Policy & Practice - A Development Education Review

 

 

Development Education and the Scandal of the Human: The Grammar of Silence and Erasure

issue39
Development Education Silences
Autumn 2024

Mostafa Gamal, Simon Hoult and Kieran Taylor

Abstract: A common aim of global citizenship education (hereafter GCE) is to enable students to focus on shared contemporary matters of significant global concern.  Despite such an important aim, we argue that the dominant assumption of the global citizen as White, Western and liberal (perceived as universal) within global citizenship education produces harmful silences and erasures which marginalise the Other.  This article is presented in four sections.  We begin by articulating some of the silences and erasures that are enacted by curricula and policy practices of GCE by adopting a social cartography (Paulston, 2009) as a heuristic to map various orientations to global citizenship education.  In doing so, we highlight its inherent silences, tensions and contradictions.  A second section addresses some of the key sites in which mainstream approaches to GCE enact silences and absences by their sole focus on soft, rather than critical, approaches to global citizenship education (Andreotti, 2006), where the liberal subject is regarded as the global citizen with a consequent muting of the experience of the Other.  In the third section, we draw on Wynter’s work on the historicisation of what it means to be human.  Wynter’s concept of ‘Man’ (2003), as a genre of being human (White, Western and Imperial), enables us to excavate violence regarding other modes of being human within global citizenship curricula practices and discourses.  A final section unpacks some of the ways in which we, as three teacher educators, respond to these silences and erasures in global citizenship curricula practices and policies. 

Key words: Global Citizenship Education; Silence; Human; Violence; Liberalism.

“We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly”

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Minister of Defence (International Court of Justice, 2023: 60).

“No, I don’t care.  Show me the pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I don’t care.  Make no mistake, these immigrants are like cockroaches” Katie Hopkins (Jones, 2015).

An oft-invoked aim of development education/global citizenship education (hereafter GCE) is to enable students to engage in studies that respond to the urgency of the contemporary global crises we are collectively experiencing: climate degradation, human rights violations, racial and ethnic conflict and forced displacement, to name just a few.  Despite this aim and with the exception of some strands of critical global citizenship (e.g. Pashby, 2015; Stein, Andreotti and Suša, 2019; Gamal and Swanson, 2018; Khoo and Jørgensen, 2021), the status of the global citizen (student, pupil) is exclusively conceived of as ‘the autonomous and European citizen of the liberal nation-state’ who:

“must work to encourage a liberal democratic notion of justice on a global scale by ‘expanding’ or ‘extending’ or ‘adding’ their sense of responsibility and obligation to others through the local to national to global community” (Pashby, 2011: 430).

In centring this European (universal) subject, what is elided is an account of the technologies of dispossession, deprivation and subjugation of the Others of global citizenship (Gamal and Swanson, 2018): those whose humanity has been/is being called into question and who are marked for harm.  Concomitantly, these practices which violently structure the others into the ‘zone of the nonbeing’ (Fanon, 1986: 10) not only constitute an ontological crisis at the heart of development education, but also work to erase the violence, coercion, desire and affective economies involved in a ‘history of injury that has yet to cease happening’ (Hartman, 1997: 772).  In this article, we build on the insight of Roitman (2014: 8) that crisis and critique are intertwined, by articulating the ways in which GCE, through its celebratory narratives, forecloses discussion of how its Others are locked into a ‘belatedness in becoming human enough in relation to the ideal (White) humanist subject’ (Yusoff, 2018: 42).  As a key manifestation of our current Eurocentric crisis, this ‘cultivated silence’ (Hartman, 1997: 11) offers us the opportunity to not only centre the violence, erasure, denial and evasion embedded in creating the Others of global citizenship, but also to ask questions such as ‘where are we, what is going on, what went wrong, how we can get out of here?’ (Cordero, 2017: 1).

We develop our argument by articulating some of the silences and erasures that are enacted by curricula and policy practices of GCE.  Building on the work of Pashby et al. (2020), the first section adopts social cartography (Paulston, 2009) as a heuristic to map out the different orientations of GCE, but also to highlight the silences, tensions and contradictions inherent in GCE discourses.  A second section addresses some of the key sites in which mainstream approaches to GCE enact silences and absences.  In this section, we argue that the focus on the liberal subject as the global citizen erases and mutes the experience of others.  In the third section, we turn to the work of Sylvia Wynter (2003), especially her historicisation of what it means to be human.  As a heuristic device Wynter’s concept of ‘Man’, as a genre of being human (White, Western and Imperial), enables us to excavate erasures and silences about other modes of being human within global citizenship curricula practices and discourses.  A final section outlines some of the ways in which we, as three teacher educators, respond to the silences and erasures in global citizenship curricula practices and policies.

Global citizenship education

Over the last few decades, GCE has emerged as a ‘goal of schooling in many countries’ (Oxley and Morris, 2013: 30), a main referent in pedagogical and curricular discourses and practices, and a policy focus in international agendas.  Its incorporation into the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2015) attests to the centrality of GCE in fostering a range of attributes in students to encourage global connectedness and global responsibility.  Under goal 4.7 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, GCE is said to promote ‘sustainable development, sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development’ (UN, 2015: 17).

Despite its wide adoption in both policy and educational practices, GCE remains a contested concept that is open to a multitude of interpretations.  As an ‘empty signifier’ (Pais and Costa, 2020: 3), GCE has been taken up within curricula and policy discourses in multiple ways and often made to serve conflicting agendas.  Dill (2013: 4) articulates two orientations of GCE.  Firstly, as a form of ‘global consciousness’ GCE aims at fostering ‘an awareness of other perspectives, a vision of oneself as part of a global community of humanity as a whole, and a moral conscience to act for the good of the world’ (Ibid.).  Secondly, and simultaneously, GCE is conceived as a set of global competencies that enable students to compete in a global employment market.  Similarly, Swanson and Pashby (2016: 184) note a ‘dual agenda' which underpins GCE: the development of ‘skills and dispositions for participating in the global economy’ and ‘the development of citizens who contribute to a more socially-just world’. However, whilst these orientations are ‘often conflated [and] contradictory’, dismissing GCE as a flawed concept forecloses generative possibilities (Ibid.).  As Swanson and Gamal (2021: 456) argue, ‘viewing contradiction at the heart of GCE as a “productive tension”, rather than “flaw”…may offer the necessary vector in prizing open new windows to hopeful, alternative futures’.  That is to say, these contradictions and tensions force us to attend to the implications of the privileging of participation in a global economy and the cultivation of global consciousness as initial conditions of global citizenship.  As we will argue below, such privileging invariably entrenches Eurocentricity and a depoliticised, individualistic and benevolent conception of global citizenship (Jefferess, 2008) that reproduces harmful beliefs and practices towards the Other.

There are a number of attempts to map out and classify the ways in which GCE is theorised (Oxley and Morris, 2013; Andreotti, 2006; Gaudelli, 2009; Pashby et al., 2020).  We focus on the work of Pashby et al. (2020: 160) as they highlight ‘what exists, but also the overlooked tensions, assumptions, and edges of discussions within a field or overlapping fields’.  Using social cartography (Paulson, 2009) as a heuristic device, Pashby et al. (2020: 160) provide a mapping of the various discursive orientations of GCE, areas of overlap, conflations and tensions between these orientations as well as the ‘significant absences’ and erasures.  Pashby et al. (2020) identify three major discursive orientations of GCE: neoliberal, liberal and critical.  They also identify the interfaces between these orientations.

Interfaces here index ‘spaces of ambivalence’ that ‘signal underlying communality across two or more orientations’ (Pashby et al., 2020: 146).  Common interfaces are: neoliberal-liberal, liberal-critical, neoliberal-critical, and all three (neoliberal-liberal-critical) (Ibid.).  The neoliberal discursive orientation frames GCE in terms of human capital development. Education is seen as a means of ensuring national competitiveness by equipping students with ‘global competencies’ to enable them to secure employment in a competitive global market.  In short ‘learning about and engaging with the world is valued as a line on one’s c.v’ (Ibid.: 151).  The liberal orientation sees GCE as concerned with developing in the student a set of universal values.  This is premised on the view of an underlying shared humanity that is sustained by universal notions of self, morality and society (Gaudelli, 2009). Andreotti (2006) refers to this orientation as a ‘soft’ as opposed to ‘critical’ GCE, that is based on ‘the notion of a common humanity and single, Eurocentric view of progress where global justice issues are framed and responded to from within a Western, Global North status quo’ (Pahsby et al., 2020: 151).  Within the critical orientation, however, GCE acknowledges and addresses social injustices and interfaces with liberal and neo-liberal orientations.  All in all, this orientation names attempts to ‘critique current power structures, modernisation, western exploitation and violence’ (Ibid.: 153).

Silences, absences and exclusions

The previous section outlines the social cartography of GCE but is limited to outlining the broader contours of its different discursive orientations (for a discussion of this typology see e.g. Andreotti, Stein, Pashby and Nicolson, 2016).  It does, however, orient our thinking to two related issues.  The first is that global citizenship is a contested concept and has generated a number of critiques. The second is that it alerts us to the question of the absences and associated silences.  Broadly speaking, much of the critique of the concept of global citizenship centres around its normative and instrumental orientations that articulate ‘a particular vision of a “better future” entrenched in a set of norms and values about perceived political, economic and cultural conditions and the possible futures these might permit’ (Marshall, 2011: 414).  Its appeal to a universal notion of democracy, freedom, rights and justice forecloses the possibility of ‘ethical, responsible ways of seeing, knowing and relating to others “in context”’ (Andreotti, 2010b: 239).  This is because global citizenship enacts fundamental exclusions.

As Isin and Nyers (2014: 4) argue, ‘citizenship is not just a name for membership, but a title or a rank that separates, excludes and hierarchizes’.  There are a number of other critiques levelled at the concept of GCE (see Stein et al., 2019; Tarozzi and Torres, 2018; Pashby et al., 2020; Pais and Costa, 2020), however, of immediate relevance to us is the Eurocentricity of the concept.  As Falk (2006: 6 in Lee, 2014: 76) notes, ‘discourse on citizenship… remains an essentially Western experience’ that derives most of its theoretical impetus from a liberal tradition that is firmly embedded in ‘Westernised political and institutional structure’ (Ibid.). Concomitantly, GCE remains ‘contaminated’ and complicit in ‘whiteness/Westerness…owing to the historical, material and structural entrenchment of citizenship in the liberal world view’ (Ibid.).  What emerges from this critique is the need to historicise and account for the locality from which the global citizen, as a category, is constituted politically.  To argue that the concept of global citizenship is heavily inflicted with Eurocentrism, foregrounds the notion that it is ‘inescapably racialized and thoroughly contaminated by the civilizing engineering of whiteness/Westerness’ (Ibid.: 80).  Whiteness here refers to:

“structural formations of racial domination tied to European colonialism which continue to be inscribed across all aspects of social life, mediating understanding of self, relations with others, work, within institutions, and ideas of the nation” (Sriprakash et al., 2022: 4).

Except for some strands of critical GCE, mainstream or ‘soft’ approaches to global citizenship tend to invoke an apolitical and individualistic understanding of it.  In doing so they obfuscate, silence and erase the ways in which coloniality continues to structure GCE.  Soft GCE (Andreotti, 2006) aims at strengthening existing relationships between people and countries.  To solve global issues, it puts an emphasis on individual responsibility and advocates market-driven approaches, or social justice initiatives as solutions.  GCE here is seen as ‘as a redemptive educational solution to global problems’ (Estelles and Fischman, 2021: 223).  This soft notion of GCE, as Andreotti (2006: 1) argues, positions students as ‘saviours’ for other countries and people, and this conceals hierarchies of global power and their consequences.  Students may ‘project their beliefs and myths as universal and reproduce power relations and violence similar to those in colonial times’ (Ibid.) at epistemic and ontological levels.

A key site of the absences enacted by mainstream approaches to GCE is that in their focus on the liberal subject as the global citizen, they erase and mute the experience of others. The notion of citizenship is not a neutral designation that references membership to a community, but that, as Isin and Nyers (2014: 1) argue, ‘carries an already assumed conception of politics, culture, spatiality, temporality, and sociality’.  In extending the notion of national citizenship, as articulated by Marshall (1950), into the global realm, other ‘political subjects’ (Isin and Nyers, 2014: 1) are invisibilised.  For Marshall (1950), citizenship consists of a set of rights: civil, political and social.  However, as Isin and Nyers (2014:8) argue if ‘citizenship is fundamentally about political struggles over the capacity to constitute ourselves as a political subject’, performing and enacting these rights remain highly differentiated globally.  Balarin’s questions are relevant here: 

“What about [global] citizens who are only so at a formal level, but who do not really enjoy the benefits of having citizenship rights, nor exert many of the responsibilities that are supposed to follow from these?  How do they relate to the global citizenship agenda?” (2011: 358).

Consequently, in centring the experience of the White, Western, liberal subject as the global citizen, two interrelated issues emerge. Firstly, that global citizenship curricular practices and discourses exclude the Other by limiting global citizenship to a liberal subject.  Thus, foregrounding the possibility of interrogating the notion of global citizenship by asking whose experience is, and is not, included.  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it throws into sharp relief the inherent violence against those who are excluded.  Taken together, these silences and acts of silencing the experiences of those excluded from the category of the global citizen, can be mapped out on specific sites in which difference is violently structured into a ‘zone of nonbeing’ (Fanon, 1986: 10).  As Bhattacharyya (2024: ix) avers, we are witnessing ‘an enlargement of practices of exclusions and containment’ as well as ‘ongoing processes of rendering other human expandable’ (Ibid.: x).  However, in focussing on the experience of the liberal subject as the global citizen, GCE forecloses the possibility of engaging with the ‘limits of a modern/colonial imaginary’ that reproduces and further entrenches ‘narrow imaginaries of global justice, responsibility and change’ (Ibid.).  In other words, the celebratory and mainstream notions of GCE erase the ‘systemic, historical and ongoing colonial and racial violence’ (Ibid.: 161) as the very conditions of producing the liberal global citizen.  Here the Other is erased through an absence that has been discussed by Spivak (1999) in her critique of early Enlightenment philosophers.

There are a number of sites that illustrate the silences and modalities of violence which are occluded from discussions on GCE.  These sites illustrate practices that prevent a staging of global citizenship by Others who are immobilised and denied the official standing to participate in it.  Through a global and historical articulation of sites such as policing, bordering, waste-landing and reproductive control, Danewid (2023: 26) foregrounds the ‘violence, terror, subjugation and coercive exploitation’ that were ‘meted out…to populations across the globe’ (Anievas and Nisancioglo, 2015: 278, cited in Danewid, 2023: 26) that are often written out of accounts of global citizenship.  For example, most GCE models declare their aim to inculcate a global consciousness in students by enabling them to develop an understanding of their relationship with other cultures.  However, as Eybers (2020: 2) avers, ‘Africans cannot do so without acknowledging that their relationships with much of the globe has been characterized by exploitation, inequality, under-development, and global racism’. 

An understanding of the tyrannical structures and practices (such as extractivism, marginalisation and coloniality) of global citizenship seem to be absent in the celebratory account of GCE.  This investment in silence is evidenced by the practice of bordering (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019).  Borders are not physical structures that exist at the exteriority of a territory, but rather as Brah (2022: 51) argues, borders ‘are simultaneously meaning-making and meaning-carrying formations’ as they enact histories of colonial control of movement, practices of stigmatisation and discrimination.  In some cases, the question of border, Bhattacharyya (2024: 102) argues, ‘becomes a question about who lives and who dies’.  The Mediterranean Sea is an example of the ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe, 2003), ‘governing migration through death’ (Squire, 2017) and the politics of organised abandonment (Gilmore, 2007) that target particular populations and criminalise solidarity with these populations. 

The sites of silences and modalities of violence collectively help us understand some of the ways celebratory narratives of global citizenship ‘conceal [their] role in the destruction of worlds and their modes of caring and sharing, wherein those who were made noncitizens dwelled…’ (Azoulay, 2019: 19).  At the same time and against a background of raising nativism, xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant practices, the modalities of state violence continue to produce, define, exclude and criminalise certain ‘abject’ subjects.  To paraphrase Beltran (2020), global citizenship becomes a practice of cruelty.  The global citizen who is interpellated in celebratory discourses does not come into being without bracketing its Other’s experience of violence, expulsions and abandonment.  Such a silence on the ‘racialised performance of (neo) colonial violence’ (Bhattacharyya, 2024: 84) produces the liberal, global citizen as an active agent.  It simultaneously produces the ‘constitutive outsiders’ as inhuman or human animals, evidenced by the quotes at the beginning of this article.  In the next section, we address this silence in global citizenship curricular and policy discourse on the ‘ongoing struggle over the meaning of the human’ (Snaza and Singh, 2021: 5, italics in original).

Becoming/being human

Schools and curricula are nation-state projects that are involved in the production of ‘responsible citizens, efficient workers and good consumers’ (Snaza, 2019: 131).  These function as a ‘humanizing assemblage’ (Ibid.) and the ways in which schools, national curricula and by extension GCE, were formed in the crucible of empire and colonialism. The selectivity of western education systems and their curricula deliberately erases the Other.  Wynter (2003: 141) theorising helps us understand this as she urges us to see schools as sites for ‘producing Man and its unhuman, non-human and less- than- human others’.  Wynter (2003) argues that the Western concept of ‘Man’ is based on European colonisation, racialisation and dehumanisation of the Africans and other people encountered by Europeans.  In particular, Wynter argues that becoming human is shaped by a range of discourses and practices which frame what it means to be human at a particular historical epoch and place.  Wynter (2003) traces the development of the European genres that come to dominate our understanding and relegated other modes of being to the realm of the inhuman and less- than-human.  Reflecting on the work of Wynter, Snaza (2019: 131) argues that ‘Western imperialist projects … institute[d] one specific genre of the human on the whole of the Earth’s peoples.  She calls this imperialist, white, Western, masculinist, heterosexist version of the human “Man”’.

Man, as a mode of being human, Wynter (2003) argues, emerged in a European context through a series of stages.  Man1 (homo politicus) emerged as break away from medieval theocracy and became more pronounced with the emergence of the Enlightenment. Accordingly, Man1 as a genre of being human named a category of people endowed with the capacity of reason.  However, as noted by Truman (2019: 3), in heralding a break from theocracy and ushering in ‘the modern rational world’, the context of the emergence of Man1 is suffused by coloniality.  Truman avers that although the rise of humanism was celebrated for ‘the untethering [of] Man from medieval thought, [it] flourished through a practice of Othering’ (Ibid.).  It also harboured a dark side: ‘the trans-Atlantic slave trade and settler colonialism around the world’ (Ibid.).  Man2’s emergence coincided with the rise of capitalism and the Darwinian theory of natural selection.  Darwin, for Wynter, further entrenched the view that ‘less developed’ people are closer to animals than Victorian Englishmen.  Taken together, these ideas defined what it means to be human. As Wynter (2003: 260) explains, this ‘Western bourgeois’ version of Man, ‘overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself’. Such an unstable position created by this overreaching and subjugation of the Other, resonates with Bhabha’s notion of the distorted post-Enlightenment man whom he describes as being:

“tethered to, not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonised man, that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of his being” (Bhabha, 1986: xxvii).

Despite these shifts in what it means to be human, ‘what remains constant as the benchmark of normalcy in Man is his Whiteness’ (Truman, 2019: 3).  To Wynter, the coloniality of being is sustained by Eurocentric judicial-political orders that have (re)produced the figure of the ‘White European “Man” as a rational, masterful, civilized being…as it were the human itself’ (Odysseos, 2017: 454) despite its hidden instability.  In particular, as Zembylas (2022: 339) notes, Wynter’s theorisation of the genres of Man – from medieval man to Man1 and Man2 – are not:

“only deeply entrenched in the colonial project, but have also contributed to the sedimentation of racial differences that normalized whiteness and designated black, brown and indigenous subjects as Others, excluding them from the prevailing and privileged category of ‘the human’”.

Following Wynter, using the human/Man as a heuristic not only underscores the historical and contextual contingency of the category of the human, but also invites us to grapple with ‘new ways of being human’ that are not defined by Whiteness (Snaza, 2019: 129). Simultaneously, it offers us the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which celebratory discourses of GCE reproduce, universalise and normalise the figure of the human (Man) by erasing other forms of being human.  Consequently, as Erasmus (2020: 48) notes, the European figuration of Man becomes ‘the master and savior of all and everyone’.  Saviourism becomes a telos and ‘a manifestation of this history of whiteness’ (Jefferess, 2021: 424).  Saviourism here indexes the many ways in which the (useful, but somewhat simplistic terms), global ‘North’ defines the global ‘South’ ‘as (having) a problem’ within which ‘the global citizen…is constructed as the solution to that problem’ and that ‘it is the saviour who has the power to delineate these roles and this relation’ (Ibid).  Whilst the inferiorisation of the Other, including excluding it from the category of the human, has been one of the strategies of justifying colonialism (Wynter, 2003), what emerges from Wynter’s intervention is that becoming human needs to be understood within the context of the histories of racialised violence.  This also entails excavating the silences and the omissions of these violences in global citizenship discourses and curricular practices.

Crisis and critique are intertwined (Roitman, 2014: 8).  Against the background of the ‘scandal of the human’ (Dillon, 1998: 31), the rise of far-right politics intensifies the ‘hostile environment’, creating the very conditions for sustained assaults on those who are deemed not to belong.  The associated silence in global citizenship discourses and curricula practice provokes the Fanonian question: ‘How do we extricate ourselves’ from this? (Fanon, 1986: 3).  In the following section, we offer some reflection, by way of an affirmative critique, on how as three teacher educators we respond to some of the tensions, silences and erasure inherent in the celebratory approaches to GCE.

The implicated subject

As a starting point, the historical legacies of colonialism, including its taxonomies of the human and the less-than human, not only haunt (in the Derridean sense of the word) our classrooms and lecture halls but circulate in our institutional strategies and policies.  Such a legacy, enhanced by contemporary globalisation, provides the context in which we work and educate student teachers.  This, as Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu (2018: 5) argue, is a key site in which ‘colonial intellectuals developed theories of racism, popularised discourses that bolstered support for colonial endeavours and provided ethical and intellectual grounds for the dispossession, oppression and domination of colonised subjects’. How mainstream and celebratory discourses of GCE sustain and further entrenches coloniality is evident in GCE as an institutional goal of Internationalisation of Higher Education (Khoo, 2014; Stein, 2017).

The internationalisation of higher education in the global ‘North’ has been reputed to foster global citizenship.  However, as a range of critical scholars of internationalisation argue, internationalisation ‘maintains its commitment to the colonial episteme’ and the myth ‘colonial difference’ (Meghji, 2021: 22). For example, Shahjahan and Edwards (2022) argue that internationalisation shapes future aspirations of students from the global ‘South’ by further entrenching the ‘seductive working’ of the colonial university (Zembylas, 2021: 953).  A key aspect of this aspiration is whiteness.  Study abroad programmes are said to potentially enable students from the global ‘South’ to acquire a ‘global subjectivity’, and in so doing they ‘pursue aspirations that normalises Whiteness’ (Shahjahan and Edwards, 2022: 750). There are hopeful signs of study abroad from the global ‘North’ to the global ‘South’ provoking a realisation of privilege and exposure of the apparently universal as Eurocentric (Hoult, 2017), however, such outcomes are understandably rare given worldviews are built over a lifetime (Finney and Orr, 1995).

As teacher educators, we are therefore implicated in reproducing the curricula of Man, that simultaneously normalise certain ways of knowing, feeling and inhabiting the world, and erase/silence the ontological and epistemic violence against others whose humanity is being contested.  In our context, we are surrounded by policy and media discourses that endlessly invoke the putative threat the Other poses to national security, community cohesion and imagined national values.  Such demonic repetitions rely for their effectiveness on a range of tropes.  Chief amongst these is the trope of the ‘animal’.  There is a considerable amount of literature that attends to the animalisation of the Other, especially black people (Hartman, 1997; Jackson, 2020) and associated demonic repetitions invoked here.  These portrayals are redolent of Bhabha’s (2004) ‘ambivalence’ and the psychological processes that produce racism (Hook, 2012).  However, it is not simply a question of dehumanisation: i.e. denying humanity of the Other, but rather as Jackson (2020: 3) avers in the case of black people, this is:

“not …black ‘exclusion’ or ‘denied humanity’ but [it is] the violent imposition and appropriation – inclusion and recognition – of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity, whereby ‘the animal’ is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass”.

Appropriating this insight of the ‘plasticising’ of the humanity of black people, as teacher educators we invite a reckoning with our collective implication in buttressing whiteness and the ensuing silences and erasures of the Other.  To be an implicated subject, Rothberg (2019: 48) argues:

“is to occupy a particular type of subject position in a history of injustice or structure of inequality – a history or structure one may enter, like an immigrant, long after the injustice at issue has been initiated or, like a beneficiary of global capitalism, far from its epicenter of exploitation”.

The concept of the ‘implicated subject’ helps to bridge the gap between ‘individualising responsibility’ and ‘thinking institutionally’ (Bryan, 2021: 338). It enables a deeper understanding of ‘the myriad ways in which personal, micro-level actions are deeply enmeshed in wider structures of injustice and inequality’ that perpetuate Eurocentrism and its attendant violence (Ibid.).  This concept enables us to move from dualist approaches to undoing harmful effects that privilege either personal actions or macro level, universal practices.  It foregrounds instead a deeper understanding of the multiple ways in which individual actions both sustain and are entangled with structural conditions.  This equally involves a process of unlearning and disinvesting ‘from the inherited material, intellectual, and affective economies that frame our shared meanings and collective desires, and learn to invest in other forms of feeling, knowing, being, wanting and relating’ (Stein, 2019: 679). 

Global citizenship curricula and discourses are performative practices, they constitute political subjectivities, construct and validate ways of knowing and being and exclude other modes of knowing.  The process of unlearning requires more than an epistemological shift in our student teachers’ understanding of their world.  Rather, this needs to be articulated as an ‘ethic-onto-epistemic’ project (Barad, 2007).  Unlearning as a process of understanding power, privilege and epistemic violence is a key part of Spivak’s contribution to education (Andreotti, 2007).  Andreotti (2007: 230) furthers this via her own pedagogic framework that highlighted the importance of ‘learning to unlearn’, ‘learning to listen’, ‘learning to learn’, and ‘learning to reach out’.  Two associated pedagogic features emerge from our reflections and theory: the significance of dialogue and of reflexivity.  Firstly, there is a crucial need to be ‘hyper-reflexive’, built on Spivak’s need for us to be ‘scrupulously vigilant in relation to [our] complicities’ (Ibid.: 74).  Secondly, dialogue benefits when it draws on Freire’s (2005: 111) talking ‘with’ rather than ‘to’ students and a pedagogy of ‘kindredness’ and ‘coexistence’ (De Lissovoy, 2010: 279) associated with Freirean principles of love and respect for the Other.

Conclusions

Engaging our student teachers in global citizenship silences and exclusions is an ‘ethic-onto-epistemic’ project (Barad, 2007). Attuning our student teachers to their implications in (re)producing colonial frames that structure their worldview is a necessary epistemological gesture that requires, as Spivak argues, a process of unlearning. At the same time, this opens up the space in our curricular practices for our student teachers to consider the ways in which their sense of self is entangled with the Other.  In contrast to the dominant ‘colonial difference’ (Mignolo, 2002) that postulates and sustains the ‘myth that…the colonized were somehow different from (and inferior) to the “West”’ (Meghji, 2021:21), addressing the silences and erasures in GCE would occasion a shift in our student teachers’ ways of being in the world. Further, by reframing the Self (the liberal global citizen) as inextricably entangled with the Other, what is foregrounded is an ethical orientation of being in the world. Being here is conceived of as ‘co-existence’ (Nancy, 2000: 43).  Rather than starting with distinct entities such as self/other, Nancy reconfigures being as always ‘being-with’ (Ibid: 84): 

“[F]rom the very beginning, then, ‘we’ are with one another, not as points gathered together, or as a togetherness that is divided up, but as a being-with-one-another.  Being-with is exactly this: that Being, or rather that to be neither gathers itself as a resultant commune of beings nor shares itself out as their common substance” (Ibid: 96).

This resonates strongly with a critical approach to GCE and where knowledge is contextual and provisional, rather than universal and fixed akin to the learning spaces of Andreotti (2010a). As such our practice requires that we critically engage our students in interrogating the epistemic frames that we operate with in order to interrupt the historical and on-going violence and harm. The interrelatedness of ethics, knowing and being holds the promise of enabling our student teachers to inhabit the world differently.  This is because it centres this denial of relationality and unsettles the notion of the Eurocentric liberal subject as the global citizen.  In suggesting an ethico-onto-epistemological frame as a way of engaging with the silences and erasures from the dominant imaginary of Man, we are aware of the difficulties, tensions and ethical conundrums we face.  As teacher educators, the key question for us is how to move ahead when our attempts to reconfigure and unsettle the Eurocentric liberal global citizen are met with denial and silence?  Faced with this incapacitating despair, Solnit (2016: xii) urges us to think that ‘[H]ope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act’.  We take heed of Tomlinson and Lepsitz’s advice that ‘…centrally important to the success of our scholarly endeavors is knowing the work we want our work to do, taking responsibility for the world we are creating through our endeavors, for the ways of being in the world that we are modelling and creating’ (2013:9-10 in García Peña, 2022: 69).  We share García Peña’s (2022: 90) view that we ought to teach our students ‘… to identify the silences…to ask about the silences…to notice the absences and the omission…And it is those silences that we truly need to understand about our collective human experience’.  The silence around the notion of who is human remains an urgent task for us as teacher educators.

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Mostafa Gamal is a lecturer in the division of Psychology, Sociology and Education, Queen Margaret University, Scotland.  Mostafa is interested in exploring through a post/decolonial lens the nexus of global citizenship education, immigration and race. Mostafa is also interested in exploring the sustainability through a post/decolonial lens.

Simon Hoult is a teacher educator, with geography education and postcolonial specialisms.  He has experience of working in English and Scottish universities and is currently the joint Head of the Division of Psychology, Sociology and Education at Queen Margaret University. His research interests focus on students’ intercultural engagements with a cultural Other including through study abroad.

Kieran Taylor is a lecturer in Education at Queen Margaret University in the division of Psychology, Sociology and Education.  His research has focused on the subject of historical and contemporary migration to Scotland.  He is interested in how Scotland has transitioned from being a country of emigration to a destination for migrants.  He has recently been involved in researching the experiences of young people who have been involved in the asylum system in Scotland. 

Citation: 
Gamal, M, Hoult, S and Taylor, K (2024) ‘Development Education and the Scandal of the Human: The Grammar of Silence and Erasure’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 39, Autumn, pp. 11-33.