Coloniality, Whiteness, and Global Higher Education: Reckoning Categories and Reimagining Otherwise
Sharon Stein, University of British Columbia
Kumari Beck, Simon Fraser University
Many have noted how coloniality and whiteness are deeply rooted in the process of global higher education. This is evident in all areas of higher education, such as the purpose of teaching and learning, curriculum, research and scholarships, and or impact of higher education in diverse societal contexts, both including human and non-human worlds. The fact that knowledge is still assumed to flow from the Global North to the South, as well as in the desire of some in the Global South to belong in and be validated by the Global North, highlights the important role of coloniality of knowledge. Across these and many other mainstream mobility patterns of policy, people, and imaginaries, coloniality and whiteness shows itself to be in the foundation of global higher education. In light of the extensive work on coloniality in its most varied forms in higher education, using a decolonial lens, this panel explores: “How can we imagine education and research in global higher education beyond the confines of modernity and its violences?”.
To this end, some questions that this proposed panel explore are:
● Which/whose knowledges are most highly valued and validated in the context of global higher education, and whose are denigrated, invisibilized, and erased?
● How is whiteness reproduced in the context of global higher education?
● How might we exist, practice, and research beyond the abyssal line? What are the challenges and complexities that commonly arise in efforts to do so?
● How are higher education scholars and practitioners, even those of us whose work is critical or decolonial, also complicit in the coloniality of higher education?
This panel will begin with a paper interrogating the persistence of white supremacy sensibility (WSS) and how it manifests in higher education located in white majority countries in the Global North. Building on the idea of WSS, the second paper interrogates how internationalization of higher education, as a taken-for granted and desirable institutional or state policy, reproduces Whiteness and coloniality in the internationalization of higher education through ideological frames produced through texts such as definitions and policies, and colonial structures. The third paper, as a conceptual paper seeks to unpack the nation-state ontology which in turn challenges the inherent logic of “internationalization” itself pervading global higher education policy and practices. The latter suggests pursuing inter-being as alternatives to promoting planetary consciousness, rather than exclusively focusing on trans/national problems in higher education.
