International organizations (IOs), epistemic tools of influence,and the colonial geopolitics of knowledge production in higher education policy

Abstract

While other scholars have analyzed the way that international organizations (IOs) in higher education policy may contribute to neocolonial domination, this paper illuminates not only on how IOs’ epistemic activities promulgate one-size fit all solutions, but centers the colonial structures of knowledge/power that inform the why (or logic) of these IOs’ epistemic activities and their effects. A decolonial analysis of discursive artifacts and tools such as policy reports, performance indicators, and technical assistance, of the OECD and World Bank, suggests that standardized IO policy processes and practices reproduce global inequities. In collusion with other policy actors, these IOs constitute and perpetuate coloniality in global higher education, through enacting a god-eye point of view, colonial difference, and the geopolitics of knowledge. This article proposes a set of questions that may open the possibility of ‘delinking’ from modern/colonial world systems and pushes us to decolonize our imaginaries of the landscape of global HE.     

二战后英国在东南亚的非殖民化研究现状述评

目前国内外学者对二战前英国在东南亚的殖民统治的研究已取得了丰硕的成果,而对战后英国重返东南亚的探讨还远远不够深入。国外学者对这段历史的研究带有较大的缺陷,其主流观点也经历了两次偏摆;而中国学者的研究则相当滞后,零星的成果也相当粗糙。英国是主动撤离东南亚,还是被赶出东南亚,成为中外学者争论的焦点。所幸的是,英国政府已相继公布了有关这段历史的大部分档案材料,这使我们研究战后英国在东南亚的非殖民化成为可能。     

Epistemic Perspective and Online Epistemic Processing of Evidence: Developmental and Domain Differences

Relations between epistemic perspective and online epistemic processing of evidence when reading a text were examined. Thirty-seven young adolescents and 24 graduate university students were asked to read and think aloud with two texts, one in the history domain and the other in the science domain. Participants also completed a prior-knowledge test and an instrument assessing their epistemic perspective. Results showed that participants who exhibited an evaluativist epistemic perspective and high prior knowledge used the epistemic standard of scientific research more than participants who held a nonevaluativist epistemic perspective. Furthermore, an age-related developmental difference was observed, with adults using the epistemic standard of scientific research more than young adolescents. Domain differences were observed in both participants’ epistemic perspectives and online epistemic processing. Participants overall engaged in online epistemic processing of evidence more in the history topic than in the science topic.     

(De)coloniality and South African academe

ABSTRACT

The colonial nature of South African universities remains a source of debate among students and academics. Decolonization as rethinking academic institutional practices seems less controversial; the specificity of how to decolonize the academia is the core of divergent arguments and contesting ideologies. Consequently, many suggestions and methods for the decolonization of South African universities have been proffered. Although some of these suggestions are pertinent, a critical question about what should South African academe decolonize from needs to be engaged. This requires a critical, theoretical and intellectual discourse of coloniality in order to rethink the academia in South Africa. Drawing from Anibal Quijano’s critical discourse of coloniality of power, this paper (re)visits the nature of coloniality, explores approaches to decolonization and situates these understandings to the academia in postcolonial South Africa. A polycentric approach to decolonization is supported with a goal of decolonization as innovations.     

Transpacific precarities: responding to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found and Rita Wong’s forage in East Asia

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa’s father; and Rita Wong’s forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or “e-waste”). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites.     

Community organizing,schools, and the right to the city

One of the central tenets of the neoliberal world view is that there is no alternative to market-based societies with their focus on competition, individualism, and the abandonment of social safety nets and environmental protections. This vision has become the new common sense. As neoliberal policies and practices have spread across the planet, communities and regions have been turned into winners and losers with seemingly little voice in the matter. Alternatives, however, are in fact being invented in places that have been most victimized by this process. Much can be learned from them. Non-formal and formal educators in Detroit, Michigan and Roxbury, Massachusetts are demonstrating how young people can become participants in efforts to resist this vision and join with their communities in inventing solutions that promise to be healthier for human beings and the natural world.     

A Roundabout Revolution: Rethinking the Decolonization of Rwanda by the Practices of the Catholic Scouting Movement, 1954–1964

Modelling itself on the organizational structure and the physical fitness culture of Catholic scouting, the xaveri movement in Rwanda developed within a climate which was highly susceptible to the development of deep racial and political divisions. Between 1954 and 1964, this Catholic youth organization was influential in the gestation of a Christian democratic culture which was one of the essential elements of the ideology behind the ‘Hutu revolution’. Covering the colonial to the postcolonial period and from the angle of the rise of the xaveri movement, this paper shows how the ‘Hutu revolution’ was a consequence of a liberation struggle from an imagined oppressor. This is in reference to colonial privileges attributed (until the end of the 1940s) to the Tutsi minority. However, and still from the perspective of the organization explored here, it seems that the model of the ‘civilised Tutsi’ targeted by the revolutionary Hutu movement was the essential referent of the more subconscious invention by republican leaders.     

认知心理分析模式与日语认识情态

为了更好地描写日语认识情态，本文提出了认知心理分析模式，用这一模式描写了日语认识情态的主要表现形式。并在此基础上尝试整理日语认识情态的系统。     

Decolonizing educational/curriculum studies in East Asia: problematizing shadow education in South Korea

This essay review critically engages Young Chun Kim's book, Shadow Education and the Curriculum and Culture of Schooling in South Korea, by responding to two central questions at its heart: What does decolonization of educational research mean and what does it look like? In what way can cultural studies of countries with histories of colonized educational systems challenge the inertia to recapitulate colonized historical consciousness? Kim provides theoretical and empirical foundations for generating intellectual space that reveals the dialectical relationship between the dominant modes of discourse in educational research and aspirations of the colonized to envision their own educational culture and history.     

Modes of knowledge and patterns of power

The paper attempts to identify the extent to which modes of knowledge can be associated with different patterns of and assumptions about power.It discusses the meanings and scope of power itself, i.e. both within and beyond epistemic communities, as against ‘social robustness’ implying more democratic or inclusive forms of evaluation.It analyses the extent to which knowledge has shifted from an internalist perspective relying on the prestige of epistemic communities towards socially relevant assumptions resting within social contexts. It discusses the factors affecting types of power patterns, such as: the nature of sponsors’ objectives and the uses to which they might put knowledge; epistemic characteristics; the nature of the resource required, and the stage of finalisation reached. It sketches the range of models of sponsorship to which knowledge is subjected – from that of the free standing and autonomous individual through different patterns of sponsorship to the directly managed.It attempts to link these classifications to a range of empirical examples, including the power of knowledge in government and in crossing the boundaries between universities and industry.In discussing the reciprocal relationships between power and knowledge, it accepts that power affects the identification, use and transmission of knowledge. It is concerned, however, to question overdetermined perspectives of the relationships between knowledge and power whose mutual impacts may be strong but not easily predicted or defined.