Coloniality and Education: Gender Race and Difference
Explore how this theme examines the work of education in the production of identities and social difference.
This theme explores the intersections of education, society and citizenship, addressing the histories and social geographies of a global post-colonial landscape. In particular it examines the work of education in the production of identities and social difference.
Research in this theme explores the dynamic relationships between education and identities, in particular the intersections in diverse contexts of gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; nationality, religion and citizenship; migration and displacement; youth, age and generation; work and employment; socio-economic status, class and caste. This attends closely to the reciprocal ways that educational provision, uptake and outcomes systematically embed social differences and stratification.
Informed by sociological, anthropological, feminist, poststructural and postcolonial perspectives, CIE members have used a wide range of research methods and intersectional analyses to critically engage with the power relations of identity production. These analyses are central to understandings of educational and social exclusion as key concerns for international development.
Research by CIE faculty, partners in the Global South and doctoral researchers within this theme has explored the following questions:
- How has education (re-)produced social differences (by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status etc.) and distinctions in specific local contexts?
- How have school processes framed and legitimated particular constellations of gender and sexuality? How is gender violence implicated in education and beyond?
- How have colonial histories of higher education and schooling privileged particular knowledges and valorised particular citizen identities? In what ways do these histories continue to shape contemporary postcolonial societies?
- How are identity and difference theorised in (inter-)national policy and practice? How do these theorisations constrain or limit the possibilities for research and social action?
- How are identity and social location significant to educational outcomes, social participation, citizenship and livelihoods?
- How does space and place shape the possibilities for youth citizenship in particular local and national contexts?
- How do hegemonic discourses of development frame the relationships between education and work? What are the absences and silences in these discourses? As researchers, how can we make these absences visible?
Research in this theme has engaged in four significant fields:
Gender and education
There has been a long history of CIE research into education and gender as it intersects with other structures of identity in a range of postcolonial contexts. This work has focused on the colonial histories of education, the curriculum and its gendered assumptions; student experiences of gendered inequalities, violence and exclusion and the ways that educational institutions in different contexts produce or address these. In turn these studies have raised questions about theoretical understandings of coloniality, education and gender in the field of international development.
Recent work in this sub-theme has examined and complicated the celebratory narrative of gender parity in HE in India, attending to the ways gender inequalities and social stratification in postcolonial Global South contexts are enmeshed.
Citizenship identities and coloniality
This sub theme engages with education and the production of citizen identities in a range of postcolonial contexts. Through this we explore the educational, institutional and social in-/exclusions of different kinds of citizens (regional, religious, racialised, ethnic or Indigenous) within their local contexts. In recent work focused on youth citizenship identities across different Muslim-majority countries of the Global South, we traced how their discourses of belonging reverberate with traces of the colonial past and the scars of their national formation. Against, Eurocentric ideals of citizenship, we highlight the significance of religion, nation, race, ethnicity and gender in youth narratives of identity and the work of education in producing these.
Previous work in this sub-theme has focused on the production of indigenous Adivasi and rural youth identities in India through intersecting axes of gender, religion, ethnicity and citizenship discourses. This work examined the dominant discursive strains that produce the post-colonial nation-state and citizen, and through this position groups like the indigenous Adivasis and rural youth in opposition to ideas of the ‘modern’.
Young people, education and work
This theme addresses the social landscape of education, work and livelihoods within the Global South. It challenges dominant narratives of development that tend to assume a linear trajectory through education and into work. It instead highlights the dynamic relationships between education, work and family life in different majority world contexts.
Research has explored young people’s imaginaries of work and mobilities in conditions of precarity and conflict. Our analyses attend closely to location (social, cultural and geographical), gender, race, religion and other identity structures to question the work of education in the production of the worker.
Recent work in this sub-theme has focused on multiple and contingent understandings of work, employment and employability in youth within ‘post’ pandemic contexts, attending to their work-education trajectories to capture links and tensions between contemporary global trends, national (policy) imperatives and their everyday navigations of education.
The following CIE members work within this theme, alongside CIE Alumni and research partners: