Response to Policy and Practice Call on Development Education Silences: Reflections on a Pedagogy of Non-Silence – Resisting the Politics of Hopelessness

Abstract: This Viewpoint article responds to the Policy and Practice Call for Contributors on ‘Development Education Silences’, briefly considering how silence may be a root cause as well as a symptom or effect.  It brings the sociology of ignorance to consider the broader context of financialised higher education.  The discussion reflects on silences surrounding Palestine, connecting silencings of neoliberal restructuring and climate crisis, following on from a silenced pandemic.  Pointing to the central arguments emerging at the high-level 2022 Transforming Education Summit, the discussion links problems of silences and silencing in and through education to the silencing of critical questions about education’s fundamental purposes, and how it is to be funded.  Silencing may lead to moral injury as contradictions mount amidst a global order in a state of disintegration.  The article returns to embrace Freire’s pedagogies of oppression, freedom and hope, to critically counter emerging threats from silenced inaction and its political correlate, liberal fatalism.

Key words: Higher Education; Ignorance; Moral Injury; Paulo Freire; Liberal Fatalism.

Introduction

I was going to stay silent, despite numbering amongst the Policy and Practice Editorial Board members who suggested that this journal might discuss the theme of ‘silences’, but felt compelled to explore how the problem of silences and being too busy to write about them seemed to be connected.  Academic overwork is silencing.  I decided to write this short article to think through what being silent (or perhaps silenced) on silences means, while telling myself off for taking the time to write this.  Most academics face similar problems of simply having too much work to do; teaching, placating ever-ramifying administrative demands, wrangling learning technology, responding to sector-wide problems of recruitment, enrolment,  student attendance, engagement, results and feedback, creating new courses to meet administrative and marketing demands, redesigning or replacing courses terminated on administrative grounds, grading, offering feedback, moderating grades; applying for research grants; reporting, evidencing and justifying every initiative and expense, administering research grants, conducting research, writing, disseminating research, attempting to get reimbursed for work expenses, the list goes on and on, against an invisible adversary – a constraining envelope of fiscal austerity and menacing, but ever-changing, chaotically inconsistent, and poorly articulated threats.  Deadlines loom hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, creating an overwhelming sense of urgency and anxiety.  Work is pervaded by time poverty, running out of time, while the horizon of expectation is suffused by a sense of dread going all the way down, a sense of futureless futures (Goldberg, 2021).

‘It’s not you…’: silences and bad feelings

Silence is an outcome, a symptom, as well as a root cause of oppression and injustice.  Silences in development, in education, and the silencing of development and education are topics that I have been writing and researching about for many years, drawing on the sociology of ignorances, silences and non-knowledges (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008; Gross and McGoey, 2022) and the philosophical and political exploration of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), epistemic erasure and epistemic violence (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018).  I have read, written and thought about these problems of absences, silences, denial and non-knowledge, yet remain baffled by my own and my peers’ and superiors’ inability to resist serious assaults on our profession, interests, institutions and the interests of our students and wider publics.  The entire life world of many universities seems to be alternating between slow suffocation and sudden, large-scale closures and layoffs (Armstrong, 2024).  Why have academics failed to mobilise the considerable academic and epistemic resources available to them, to resist serious threats to our own lives and livelihoods, professions, colleagues, students and friends?

A recent blog by a UK-based history professor (O’Hara, 2024) offered sympathy for a sector that is running down its social capital.  Higher education and its staff have become ‘sweated assets’, under constant financial pressures to ‘do more with less’.  O’Hara tells us to ‘[r]emember, first, foremost and above all: it’s not you.  It’s them.  Don’t feel bad.  You’ve not failed.  You’ve been failed’.  Several years ago, a doctorate candidate tearfully asked me, their supervisor, if academia was going to end.  Taken aback, I replied along the lines of ‘of course not, academia has been there in some shape or form for a thousand years, it will survive, though perhaps not in its present form’.  Nevertheless, O’Hara’s admission that perhaps we cannot stay on top of an exponentially increasing mountain of work that is not only thankless, but increasingly under pressures of suspicion and blame, chimed strongly.  Questions of how higher education should be financed have been perennially raised, but never satisfactorily answered.  An over-financialised, but under-financed sector must ‘sweat its assets’, forcing its workers to be ‘constantly whacking our own creativity, and capacity for ideas, against the brick wall of funders’ and employers’ indifference’ (Ibid.).

The 2022 high-level conference on Transforming Education Summit (TES) (United Nations, 2022a) pointed out the major ongoing global silence concerning how to finance education.  97 percent of educational financing comes from domestic sources, yet policy attention focuses on the tiny fraction of external funding, donors and philanthropy (Archer, 2023; Armstrong, 2024; UNESCO, 2023).  The TES Discussion Paper on Financing (United Nations, 2022b) highlighted an urgent need for a transformative financing agenda, addressing debt relief, restructuring, and cancellation; progressive taxation; reversing austerity constraints on public sector wage costs; changing the paradigm to view education as public investment, not private consumption; and building strategic dialogues between finance, education and other ministries (Archer, 2023).

The spectre of moral injury

The silencing and failure to countenance high-stakes issues of financing, purpose, survival and transformation results in educational institutions adopting an essentially hollow linguistic approach to the objectives of equity, inclusion, respect, consultation and engagement.  The actual policies and practices in the contemporary sector must continue to work in a bad faith manner, through top-down imposition of financialisation and its fixes.  This barging ahead often results in ‘things being done very badly’, as O’Hara admits, while institutions continue to boast that the highest standards are being adhered to.  This contradiction makes the university a site of constant moral injury, where it becomes genuinely difficult to keep a sense of purpose and morality intact, though O’Hara hopes that academia’s moral injuries are ‘perhaps mild’.  Moral injury is a form of psychic trauma, mental pain associated with wrongdoing, a ‘sin-sickness’ (Pederson, 2021).  Moral injury occurs when someone or an authority openly condemns one kind of bad behaviour (usually implied to be abstract, or far away), while ignoring, condoning or putting up with other forms of horrible behaviour (usually inescapably concrete and closer to home). 

Paul and Haddad (2022) point to the COVID-19 pandemic as a unique moment to examine the role of ignorance and non-knowledge, turning a blind eye to historical lessons, bracketing out alternatives, over-relying on quantifiable knowledge, and actively concealing, delaying, and not sharing knowledge, with grave and deadly consequences.  Governments and educational institutions’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020-22 arguably normalised forms of moral injury that were far from mild.  Institutional orders to ‘get back to normal’ and dispense with preventative measures implicated staff and students, but also silenced our involvement in causing considerable avoidable illness, injury and excess deaths. Moral injury is the result of privileging university revenues over people’s health and safety, and treating more medically vulnerable students and staff as disposable.

Searching for hope in the shadows of genocide

So far, most of the problems of silencing discussed concern affective burdens, emotional and psychic harms and bad feelings of being ‘isolated, disliked, frustrated and alone’ (O’Hara, 2024).  But how do such feelings connect to silencing and inaction?  One of the ways is by the routinised normalisation of hopelessness.  Reflecting on the challenges of social and political transformation facing South Africa after apartheid, the poet Seamus Heaney remarked that hope is not merely optimism that things will turn out for the best.  Heaney’s hope is like ‘development’ (Khoo, 2015), thinking towards and striving for ‘a farther shore’, ‘… hope is something that is there to be worked for, is worth working for, and can work’ (Johnson, 2002).

The Call for Contributors rejects unreflexive educational ‘action for action’s sake’, reminding us that education is important because it plays an essential role in enabling the emergence of consciousness, leading to critical interventions in reality.  Writing only about feelings, about effects on our affect, de-centres and marginalises the role of education as critical praxis that brings reflection towards action.  This silencing of the praxiological dimension of education bundles together silencing as symptom, silencing as effect and silencing as root cause.  At this moment a great amount of effort seems to be going into silencing education, from censorship, to dis-invitations, to suspensions, and large-scale cuts and redundancies.  This silencing feeds into passivity under the pressures of domination.  The affective burdens of dread and feelings of powerlessness lead to an inability, even a refusal, to empower ourselves as learners to become conscious, as subjective beings, who can be empowered to act in the interests of self and collective liberation in the face of existential crises, in both our immediate workplaces and in the larger world order.

I cannot help reflecting upon half a year of teaching about global development, human rights and public activism, overshadowed by Hamas’ incursions into Southern Israel on October 7^th, 2023, kidnapping and killing 1200 civilians, followed by Israel’s retaliatory intensification of brutal occupation in Palestine to genocidal proportions.  The United Nations Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, reported five months after the Hamas attack (Albanese, 2024) that Israel was continuing to perpetrate an ‘incalculable collective trauma which will be experienced for generations to come’.   More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 14,500 children.  Over 12,000 more are presumed dead and 75,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations (Reliefweb, 2024).  Seventy percent of Gaza’s residential areas have been destroyed and eighty percent of Gaza’s population has been forcibly displaced.  Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, while the incredibly shocking targeting of hospitals, humanitarian assistance and aid workers added unimaginable atrocities on top of intentional mass starvation and dehydration.  As the case brought by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) detailed, the genocide escalating after 7 October was not a new crisis, but an intensification of Israel’s 75-year historical imposition of apartheid rule, 56-year occupation, and 16-year blockade of the Gaza Strip (ICJ, 2023).

Drawing on experiences of scholars teaching in the United States (US), Sayigh (2022) documents the continuities between the denial and silencing about Palestine through colonial appropriation, landscape transformation, censorship, memoricide, and processes of schooling.  Reflecting on Sayigh’s criticism of ‘schooling’ and silencing through distorted fears of ‘antisemitic’ labelling, educational silencing can be observed to be happening formally, by deliberate omission and distortion, or as part of a wider ‘informal curriculum’, creating a generalised atmosphere of silencing, that comes in the wake of the ‘weaponized hopelessness’.  Such hopelessness is not new, but a fresh instantiation of the hopelessness inaugurated by the chilling of criticism, and how this impacts the inability to speak up and act against climate change (Johnston, 2023), or increasing racism and border violence against migrants.

The experience of teaching about human rights as if they should exist, amidst ghastly daily reminders that that they do not, induces a sense of hopelessness, failure and pointlessness.  It is as if salvatory clauses do not exist to save the human rights and the international order from forces of disorder and inhumanity, as killing and destruction continue with blatant impunity.  My university issued a brief, unspecific statement calling for peace ten days after the Hamas actions.  This led to four months of dialogue with students and staff, after which a longer official statement was issued on 8^th February 2024.  This more substantial statement acknowledged a sense of solidarity as a community of scholars and students, decrying the destruction of Gaza’s universities. It named the Israeli forces’ killing of students and academics ‘particularly grievous’, and called for an immediate end to killings, accountability for criminal actions, as well as undertaking to ‘review’ relationships with Israel (University of Galway, 2024).  More top-down attempts to coordinate a response across academic institutions have been meagre, ambivalent and lacking in coherence (see Letter to the Presidents of all Irish Universities on the situation in Gaza, 2024).  These attempts have been in contrast with broad civic protest coalitions beyond the walls of academia, which have consistently and effectively organised mass demonstrations in many cities across the world, have been calling for immediate ceasefire, economic and academic boycotts of Israel, and have been continuously mobilising practical forms of solidarity and assistance.

The silence of neoliberalism vs the pedagogy of freedom

Every aspect of the Call for Contributors points to the central relevance and importance of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of oppression (Freire, 2000a [1970)]) and pedagogy of hope.  What sits in-between Freire’s account of the pedagogy of oppression and its return in the form of a pedagogy of hope is the pedagogy of freedom (Freire, 2000b [1996]).  ‘Pedagogy of Freedom’ is a meditation on a life-long and career-wide question, of what education and becoming a teacher are about, what a ‘progressive’ education aims to do, and what education presents as a horizon for individual and collective thought and action.  The starting point of the pedagogy of oppression is a fulsome rejection of the ‘banking’ approach to education, premised on an impoverished educational view of education as an individualistic project of ‘human capital’ – ‘to turn women and men into automatons – the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human’ (Freire, 2000a [1970]: 74).  Instantiations of ‘human capital’ remain complicit in their own domestication and negate their ‘ontological vocation’, to search for, and engage critical curiosity in a struggle towards liberation.  Hope (Freire, 2014 [1992]: 81) is an orientation towards not only internal and individual change, but to external and collective forms of self-actualisation through dialogue and relationships with others.  It is a relational and collective project that rejects indoctrination and instrumentalisation.  Collective emancipation is about dreams and there can be no dreams without hope.

The Call asks contributors to address silences concerning neoliberal economics and ideology, bearing in mind the Centre for Global Education and Financial Justice Ireland’s report on neoliberalism as responsible for system-wide ‘root causes’ of poverty, inequality and injustice, and failures of the international development and development education sectors to address such ‘root causes’ (Fricke, 2022).   Why do these key sectors remain largely silent on neoliberalism?   On the side of the public, Meade (2024) suggests that ‘neoliberalism’ stands in for people’s dissatisfaction with mainstream politics but cannot easily be identified as a ‘root cause’ of problems.  Lacking a root cause analysis, people turn to far right rhetoric and disinformation for alternative explanations.  From the academic side, neoliberalism is no longer perceived as having scholarly relevance.  Many academic disciplines reject ‘neoliberalism’ as vague, misleading, irrelevant or no longer interesting, a term not worth discussing.  If I mention ‘neoliberalism’ in an academic article, there is a good chance that peer reviewers will question it, or even reject the entire article.  Neoliberalism’s deregulatory and free market policies are no longer considered to be ideologically powerful, as politics turns towards economically nationalist rhetoric, the politics of militarism, xenophobia and aggressive border policing. 

New realities of global financialisation, polarising inequalities, and corporate capture cannot be attributed to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) original policy prescriptions, or different technical interpretations of the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 2008).   Neoliberalism’s macroeconomic policy prescriptions have become passé, as market freedom has given way to new, dysfunctional spirits of financialisation.  Economic protectionism is creating its own problems in the wake of Brexit, Trumpism, and the rise of reactionary politics and mainstreaming of the far-right. Against the silences surrounding neoliberalism, we might return to Freire’s critique in the ‘Pedagogy of Freedom’ (Freire, 2000b [1996]).  Freire does not denounce neoliberalism as deregulation or macroeconomic policies.  What Freire demands is ‘a permanently critical perspective’ on what he describes as neoliberalism’s ‘scourge’ – ‘its cynical fatalism and its inflexible negation of the right to dream differently, to dream of utopia’ (Ibid.: 2).  Assuming that neoliberalism disappears when it gets thought of as theoretically passé silences a critique of its scourge, accepting cynical fatalism in place of critical freedom and hope. 

At the heart of Freire’s critique is the banking model’s assumption that learners’ minds are empty, lacking intellectual wealth that can be a source of learning for others.  Hope is the sense that a different kind of education is worth working for, that comes from ‘opening up to the thinking of others’ (Freire, 2014 [1992]: 110).  A mind empty of others is also a mind emptied for othering and the convenience of scapegoating.  The rise and emboldening of the far-right requires an educational project that is capable of redressing cynical fatalism with wider understandings of the root causes of poverty and its spread. This educational project needs to make connections between economic and social polarisation, and find ways to make sense of racist and xenophobic targeting, scapegoating and ill-treatment of foreigners, migrants and displaced people by diverse political forces and governments.

Conclusion – against liberal fatalism in the (un-declared) Anthropocene

The ‘Anthropocene’ is a concept that had galvanised the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to demand a new era of greater solidarity (UNDP, 2022).  Then, in 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) surprisingly un-declared the Anthropocene concept, arguing that it did not constitute a new geological epoch (Witze, 2024).  This surprise announcement merely served to underline the importance of the Anthropocene as a social, economic, and political concept, if not a geological one, describing an age where concerted change is needed if humanity is to survive the breaching of environmental ‘safe operating space’ (Rockström et al., 2009).  Global governance has proved to be extraordinarily ineffective in balancing corporate interests and business-as-usual tendencies against urgent demands for climate justice, and climate-related environmental loss and damages.  At the mid-point of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it seems more urgent than ever to drive longer-term, broader transformations of the global environmental-social contract, taking in the interests of the future generations in inheriting a livable world.

But these goals evince a sense of the dread about futureless futures as global governance appears to have reached an all-time low point.  The UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights imply the existence of a social and international order, in which state and non-state parties cooperate and uphold duties to conserve and not destroy that order.  Article 30, the salvatory clause, completes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by stating that the rights set out in the preceding 29 articles must not be destroyed.  Yet today, this order seems to be in tatters, as genocide continues with impunity, human rights are trashed and even the most basic prohibitions in international law are openly traduced.  Development education and global learning have constituted non-prestigious, but hardily perennial characteristics of my own educational practice over the past three decades, but now I find myself speaking about education and learning to an international development sector amidst an existential crisis.

After two decades of drifting towards humanitarianism, the worlds of development and education now face a grim prospect from what might be described as liberal fatalism, which follows in the wake of pandemic silences of ignorance, complacency and inaction (Paul and Haddad, 2022).  Liberalism implies the promotion of formal freedom and rationality, leaving substantive and normative questions of what education is and what learning is for largely undisclosed.  Liberal fatalism operates a ‘politics of impossibility’, effecting politics through claims of incapacity.  It is a form of strategic ignorance that delays decisions and interventions, while allowing inaction to narrow political possibilities.  Liberal fatalism is likely to become an increasingly prominent strategy of governments, when facing crises and challenges such as pandemics and climate change (Bacevic and McGoey, 2024: 178).  Liberal fatalism’s silences of denialism and policy narrowing are likely to deepen inequalities and racist and classist harm (Bardon, 2019).  Liberal fatalism is a political epistemology that contributes to a complex of denial, evasion and untruth, undermining the public good, understood as a triangular concordance of democratic deliberation, equitable enjoyment of basic goods, and public benefit (Khoo, 2014).  The public needs a responsible exercise of academic and educational autonomy and freedom (Khoo, 2023) to counter government and institutional failures to prevent avoidable public harm.  However, the enactment of liberal fatalism within, and through, public higher education’s quotidian work, for example, through widespread organisational avoidance of responsibilities to minimise avoidable health harms from COVID-19 and other infections. Its failures to call out public health silences and other silences around the dereliction of the international order, incipient genocide, or neoliberal inequalities and injustices are likely to undermine higher education’s longer-term capacities to exercise public epistemic responsibility. 

References

Albanese, F (2024) ‘Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, A/HRC/55/73’, available: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf (accessed 9 April 2024).

Archer, D (2023) ‘Transforming the financing of education at the mid-point of the sustainable development goals’, International Journal of Educational Development, Vol. 103, p. 102931.

Armstrong, S (2024) ‘Broke and shrinking: the downward spiral in British universities’, Tortoise, 25 March 2024, available: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/03/25/broke-and-shrinking-the-downward-spiral-in-british-universities/ (accessed 27 March 2024).

Bacevic, J and McGoey, L (2024) ‘Liberal fatalism, COVID 19 and the politics of impossibility,’ Economy and Society, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 163–182.

Bardon, A (2019) The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion, New York: Oxford University Press.

Freire, P (2014 [1992]) Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed, London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Freire, P (2000a [1970]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum.

Freire, P (2000b [1996]) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage, Rowman and Littlefield.

Fricke, H-J (2022) International Development and Development Education: Challenging the Dominant Economic Paradigm?, Belfast and Dublin: Centre for Global Education and Financial Justice Ireland.

Fricker, M (2007) Epistemic Injustice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, D T (2021) Dread: Facing Futureless Futures, Cambridge: Polity.

Gross, M and McGoey, L (2022) Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, Abingdon: Routledge.

International Court of Justice (2023) ‘Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)’, 29 December, available: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240111-ora-01-00-bi.pdf (accessed 9 April 2024).

Johnson, S (2002) ‘Seamus Heaney: “Hope is something that is there to be worked for”’, The Independent, 21 October, available: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/seamus-heaney-hope-is-something-that-is-there-to-be-worked-for-141727.html (accessed 9April 2024).

Johnston, J (2023) ‘Weaponized Hopelessness’, Climate Emergency Forum, 23 July, available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHSvOcnZbVA (accessed 23 July 2023).

Khoo, S (2023) ‘The public epistemic role of higher education for all’ in R J Lawrence (ed.) Handbook of Transdisciplinarity: Global Perspectives, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 63-79.

Khoo, S (2015) ‘Development Studies’ in J D Wright (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol. 6, Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 307–313.

Khoo, S (2014) ‘Public goods: from market efficiency to democratic effectiveness’, Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14, London: Commonwealth Secretariat/ Nexus Strategic Publishing, pp. 97-100.

Letter to the Presidents of all Irish Universities on the situation in Gaza (2024) 4 April, available: https://openletter.earth/letter-to-the-presidents-of-all-irish-universities-on-the-situation-in-gaza-9c419d10?limit=0 (accessed 9 April 2024).

O’Hara, G (2024) ‘It’s Not Your Fault That Academic Life is Getting Harder’, Voices of Academia, available: https://voicesofacademia.com/2024/04/05/its-not-your-fault-that-academic-life-is-getting-harder-by-glen-ohara/ (accessed 4 April 2024).

Meade, E (2024) ‘Epistemic Injustice, the Far Right and the Hidden Ubiquity of Neoliberalism’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 38, Spring, pp. 14-33.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S J (2018) Epistemic freedom in Africa: deprovincialization and decolonization, New York: Routledge.

Paul, K T and Haddad, C (2022) ‘The Pandemic as We Know It: A policy studies perspective on ignorance and non-knowledge in COVID- 19 governance’, in M Gross and L McGoey (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 221-233.

Pederson, J (2021) Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Proctor, R N and Schiebinger, L (2008) Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford University Press.

Reliefweb (2024) ‘Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel | Flash Update #150’, 5 April, available: https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-150-enarhe (accessed 9 April 2024).

Rockström, J et al. (2009) ‘A safe operating space for humanity’, Nature, Vol. 461, pp. 472-475.

Sayigh, R (2022) ‘On the Burial of the Palestinian Nakba’ in M Gross and L McGoey (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, pp. 279-289, Abingdon: Routledge.

UNDP (2022) ‘2022 Special Report on Human Security: New Threats to Human Security in the Anthropocene’, available: https://hdr.undp.org/content/2022-special-report-human-security (accessed 9 April 2024).

UNESCO (2023) ‘Can countries afford their national SDG 4 benchmarks?’, Paris: Global Education Cooperation Mechanism, UNESCO Inter-Agency Secretariat. available: https://doi.org/10.54676/YHFN2611 (accessed 6 April 2024).

United Nations, (2022a) ‘Transforming Education Summit’, Paris: Global Education Cooperation Mechanism, UNESCO Inter-Agency Secretariat, available: https://www.un.org/en/transforming-education-summit (accessed 9 April 2024).

United Nations (2022b) ‘Thematic Action Track 5: Financing of Education Discussion Paper’, Paris: Global Education Cooperation Mechanism, UNESCO Inter-Agency Secretariat, available: https://transformingeducationsummit.sdg4education2030.org/AT5DiscussionPaper (accessed 9 April 2024).

University of Galway (2024) ‘Statement on Israel-Palestine’, 7 February, available: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/about-us/news-and-events/universitystatements/ (accessed 9 April 2024).

Williamson, J (2008) ‘A Short History of the Washington Consensus’ in   N Serra and J E Stiglitz (eds.) The Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance, Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Oxford: Oxford Academic, available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199534081.003.0002 (accessed 10 April 2024).

Witze, A (2024) ‘It’s final: the Anthropocene is not an epoch, despite protest over vote’, Nature News, 20 March, available: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00868-1 (accessed 20 March 2024).

Su-ming Khoo is Associate Professor, Head of Sociology, and Chair of the Socio-Economic Impact research cluster of the Ryan Institute at the University of Galway.  She is also Visiting Professor in Critical Studies in Higher Education and Transformation (CriSHET) Nelson Mandela University, South Africa (2022-27).