G.06. Decolonizing and Queering Education: Intersections of Power, Epistemic Justice, and School Practices

This panel proposes a dialogue between queer and decolonial pedagogy to examine how contemporary educational institutions continue to reproduce hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality within globalized metropolitan contexts shaped by neocolonial dynamics. In such settings, structures of power—race, class, gender—configure learning environments that ostensibly promote democratic values while frequently sustaining colonial and patriarchal arrangements. Both approaches share a critical and intersectional epistemological stance aimed at exposing sedimented power relations and demonstrating that educational processes are historically situated and inherently political. Queer pedagogy (Lugones, 2007) highlights how modern schooling has normalized a binary and patriarchal order, while decolonial studies (Walsh & Mignolo, 2018) reveal that this order is embedded in a broader colonial project of modernity that has imposed Eurocentric models of the body, family and citizenship.

The panel invites theoretical, empirical, and ethnographic contributions that, through decolonial and intersectional lens (Collins, 2019), explore how curricula, teaching practices, and institutional cultures can be reimagined in democratic terms. The aim is to understand whether, and under what conditions, pedagogy can be decolonized by bringing postcolonial theory, intersectionality and critical pedagogy into conversation to redefine education as a space of emancipation, participation and plurality.

We particularly welcome contributions that examine: the subversion of hegemonic masculinities; intersections of power within forms of oppression and resistance in contexts marked by migration, borders, and gender norms; processes of decolonizing school practices that integrate racialized and gendered perspectives; and forms of epistemic justice and pedagogical approaches that promote democracy and collective agency, including within digital environments.