The Decolonization of the University?

A book in progress

Introducing Book Project

Neutral knowledge does not exist. Knowledge production or what and how we understand “reality” and “truth” is an extremely political process. What is “reality” or “truth”? How do we know this “reality”? Is there only one reality or are there many of them? Are these “realities/truths” universal? In the world we live in today, knowledge structures are mainly shaped by colonial ontology and epistemology. Most approaches to these philosophical questions are answered by mainstream colonial values and colonial ways of knowing and being. Such approaches reinforce colonial hegemonic relations. (Tamale, 2020, p. 28)

We all know that the modern university as an institution is a product of Western traditional culture and intellectualism. This means that its practices, orientation, philosophical and pedagogical models are all geared towards Western values (Tamale, 2020, p. 44)

Is it necessary to write another book or article on the decolonization of the university? Do we risk using decolonization as a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012)? How about if we turned our attention to concrete sites of struggle? This last question leads to other questions: What is the role of university student movements in Latin America and the Caribbean in creating the conditions of possibility to decolonize the university in material (power) and symbolic (knowledge) terms? Why use decolonial theory from Latin America and the Caribbean and what does this perspective offer analytically and interpretively? Is there (geo)political value to decolonial theory? I will not answer these questions definitively, yet this book (which I am drafting) aims to explore the multiple and diverse ways in which university student movements in Latin America and the Caribbean construct oppositional political cultures within the institutional constraints and possibilities of autonomous universities in the region. It will also explore how student movements work against the forces of neoliberal globalization or global coloniality, which is intimately linked to the restructuring or, better yet, recolonization of autonomous universities through governance and curricular reforms.

To answer the above questions, it is imperative to “study up” and down and anything in between to understand the complexity of the student movement and its historical resistance against coloniality (Nader, 1972; Quijano, 2000, 2007). Critical ethnography, decolonial, space and place, and collective action theory initially provided the philosophical, methodological, conceptual, practical, political, and ethical commitments to understand how the university student movement’s political culture resisted neoliberal higher education reform. This book, however, limits itself to theoretical discussions grounded empirically in my ethnographic study to provide a decolonial interpretation of university student movements and the role they continue to play in radically democratizing the university. Although the radical democratization of the university is not decolonial in and of itself, it does create the material conditions of possibility to build an alternative university model that delinks itself from modern/colonial desires and global designs. Delinking epistemically, as Turner (2022) illustrates, is necessary yet it is not enough when we seriously consider the material, colonial, and imperial projects in which universities actively participate.

Although decolonial thought takes as its theoretical point of departure the vast array of social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, empirical studies on, with, and alongside social movements are scarce, including student movement research. The empirical dimension of this book draws on an 18-month critical ethnographic study in Honduras in which I modestly collaborated with student activists in their efforts to resist the neoliberal recolonization of the university, as students prefer to call it. I address the ontological, epistemological, and methodological limitations of Eurocentric frameworks utilized to analyze and interpret the multiplicity of social struggles in the region. I argue, further, that decolonial analyses and interpretations of student movements move the fields of social movement studies and decolonial theory forward by articulating political-economic perspectives with sociocultural interpretations of collective action (i.e, the intersection of political cultures and cultural politics). This study simultaneously contributes to decolonial studies in education, an emerging field of research that does not always situate its studies in sites of struggle. This book, lastly, will complicate the discussion on the decolonization curriculum by showing how university governance is contested by student movements in autonomous universities in their efforts to radically democratize governance structures. The inextricable relationship between governance/power and curriculum/knowledge will provide insight into the ways student movements unsettle and reconstruct power and knowledge from below in concrete ways.

The knowledges born in struggle, I contend, have sociopolitical, cultural, and decolonial implications, as well as methodological consequences. In addition to the analytical and interpretive work included in this book, I highlight how the emergence of a heterogeneously articulated student movement slowed down, at the very least, the neocolonial reconfiguration of the university.

By focusing on global neoliberal tendencies, this book addresses the sociopolitical tensions and frictions expressed between the global and the local (Lowe, 2015; Pratt, 2022). Local expressions of social conflict reveal their always already entangled relationship with global forces. The re-localization of politics here must not be confused with reactionary politics. It means instead to recognize how the particular is enmeshed in a more complex web of power, domination, resistance, and re-existence. To resist locally means that collective actors simultaneously counteract colonizing global and local powers and forces. Student movements, as I argue, are life-affirming decolonial gestures and radical expressions that make it possible to imagine another type of education. They seek to create relational modes of existence in the present and re-localize politics while not forgetting the geopolitical implications, intimacies, and frictions of trying to build a world otherwise.

Student activists, who were able to put an end to a series of neoliberal reforms implemented since the Honduran coup of 2009, reminded those in power (local, national, and global) that neoliberal higher education reform within a re-politicized autonomous university will be faced with organized resistance. This book reveals how student activists built a political culture characterized by alternative, and indeed more horizontal, forms of organizing to resist what is too often conceived fatalistically as the inevitable neoliberalization of education. It thus counters the naturalized notions of globalization as being a harmonious “flow”, which is nothing more than a recycled colonial discourse, an “innocent imperial narrative” (Pratt, 2022, p. ) hiding the darker side of colonial domination and capitalist exploitation of which universities in the Americas have always been an integral part since the 16th century.

I hope the reader finds political significance in this book since it is oriented toward a decolonial interpretation of university student movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region in which university student activists have engaged in collective action within and beyond higher education institutions for over a century. The educational significance of this work revolves around the need to rethink and rebuild universities in radically democratic terms. This rethinking involves more than democratizing access to higher education. It’s about radically democratizing governance, curriculum, knowledge, research, and ways of knowing, being, doing, relating, and sensing. It’s about situating the university socially and politically. Transforming the university into a radically democratic place in which students are directly and meaningfully involved in university governance and curriculum reform opens a path toward decolonial futures where knowledge is no longer dictated from above but is rather deconstructed and reconstructed politically from below—that is, through praxis.

Why write another book on the decolonization of the university?

Since this book also addresses the potential decolonization of the university, what else can be stated that has not already been addressed by well-known works on the topic? I will focus on four distinctions: 1) governance, 2) geography, 3) autonomous university, 4) student movements. I base these distinctions by drawing on the work of Grosfoguel, Castro-Gomez, Bhambra, Jansen, Sousa Santos, Tuck and Yang, Stein, and Andreotti.

In Decolonizing the Westernized University, Grosfoguel et al. 2016. offer theoretical insights in terms of critiquing the university while avoiding the tendency to present it in universalist terms—hence the name “westernized university.” By qualifying it as such, we are presented with another story about the university, one that does not necessarily originate in the West but one that became the dominant model through Euromodern colonialism. This edited book focused on eight key questions:

(1) What is the westernized university? (2) How did it emerge in various locales around the world? (3) What is westernized about it? (4) What have been and are the aims of the westernized university? (5) What is the future of the westernized university? (6) What should be the aims of higher education in the US and/or in other regions on the planet? (7) How can we who work in, through and outside these sites of knowledge production—with local or global social movements—participate in the slow careful process of decolonizing the westernized university from within and without? (8) How have others responded to the crisis in higher education?

My major focus is to explore the seventh question more deeply by providing a thick description of the Honduran university student movement and its role in unsettling the global designs of coloniality. This book also seeks to break away from the epistemological-existential prison established by philosophies of education, curriculum theory, and other education studies, which have ignored the knowledge production from other geographies and struggles, particularly those from the Global South. It does not only seek to write about the decolonization of the university from a textualist methodological approach but rather from sites of struggles that position themselves within, against, and beyond higher education institutions.

Another important question this book seeks to explore further is the following: How can we create learning spaces in ways that are historically rooted in local histories and conscious of global designs while oriented by a negative decolonial ethics—that is sensitive to the aforementioned multiple intersecting axes of oppression—and a positive decolonial ethics.

To be continued…