G.15. Popular And Postcolonial Education In The Unfolding Of Capitalism

Practices such as refugee rescue operations in the Mediterranean and the recent Sumud Global Flotilla illustrate a growing tension between sectors of civil society and political society, echoing Gramsci’s distinction. These global initiatives find local expression in multiple forms of activism in the global North, including educational support for structurally disadvantaged students. The partial assumption of responsibility for the schooling of working-class students with migrant backgrounds often leads activists to adopt a “postcolonial stance” through which they seek to counter neoliberal power arrangements. This stance becomes analytically relevant when neoliberalism is understood as a system that reproduces the capitalist hierarchisation of “races” and classes (Mellino 2021) and misrecognises subjectivities located furthest from bourgeois norms (Kundnani 2021).

This panel brings together empirical and theoretical contributions that analyse social movements in the global North as emerging forms of popular education viewed through postcolonial frameworks. Particular attention is devoted to how activists and communities experience and contest racialisation processes (Hall 1996), especially through practices aimed at disrupting the reproduction of social inequalities increasingly shaped—culturally and educationally—by intersecting dynamics of classism and racism.

We invite contributions from the humanities and social sciences, particularly those with a transdisciplinary orientation. Relevant themes include:

-       the colonial genealogy of neoliberal schooling and the role of popular schools

-       intersections of racism, classism (and sexism) in the inequalities affecting migrants in the global North

-       emerging postcolonial pedagogies in popular movements

-       artistic, urban and cultural initiatives that disseminate postcolonial critique within and beyond academia against neoliberal authoritarianism