Economic Literacy Otherwise: A Critical Reflection on Educating for Earth-Centred, Caring Economies in a Migrant-Settler Colony

Abstract: Education systems and practices shaped by a colonial global imaginary played a central role in the settler colonial project and continue to be complicit in contemporary national and regional processes of expropriation, exploitation and hyper-consumption. How do we unlearn dominant economic logics of migrant settler colonialism and neoliberal development? How do we explicate the linkages between nature, economy and culture? How do we cultivate alternative relational rather than exploitative economic imaginaries and practices? This article presents a critical reflection on the pedagogical possibilities and complexities of interrupting hegemonic economic logics in development education in an Australian teacher education setting. In framing the article around the notion of Economic Literacy Otherwise, it takes direct inspiration from the work of the Decolonial Futures Collective (DCF) which is premised on Indigenous conceptions of care, earth-centeredness, social justice and solidarity. Specifically, I discuss selected pedagogical strategies that are responsive to two salient identities and subjectivities: 1) being teachers and 2) earthcare-centred sustainable livelihoods and living. This analysis identifies fruitful openings for decoding dominant economic logics of development as well as cultivating alternative economic and citizen imaginaries and practices.

Key words: Development Education; Australia; Decolonial; Indigenous Economies.

Introduction

The Australian settler colony is built on a violent history of invasion, dispossession, extraction and dehumanisation (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Education systems and practices shaped by a colonial global imaginary played a central role in the settler colonial project and continue to be complicit in a contemporary national and regional process of expropriation, exploitation and hyper consumption. How then do we interrupt and deconstruct the economic logics of dominant Australian development education paradigms?

To grapple with these questions, I draw on the educational work of the Decolonial Futures Collective (DFC) who coined the term ‘Global Education and Global Citizen OTHERWISE’ (Stein, Andreotti, Suša et al., 2020). The Collective consists of researchers, artists, educators, students and activists concerned with colonialism, racism, climate change, unsustainability, economic instability, mental health crises and the intensification of economic, social and ecological violence. Their work (including research, art and pedagogical experiments) aims to ‘enable healthier possibilities of (co)existence that are viable, but are unthinkable/unimaginable within dominant cognitive and affective frames of reference’ (Decolonial Futures Network, 2022: 3).

The DFC approach to Global Citizenship Otherwise is centered on values for pluriversality, earth-centeredness, care, social justice and solidarity as opposed to dominant narratives of human-centered, universal, market- and technology-driven notions of development and progress. In this article, I reflect critically on the possibilities and challenges of teaching about economics and development Otherwise in settler colonial teacher education settings in Australia. After providing a brief overview of dominant trends in development education in Australia, I share my understanding and approach to Economic Literacy Otherwise in undergraduate and postgraduate courses on international education and development developed for preservice teachers. In particular, I discuss selected curricular and pedagogical choices and strategies to name and deconstruct dominant economic logics that speak to salient learner identities i.e. teachers and sustainable living. The article ends with critical reflection on enduring constraints and challenges of centering Indigenous knowledges and ways of being in development education.

Context

Similar to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, the term global citizenship education (GCE) has begun to replace development education in Australian educational contexts (Peterson, 2020). The main reference text for GCE in Australia titled the Global Perspectives Framework for Australian Schools was developed and published in 2008 under the aegis of the bilateral aid agency AUSAID renamed perhaps more appropriately as the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) (Curriculum Corporation, 2008). The Framework was developed by the Commonwealth of Australia, in conjunction with then AusAID, the Global Education Project, the Curriculum Corporation and the Asia Education Foundation. Other sources of curriculum and lesson plans for teachers are international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) including WorldVision, Oxfam and Amnesty International. However, there is scholarly consensus that the subject area remains poorly defined in official curriculum and relegated to marginal locations (Peterson, 2020). In the absence of systemic support, teachers tend to rely heavily on easily accessed but uncritical GCE resources. Although an in-depth analysis of development/global citizenship education paradigms in Australia are beyond the scope of this article (see Peterson, 2020), it is useful to identify four key structural and cultural factors that reproduce dominant economic logics that dominate the global and economic imaginaries with which pre-service teachers enter my classroom. 

First, the Euro-American market economies-driven Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) paradigm is the foundation of global citizenship and development education curriculum Australian schools and university education including the Global Perspectives Framework mentioned above. The SDG paradigm is not only problematic because of its ethnocentric, universal assumptions but because it continues to posit that a linear market-driven model of economic growth is the only the solution to the ever-increasing environmental issues on our planet. Late capitalism encourages and relies on highly individualised, fragmented, and fundamentally depoliticised understandings of social or civic responsibility and participation which do not require questions about the structural dimensions of inequality whether economic, social or political (Kothari, Demaria and Acosta, 2014). Pashby (2012) describes this ‘global entrepreneur-citizen’ as someone who is oriented towards and capable of ‘selling the world’. The discourse of the free-market economy elevates competition, economic efficiency, and individual, privatised entrepreneurship and in doing so normalises and reproduces perpetual conditions of hyper-extractivism, precarity and disposability.

The two-thirds of the world (Esteva and Prakash, 1998) living in poverty and precarity for generations are labelled too needy, vulnerable and helpless to be worthy of rights and dignity (see Thapliyal, 2022). As the reproduction of capitalism and dispossession expands, the social imagination, agency and participation of the remaining social minority are confined to the marketplace and interests of private capital (Mohanty, 2003). In the SDG approach, learners become aware and engage with global issues without making connections between global and local contexts. It requires no or minimal reflection on the hidden costs of our way of life and the related scale of environmental destruction and human exploitation required to ‘maintain our comforts, benefits, securities and enjoyments’ (Andreotti, Stein, Sutherland et al., 2018: 6). I will return to this point later in the section on earthcare-centred conceptions of sustainability.

Second, pre-service teachers in my courses also often refer to prior knowledge derived from other official curriculum influences namely the Asia Literacy priorities introduced by national curriculum reforms almost a decade ago (Harrington, 2012). Asia Literacy education in Australian schools has also been dominated by ahistorical and highly selective instrumentalist, human capital engagements focused on language and culture acquisition (see e.g. Rizvi, 2012; Halse, 2015). 

A third source of influence is the informal curriculum of Australian educational institutions (schools and universities) which continue to reproduce uncritical discourses of diversity and development. This densely populated terrain includes formal partnerships and exchange programmes for international education and service learning as well as the informal presence of a highly profitable edu-tourism industry that promise travel experiences that entertain and build resumes (McGloin and Georgeu, 2016). Many of these programmes intersect and derive legitimacy from the consumerist, branded humanitarianism popularised by Hollywood celebrities and social media influencers (Mitchell, 2016). 

Last but not the least, students often remark that while they aspire to become and teach better global citizens, they feel ill-equipped to do so particularly in terms of teaching about diversity and difference. This resonates with decades of research findings that a majority of Australian teachers, predominantly from Anglo-Australian backgrounds, report that they do not feel competent to teach about diversity whether in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI) or refugees (see Ferfolja, Vickers, Martin et al., 2010) or migrant settlers whose backgrounds are other than Anglo- or Judeo-Christian (see Watkins and Noble, 2021).

Economic Literacy Otherwise

An insistence on learning and living with the discomfort of complicity and uncertainty with ‘radical tenderness’ sets the work of the DFC apart from other critical approaches to development or global citizenship education (Andreotti, 2014; Andreotti, Stein, Sutherland et al., 2018). I am a working-class migrant settler academic who has always lived on unceded, First Nations’ lands whether in India, Turtle Island/ United States or Australia. Finding inspiration and purpose in spaces dedicated to social justice education has also meant grappling with what decolonial scholars Tuck and Wang (2012) call an ethic of incommensurability or the recognition that projects of decolonisation are distinct and sovereign from other social justice projects including critical and feminist pedagogies, human rights and so forth. In the Australian settler-colonial context, Indigenous and anti-colonial education scholars argue that discourses and practices of diversity and multiculturalism in the education system continue to be underpinned by material, epistemic and affective dimensions of education designed to protect projects of empire and supremacy:

“that the settler colonial state is made and reshaped through these pedagogies casts education as one of the most powerful modes through which relations of the state are formed: that is, relations between people, knowledges, capital, land and feelings that constitute political normativity in Australia” (Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard, 2022: 17).

I was first drawn to the DFC pedagogical project because of the creative ways in which it problematised dominant, hierarchical modes of relationship to other human and living beings which have become so commonplace in our schools and society e.g. the humanitarianism-industrial-complex discussed in the previous section (Andreotti, Biesta and Ahenakew, 2015). Instead, the DCF approach encourages a different notion of global-mindedness – a very local and situated contemplation and conversation about our own inherently violent and unsustainable modes of existence and exposure and how we might reimagine and act for collective wellbeing and social justice. This emphasis on interdependence and shared responsibility offers a powerful alternative to discrete and disconnected forms of empathy and engagements with human and other living beings. The DCF approach also had a significant influence expanding my knowledge and pedagogical strategies from teaching critical economic literacy to teaching Economic Literacy Otherwise. 

Briefly, teaching for critical economic literacy meant critically analysing historical and contemporary issues of economic inequality, exclusion and exploitation from the perspective of historically marginalised groups. This approach engages to a certain extent with the inherent limitations of capitalist approaches to development which require continuous extraction-exploitation and consumption for continuous growth. The end point of this approach, in a manner of speaking, was rejecting these narrow conceptions of progress and civilisation and seeking out alternative, radical reforms that could transform deeply unequal and oppressive human relations and enable sustainable lives as well as livelihoods. The human-centric core to this approach became increasingly apparent to me after engaging with Indigenous-led environmental activism including the Indigenous communities who are part of the In Earth’s Care network within the DCF (DCF, 2022). A core premise of the In Earth’s Care Network is that ‘it is not only that we seek to care for the Earth, but that we are already in Earth’s care’ (Stein, Andreotti, Suša et al., 2020: 60). These perspectives exemplify to me what a life- or earthcare-centred approach to teaching about economics and development might look like because of how they name and interrupt the all-pervading tendency to consumption underpinned by enduring colonial desires and entitlements (Stein, Andreotti, Suša et al., 2020). 

The work of the Decolonial Futures Collective (DFC) (2022) begins with critical framings of global problems and solutions instead of assured narratives relentless futurity thanks to guaranteed technological solutions to our planetary problems. It then encourages learners to expose and deconstruct illusions related to separateness and superiority in order to interrupt human-centredness assumptions of linear progress and the possibility of continuity (Andreotti, Stein, Suša et al., 2018). Key to this approach is explicitly teaching about the separation or fragmentation that underpins not only the assumptions and logics of global capitalism and universal Western reason or rationality but also nation-states (DCF, 2022). This approach invites a different way of thinking about learning which at its core involves the discomfort of owning privilege and complicity and also letting go of certain solutions and the messiness of not knowing. The objective is not to find certainty and solutions. Andreotti, Stein, Sutherland et al (2018: 11) tell us that the work to be done first is within if we wish to learn to “‘hospice” a system in decline and assist with the birth of something new, undefined, and potentially (but not necessarily) wiser’.

This pedagogy of uncertainty as I have come to think of it poses the first of many challenges in a context where the identities and self-worth of pre-service teachers are predicated on always knowing and having answers or the means to find answers. A quick anecdote to illustrate this observation: before starting my courses, pre-service teachers complete two online ‘quiz’ activities about global citizenship and reflect on what these quizzes reveal about their knowledge and self-perceptions. One quiz consists of ten questions about development and global poverty focused on Asia. Without exception, students share surprise and disappointment that they know less than they think they did about this region of the world which is geographically closest to Australia. A second quiz on sustainability lifestyles and carbon footprints provokes similar feelings of disappointment with oneself, i.e. students express surprise and disappointment that their knowledge and lifestyle choices in relation to environmental sustainability are ‘less than’ they had anticipated. While the surprise appears to be linked to not knowing the correct answers, the disappointment also undoubtedly comes from a sense of concern and responsibility for the global issue of climate change. This condition  of always knowing and needing answers or solutions is intrinsic to the modernist project of linear progress and endless accumulation. However, I have learned to view this condition as potential opportunity for transformative moments of learning when given the space to be voiced and put in dialogue with care- and earth-centred worldviews.

In the next two sections, I discuss selected pedagogical strategies for teaching Economic Literacy Otherwise that are responsive to two salient identities and subjectivities: 1) being teachers; and 2) earthcare-centred sustainable livelihoods and living. This analysis identifies fruitful openings for decoding dominant economic logics of development as well as cultivating alternative economic and global citizen imaginaries and practices.

The teaching precariat

In the last forty years, the Australian government/politicians has commissioned an estimated 100 reviews/inquiries into teacher quality including professional standards for university-based teacher education programmes. As elsewhere, this manufactured crisis in teacher quality has been fuelled by relentless negative media representations of public schools and teachers particularly in market-oriented news media outlets (Thapliyal, 2018). The powerful transnational Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) has promoted a narrative where schools are perpetually failing learners and the only solutions to be had are to be found in market-style reforms such as standardised testing and relatedly, merit- or performance-based pay (Little, 2015). The resulting intensification of performance-based accountability and austerity-oriented educational cultures have not closed the achievement gap. However, they have facilitated the casualisation and contractualisation of teaching and the steady decline in the professional status of teaching and, thus, advanced the privatisation of public education.

Indigenous and anti-colonial education scholars have long argued that neoliberalism is an extension of settler colonialism. Tuck (2013) analyses the phenomenon of school ‘pushouts’ to highlight the role that educational institutions play in a continuing the settler colonial project of land management which requires First Nations to be displaced from their homelands for extraction of surplus value from land and migrant settlers (including people of colour and the working poor) to be complicit in the normalisation of these practices of dispossession and displacement. Neoliberal education and development policies merely repackage colonial beliefs and language about 1) the ability of some peoples to govern themselves; and relatedly, 2) the supremacy of some (colonial) ways of life over others: ‘Educational accountability policies are not accountable to poor and low-income families, urban communities, migrant and immigrant communities, and disenfranchised peoples’ (Tuck, 2013: 341). However, pre-service teachers have few opportunities in their programme of study to critically explore the market-oriented education and economic policies that impact teacher subjectivities, identities and working conditions.

With these considerations in mind, I have designed a teaching module called ‘The Teaching Profession in Global Perspective’ that unpacks free-market economic logics of scarcity, efficiency and merit that underpin teacher and teaching policy reform and key actors, institutions and transnational networks who profit from the precarity of teaching profession today (Compton and Weiner, 2008). We look at the working conditions of teachers, the status of the teaching profession, and teachers’ movements around the world through websites such as Teacher Solidarity (2022) and Education International (2022). Through guided inquiry, pre-service teachers learn to place dominant framings of the universal problem of teacher quality in historical contexts of systematically underfunded public education systems and assaults on teachers’ unions and the right to collective bargaining. They are asked to reframe what the compelling issues are through the lens of teachers and children’s rights (as envisioned by United Nations international legal human rights frameworks). 

In the process, we reflect on how these are not just education policies or economic logics but fundamental social logics and imaginaries that shape how we connect or rather dis-connect and distance ourselves from one another especially the unfamiliar other. Both capitalism and neoliberalism require certain kinds of fragmented subjectivities and identities e.g. citizen-as-individualist or citizen-as-consumer in order to normalise and propagate cultures of excessive consumption, redundancy, waste and waste disposal (Bauman, 2009). Once these logics are made visible and opened up for questioning, new forms of connection and relationship emerge. 

Pre-service teachers often share that this is the first time that they have had the opportunity to think about themselves in relation to other teachers whether in Australia or elsewhere. For example, the images and stories of teacher protests around the world creates an opening for some students to talk about shared experiences of working as teachers in challenging conditions across political borders and geographical boundaries. These pre-service teachers share their fears and anxieties about precarity given the unrelenting neoliberal assault on Australian public education for the last four decades. They voice their criticisms of neoliberal teaching reforms such as merit- or performance-based pay which set teachers up to compete rather than collaborate with one another. Others fail to see any connection to their own realities for reasons that highlight the persistence of social imaginaries shaped by colonialism and capitalism. For some, the collective struggles for teachers’ rights in faraway places is simply another confirmation of the backwardness and other deficits of  so-called Third World countries. For others, the notion of teachers as political beings and teaching as political work is deeply confronting. These views echo the anti-labour union sentiment encouraged by conservative politicians and their allies in corporate news media outlets. The complexity of these responses reveals the deeply individualised and competitive ways of thinking and acting that are embedded in capitalist educational institutions including teacher education. 

Earthcare-centred sustainability

Like settler colonial education systems elsewhere, the Australian education system is just beginning to acknowledge and respond to deeply ingrained tendencies to erase other value systems and ways of knowing and suppress epistemic uncertainties and contradictions (McCoy, Tuck, McKenzie et al., 2017; Andreotti, Stein, Sutherland et al., 2018). In recent years, there has been an increase in visibility and volume of ‘green economy’ perspectives that critique the extractivist and exploitative economic logics of industries like coal mining and industrialised agriculture that bolster a struggling economy. However, these shifts do not necessarily extend to decolonial perspectives on economic development or education, particularly Indigenous understandings of the relationship between economy, culture and nature.

Australian Indigenous ways of knowing and living continue to occupy a peripheral position in settler educational institutions (Vass and Hogarth, 2022). More specifically, the curriculum on sustainability tends to remain primarily human-centric rather than earthcare-centric, for example in its focus on the relationship between fast food and human health, technological advances in waste disposal, recycling and so forth (Whitehouse, Lui, Sellwood et al., 2014). The latest reforms in national curriculum guidelines for educating about sustainability (ACARA, 2020) emphasise the connections between all forms of life and interdependence between environmental, economic, social and cultural systems. They also encourage youth to act to seek out solutions for a more socially just future. However, the language of science, technology and balanced evaluations of impact continue to define what constitutes desired solutions (ACARA, 2020).

As part of my research for this article, I also scanned the previously mentioned Global Perspectives Framework (Curriculum Corporation, 2008) for references to Indigenous Australian conceptions of sustainability. They were mentioned in two areas of learning emphasis: i) Identity and Cultural Diversity (‘develop understandings to contribute to, and benefit from, reconciliation between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians’, [Curriculum Corporation 2008: 9]) and ii) Sustainable Futures (‘explore how Indigenous peoples in Australia and internationally relate to their environments and use scarce resources in order to live more sustainably’ [Curriculum Corporation 2008: 15]). Given the history and continued lived realities of dispossession, displacement, incarceration and the long struggle for treaty and reconciliation by Indigenous Australians, I expected to, but did not find, any mention in the remaining three learning areas namely: Interdependence and Globalisation; Social Justice and Human Rights; and Peace Building and Conflict Resolution.  

From the perspective of Economic Literacy Otherwise, the key word that stood out for me here was the foundational assumption of scarcity in relation to sustainability. What is assumed to be scarce and why? Is this the capitalist assumption that there are not enough resources for everyone, hence we must produce even more simply to survive? One of the most accessible and eloquent rebuttals of this assumption that I have come across is in the seminal book The Hope’s Edge by environmental activists and writers Frances Lappé and Anna Lappé (2002). They identify this discourse of scarcity as one of five Mind Traps that are foundational to corporate profit-seeking approaches to agriculture and food production where the natural abundance all around us is dismissed as waste. The DCF Collective would add that this abundance is rendered unintelligible and seemingly impossible within dominant human-centric paradigms.

In this section, I reflect on a learning module on earthcare-centred sustainability for pre-service teachers centred on issues of food and agricultural production. Despite the emphasis on sustainable development in school and pre-service teacher education curriculum, most students report that they have never been asked to critically examine the relationship between massive overproduction of food, waste dumping, poverty and global hunger and carbon emissions or even consider food as a basic human right. Thus, the first part of the module makes visible the market logics that underpin industrial agriculture and food production through the lens of peasant and indigenous movements for food sovereignty. We explore the rights-based critiques offered by these movements about the relationship between global hunger, food waste, industrialised agriculture and climate change as well as market-driven solutions to global warming such as the corporate-led Global Alliance on Climate Smart Agriculture. Students typically express agreement with these critiques as well as an interest to learn more about ‘new’, sustainable modes of food production.  

The work of Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man and writer-agriculturalist-activist Professor Bruce Pascoe on Aboriginal economies and sustainable food production is particularly well-received. Students engage deeply with a TedX talk titled ‘The First Agriculturalists’ where Pascoe (2018) explains how indigenous economic paradigms offer manifestos for equitable, sustainable and culturally inclusive alternatives to neoliberal approaches to agriculture and economic growth. The talk is based on an older, seminal book titled Dark Emu where Pascoe (2014) revealed a wealth of evidence about Indigenous economic and agricultural activities documented by early colonial explorers and subsequently erased in European accounts of settler history. Students also respond with interest to readings about the Buen Vivir (Good Living) movement with roots in Indigenous Andean philosophies of Sumak Kawsay and Suma Qamara which promote community-centric, ecologically balanced ways of life (Escobar, 2015). 

However, this openness to earth-centric worldviews is not without tensions and contradictions. For example, a reading about animal rights and interspecies education remains a source of discomfort and resistance for most students in which Andrzejewski, Pedersen and Wicklund (2009) raise troubling questions about how the treatment of other animals and species is interrelated with social justice, peace and ecological survival. Students respond angrily and dismissively to facts about the environmental damages caused by the meat and dairy industry. These far from green industries remain a mainstay of Australian settler colonial agricultural communities despite the increase in warnings from the land in the form of both bushfires and floods (Steffenson, 2020). Reminders of the material and affective investments in a worldview that separates human from land/nature can clearly be seen in the continued iconic status of outback farmers and pastoralists who played a vital role in the British settler colonial project through occupation (often violent) and deforestation of unceded Indigenous lands.

In response, I have incorporated additional resources on what it means for nature to have rights. Specifically, students engage with two Indigenous perspectives on recent legal recognitions of the rights of rivers and waterways. They read about the ongoing struggle for water justice by the Tati traditional owners and river people of the Murray-Darling River Basin in Victoria, Australia. They listen to Law Professor Jacinta Ruru (Raukawa, Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāti Maniapoto) explain the connections for Māori to water and land and the significance of the declaration of the Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui River (Tūhoe First Nations) as legal persons in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Ruru, 2017).

Responses to these learning materials about the rights of nature has been dominated by tendencies to either romanticise or extract/appropriate Indigenous knowledges instead of fundamentally reconsidering our entanglements with land/nature. For example, student responses focus entirely on the rights of the rivers without any acknowledgement of the ancient relationship between the waterways and their traditional custodians. This unthinking erasure of Indigenous peoples and their approach to living with the land always reminds me of the ever present potential for reproducing colonial habits while attempting to practice decolonial pedagogies.

Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed selected experiences of teaching Economic Literacy Otherwise which represent both openings and enduring tensions in questioning dominant economic discourses of development and education. The challenges facing teachers around the world has proven to be a fruitful space in which to interrogate capitalist discourses of scarcity of resources, self-interest, competition, efficiency, and corporate-style technomanagerial governance of educational institutions. Indigenous perspectives on education, development and earthcare-centered sustainability have created openings to amplify and prioritise historically marginalised voices and unsettle settler colonial cultural assumptions about ownership and sovereignty over nature and explore earth-centric modes of relationship and existence.

However, the resistances named in this article also underline for me that teaching about economic relations and systems is intrinsically also about teaching identity and meaning-making. The solutions offered by capitalism to our global and local problems remain seductive because they permit some of us to see ourselves as heroes and saviours. As a collective, we are also able to maintain the illusion of steady progress towards a better future through assured, almost instantaneous, hi-tech solutions. Unlearning dominant tendencies towards individualism, commodification and consumption of education and the environment is a process which  requires deeper reckonings with colonialism, empire and globalisation. The modules I have discussed here are always preconfigured with discussions about the lasting legacy of colonialism on education as well as the environment and what we might learn from the past. These kinds of deep affective investments in the logics of separation and dis-connection that upload the dominant economic paradigm cannot be permanently disrupted within the span of one or two modules or even entire courses. However, it is my hope that this reflection makes a small contribution to expanding pedagogical repertoires for teaching Economic Literacy Otherwise in classrooms situated in settler colonial, industrialised societies.

We cannot imagine and practice living well with nature without changing dominant economic forms of production or the interlinked realities of environmental exploitation, gendered and racialised forms of oppression (Amsler, 2019). In particular, Indigenous economies and epistemologies offer us a plethora of possibilities – none perfect - for alternative models of development centred on earth-centred, caring and self-sufficient ways of life. I give thanks for the work of the Decolonial Futures Collective and continue to draw inspiration and sustenance from decolonial educational projects which urge us to think ‘otherwise’ and to be open to ontological changes ‘even before the conditions of possibility for their intelligibility or desirability emerge’ (Ibid: 925).

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Nisha Thapliyal teaches in the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is a migrant settler academic who lives and works on unceded Awabakal land. Her teaching and research centre on social movements for public education and feminist, critical and decolonial pedagogies for social justice. She has developed and taught related courses for preservice teachers in the United States and Australia including: Comparative Education; Global Citizenship Education; Gender and Development; International Education Policy; Peace Education; Qualitative Research Methods; Race and Education; and Social Movements for Public Education. Email: nisha.thapliyal@newcastle.edu.au