mission that has attempted in the past to articulate responses to the ethical problem of how to struggle against violations of rights and to reinstate respect and protection of rights and positive peace in the world, both conventional and progressive approaches have been generally unreflective about the ethical implications of coloniality and Eurocentrism in these fields. The article explores how decolonial reflections on ethics sketch a different path in HRE and PE from the familiar ethical theories along three directions: border thinking, being human as praxis, and pluriversality

Exploring the Implications of Citizenship-as-Equality in Critical Citizenship Education. A Response to The Practice of Equality: A Critical Understanding of Democratic Citizenship Education

This is a response to Ruitenberg’s (2015) argument that citizenship-as-equality should be the focus of citizenship education. My aim in the response is to offer clarifying comments and questions and suggest further ideas for expanding her analysis, highlighting in particular two perspectives that deserve more attention: first, the role of emotions in the constitution of political subjectification and the practice of equality; second, the possible openings that might be created when the notion of citizenship-as-equality is utilized as a point of departure to instill more criticality in students’ understandings of and feelings about citizenship

Greek-Cypriot teachers' constructions of Turkish-speaking children's identities: critical race theory and education in a conflict-ridden society

This article examines Greek-Cypriot teachers' constructions of Turkish-speaking children's identities in the Greek-Cypriot educational system. Drawing on interviews and classroom observations from a two-year ethnographic study conducted in three primary schools in the Republic of Cyprus, the author explores how Turkish-speaking children enrolled in these schools are racialised, ethnicised and classed within the dominant discourse of Greek-Cypriot teachers. The article discusses how the homogenised perceptions expressed by the majority of participating teachers in this study are illustrative of structural racism that reinforces these constructions in teaching practices. Yet at the same time, resistance is present in the discourse and practice of a few teachers; this resistance is expressed through a counter-positioning of the 'normal/ised' identities of Turkish-speaking children. The author argues that without structural transformation, the fact and practice of racism/ nationalism/ classism will go unaltered in schools

Decolonial possibilities in South African higher education: Reconfiguring humanising pedagogies as/with decolonising pedagogies

This article is an attempt to bring theoretical concepts offered by decolonial theories into conversation with ‘humanising pedagogy.’ The question that drives this analysis is: What are the links between humanisation and the decolonisation of higher education, and what does this imply for pedagogical praxis? This intervention offers valuable insights that reconfigure humanising pedagogy in relation to the decolonial project of social transformation, yet one that does not disavow the challenges—namely, the complexities, tensions and paradoxes—residing therein. The article discusses three approaches to the decolonisation of higher education that have been proposed and suggests that if the desired reform is radical, educators within the sector in South Africa will need to interrogate the pedagogical practices emerging from Eurocentric knowledge approaches by drawing on and twisting these very practices. These efforts can provide spaces to enact decolonial pedagogies that reclaim colonised practices. The article concludes with some reflections on what this idea might imply for South African higher education.Keywords: decolonisation; decolonising pedagogy; higher education; humanising pedagogy; South Africa; transformatio

Political Emotions in the Classroom: How Affective Citizenship Education Illuminates the Debate Between Agonists and Deliberators

This is a response to Ásgeir Tryggvason’s argument that the deliberative critique of the agonistic approach to citizenship education is based on a misreading of the main concepts in agonistic theory—a misreading that has important implications for any attempt to bring closer agonism and deliberation in citizenship education. My aim in this response is to offer some clarifying comments and questions and suggest some further ideas for expanding Tryggvason’s analysis, highlighting in particular two perspectives that, in my view, deserve further attention in citizenship education: first, the consequences of cultivating agonistic emotions in the classroom; and, second, the possibilities and limitations of acknowledging what has been called affective citizenship as an important element of citizenship education. My response concludes by discussing how affective citizenship education illuminates the debate between agonists and deliberators

Re-imagining socially just pedagogies in higher education: the contribution of contemporary theoretical perspectives

Despite post-apartheid policy intentions to redress the effects of apartheid, inequalities in higher education have remained an endemic problem in South Africa, and continue to have a major influence on students and educators in South Africa. This has recently been foregrounded in student-led protests regarding equitable access to higher education (#FeesMustFall) and requests to decolonise the curriculum (#RhodesMustFall)—reigniting attention towards the enormous disparities that still exist in the South African education system generally, and which includes the higher education sector. Those institutions which were historically disadvantaged continue to struggle with paucity in terms of funding, geopolitical positioning, human and material resources. Student protest movements have resonated and reverberated across multiple higher education contexts internationally as well (for example at Oxford University, in the United Kingdom and the #StudentBlackOut demonstrations planned from Yale to University of Missouri in the United States). Conducting research into issues of social justice in relation to higher education pedagogical practices is thus of crucial importance in the present time and space, which remains plagued by issues of inequity.DHE

Critical posthumanism, new materialisms and the affective turn for socially just pedagogies in higher education

Critical posthumanism, new/feminist materialisms and the affective turn have a great deal in common with each other, and can be seen as similar perspectives with slightly different emphases in each framework, all focusing on: relational ontologies; a critique of dualisms; and engagements with matter and the non-human. Feminist thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, Nancy Tuana, Vicky Kirby, Jane Bennett,and Stacey Alaimo, amongst others, have been identified both as critical posthumanists and new/feminist materialists, and have also contributed to ideas about the affective turn. Many of these scholars have been influenced by the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their notions of monism and vitalism, and have moved beyond the centrality of discourse and cartesian dualisms to incorporate a vision of human/nonhuman, body/mind, subject/object, nature/culture, matter/ meaning, continuity/discontinuity, beginning/returning and creation/renewal (Barad 2007) in their work.DHE