Engaging the (geo)political economy of knowledge construction: Towards decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education.

Transcription

1 WORKING PAPER Engaging the (geo)political economy of knowledge construction: Towards decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education. Vanessa Andreotti School of Māori, Social and Cultural Studies in Education, University of Canterbury, Aotearoa This paper offers a synthesis of arguments mainly developed by Latin American scholars on the need for different epistemologies and a more nuanced understanding of modernity and coloniality in discussions about cosmopolitanism and global citizenship education. Informed by, but also critical of, world-systems theory (see Wallerstein 1974; 1984; 1991), these arguments highlight the importance of the geopolitics of knowledge construction and of situated theoretical approaches to questions related to the political economy of global citizenship education. My intention in writing this synthesis is not to present these scholars propositions as normative ideals, but as challenging and complementary or supplementary perspectives that are missing on the table of educational debates related to global citizenship education. My contributions to this debate have focused on the use of postcolonial theory and post-structuralism as analytical tools for critiques of global citizenship education policy and practices, and as frameworks for pedagogical projects that emphasise self-reflexivity and relationality (see for example Andreotti 2006; 2007; 2009; 2010). Hence, in choosing a different theoretical lens, it is also my intention to affirm the need for an approach to scholarship that recognises that every theoretical approach will only offer a partial and limited perspective on an issue: the complexity of global citizenship education cannot be captured by any one theory. This approach emphasises that walking (and pushing) the edges of a theory s limits is part of our ethical responsibility as researchers. In this sense, I start with Puerto Rican i sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel (2008) who offers a comparison of world systems and postcolonial analytical approaches. He argues that both share a critique of developmentalism, of Eurocentric forms of knowledge, of gender inequalities, of racial hierarchies, and of cultural/ideological processes that foster the subordination of the periphery in the capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel, 2008:10). However, according to Grosfoguel, postcolonial critiques focus on agents of colonial cultures, while world-system critiques focus on structures of capital accumulation. He perceives a divide in terms of disciplinary associations: postcolonial critiques tend to come from academics in the humanities in areas related to literature, cultural studies or rhetoric, while world-systems critiques tend to come from academics in social sciences in areas related to politics, economics and sociology. Gosfoguel affirms that while postcolonial theory tends to be limited in its analysis of political-economic relations, worldsystems theory tends to be limited in its analysis of culture: both literatures fluctuate between the danger of economic reductionism and the danger of

2 culturalism (Grosfoguel, 2008:11). He identifies a number of questions central to debates in both camps: Can we produce a radical anti-capitalist politics beyond identity politics? Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism? Can we produce knowledges beyond third World and Eurocentric fundamentalisms? Can we overcome the traditional dichotomy between political-economy and cultural studies? Can we move beyond economic reductionism and culturalism? How can we overcome Eurocentric modernity without throwing away the best of modernity as many Third World fundamentalists do? (Grosfoguel, 2008:1) These questions and others presented later seem to be key in moving debates around global citizenship beyond Eurocentrism and unexamined universality. Thus the aim of this article is to map implications of debates arising from what I call decolonial world systems theory ii for a project of global citizenship education that emphasises decoloniality and diversality, I divided this article into four parts. I start with a summary of more general discussions related to modernity in the works of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Group. I briefly outline the perspectives of four Latin American scholars writing in conversation with one another (Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo) in their emphases on the importance to re-imagine modernity as a project of violent epistemic and territorial expansion in order to clear its past and point towards different futures. Second, I explore concepts related to epistemic racism in the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Third, I present a summary of Boaventura de Souza Santos metaphor of abyssal lines and abyssal thinking, as well as his call for an ecology of knowledges that is based on an alternative way to think about alternatives. In the last part of the article, I summarise some implications for three dimensions of global citizenship education that may open possibilities for decoloniality and diversality and I offer my own interpretation of what decoloniality and diversality could look like in pedagogical practices. The modernity coloniality group: introducing the darker side of modernity The Argentinean sociologist Enrique Dussel (1998) asserts that the question of modernity is characterised by two opposing paradigms: the Eurocentric and the planetary. The Eurocentric paradigm constructs modernity as exclusively European, something that develops in the middle ages and that subsequently expands to other parts of the world. He argues that, within this paradigm Europe is believed to have exceptional internal characteristics (i.e. rationality) that justify its superiority over other cultures. In contrast, the planetary paradigm positions Europe as the centre of a world system, not as an independent system that has expanded. This centrality comes from the comparative advantage gained from the colonization and integration of Amerindia, which became its first periphery. This planetary paradigm represents modernity as the product and not the cause of European

3 planetarization and Eurocentrism as the super-ideology that establishes the legitimacy of the domination of the world system by its centre, justifying its management functions. Another Argentinian scholar, Walter Mignolo (2002) distinguishes two macronarratives that can be associated with the paradigms described by Dussel: that of Western civilisation and that of modern world systems. According to Mignolo, the former is a philosophical narrative associated with literature, philosophy and the history of ideas, locating its beginning in ancient Greece and the beginning of modernity in the eighteenth century, while the latter is a narrative of the social sciences that situates the beginning of the process of world-systems formation in the fifteenth century and links it to capitalism. Mignolo asserts that: the colonized areas of the world were targets of Christianization and the civilizing mission, as the project of the narrative of Western civilization, and they became the target of development, modernization, and the new marketplace as the project of the modern worldsystem (p.84). Mignolo argues that both metanarratives have their own defenders and critics and he places Dussel in-between the two. The modern world-system/planetary modernity macronarratives are centred on an articulation of power based on space rather than a succession of events in linear time. The Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (1997) has called this articulation of power coloniality of power. This coloniality can be conceptualised as a global hegemonic model of power in place since the conquest of the Americas that articulated race and labour, space and peoples, according to the needs of capital and to the benefit of white European peoples (Escobar 2004:218). If modernity is conceptualised as the project of the Christian and secular West, then coloniality is: on the one hand - what the project of modernity needs to rule out and roll over, in order to implant itself as modernity and - on the other hand - the site of enunciation where the blindness of the modern project is revealed, and concomitantly also the site where new projects begin to unfold. ( exchange between Mignolo and Escobar cited in Escobar 2004:218). Quijano s coloniality of power features as the overall dimension of modernity (its darker side ). It sees colonialism as constitutive of modernity, rather than derivative from modernity. In this sense, colonialism is conceptualised as an Eurocentric process of expansion of a mode of knowing and representation that claims universality for itself, derived from Europe s position as centre (Escobar 2004:217). Dussel (1998) argues that the crises of modernity, after five centuries of development, emerges from internal critiques (e.g. Nietzsche, Heidegger and the post-modernists ) that have been important, but that have not been able to go beyond Eurocentrism, as the peripheral world does not appear to be more than a passive spectator, still in need of being modernized (p.17). In a similar way, Mignolo (2002) claims that it is problematic to think from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity (p.66). He concludes that such a movement reproduces the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of inclusion (ibid).

4 In an attempt to formulate this political philosophy of inclusion, Mignolo (2002) expands on the planetary paradigm and the concept of coloniality by introducing the notion of colonial difference, which refers to an acknowledgement of the construction of the classification of the planet in the Modern/Colonial imaginary (p.13). He asserts that colonial expansion was also the expansion of (European) forms of knowledge, even if critical of colonialism and that the Eurocentric paradigm of modernity has been blind to the subalternisation of non-european knowledges. His concept of colonial difference can be described as a loci of enunciation, a connector that refers to the changing faces of colonial differences throughout the history of the modern/colonial world-system and brings to the foreground the planetary dimension of human history silenced by discourses centering on modernity, postmodernity, and Western civilization (Mignolo, 2002:80). The colonial difference is an effect of coloniality that, as Mignolo points out, can be either foreclosed or revealed (ibid). Dussel (1998) also argues that the Eurocentric paradigm that conceptualizes modernity as an exclusively European phenomenon that expanded from the seventeenth century on throughout all the backward cultures (p.18) can generate two positions about the future. The first position says that modernity needs to be concluded (he asserts that Habermas and Apel defend this position). The second says that modernity does not have any positive qualities and propose that the project should be abandoned (he asserts that the postmodernists are its defenders). For the second paradigm that considers modernity the rational management of a world-system, he identifies his own position, speaking from the world periphery (the colonial difference), as one intending to recoup what is redeemable in modernity and to halt the practices of domination and exclusion in the world system (p.20) a project of liberation of the periphery, of overcoming the world system itself by formulating an ethics of liberation defined as transmodern. Dussel asserts that he is coming from a different starting point from critical theory and from continental philosophy, a different locus of enunciation that, according to Mignolo is based on a different concept of time: Since the Renaissance - the early modern period or emergence of the modern/colonial world time has functioned as a principle of order that increasingly subordinates places, relegating them to before or below from the perspective of the holders (of the doors) of time. Arrangements of events and people in a time line is also a hierarchical order, distinguishing primary sources of thought from interesting or curious events, peoples, or ideas. Time is also the point of reference for the order of knowledge. The discontinuity between being and time and coloniality of being and place is what nourishes Dussel s need to underline the difference (the colonial difference) between continental philosophy (Vattimo, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Michel Foucault) and philosophy of liberation (p.21). An ethics and philosophy of liberation imply that the location of the speaker, her/his experience of colonial difference needs to be revealed and become the starting point for thinking. Mignolo justifies his position by stating that

5 global designs (religious, economic, social, and epistemic) emerged as responses to the propagation of an epistemology that was assumed to have universal value across time and space (p.69). From a similar standpoint, Colombian anthropologist, Arturo Escobar (2004) summarises Mignolo s point asserting that the seeming triumph of Eurocentered modernity can be seen as the imposition of a global design by a particular local history, in such a way that it has subalternised other local histories and designs (p.217). The implication is that within discourses of progress and civilisation, time acts as a principle that arbitrates and ranks both knowledge and being (i.e. who counts as human). Non-European epistemologies and ontologies are translated into universalised European epistemological parameters as inferior, less evolved, primitive, erroneous or eccentric culturally tainted derivatives. This movement of subalternisation and normalisation is generally referred to as the epistemic violence of colonialism. This violence affects cultural difference: those who stubbornly insist on maintaining their own vision of progress or reason face the danger of being isolated, impoverished and discriminated against (Canagarajah, 2002:245). This is illustrated by Mignolo with reference to the double bind facing African philosophers according to Bernasconi (cited in Mignolo, 2002): [e]ither African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt (p.70). The end of this Eurocentric and civilizing system of Western epistemology, according to Dussel, is marked by three limits. The first is the ecological destruction of the planet. For Dussel, this limit is marked by the conceptualisation of nature as an exploitable object that exists to increase the rate of profit of capital. The second limit is poverty (the destruction of humanity). This limit is marked by the unequal distribution of wealth and labour caused by a an economy that sanctions exploitation, accumulation and consumerism. The third limit is the impossibility of the subsumption of peoples and cultures through modernisation processes. This is marked by movements of resistance (Dussel, 1998). In relation to this third limit, Mignolo, Dussel, Quijano and Escobar attempt to create a common ground for peoples in the periphery by proposing that the colonial difference should be the starting point for knowledge and thinking. They claim that their border position should be revealed and become the epistemological position where people speak from (i.e. a locus of enunciation). Mignolo conceptualises border thinking as an epistemic mode that works as a double critique to crack the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system away from Eurocentrism as an epistemological perspective. As a double critique, border thinking establishes alliances with the internal critique of modernity [ ] at the same time that it marks the irreducible difference of border thinking as a critique from the colonial difference (Mignolo, 2000:87). As an epistemic mode, border thinking affirms the maxim: I am where I think (89).

6 Escobar (2004) summarises the theoretical differential of the Latin American Modenity/Coloniality Research Group as: 1) the location of the origins of modernity in the fifteenth century with the conquest of America and the control of the Atlantic; 2) the conceptualisation of colonialism, postcolonialism and imperialism as constitutive of modernity; 3) the adoption of the planetary paradigm which sees modernity as a world rather than an European phenomenon; 4) the identification of domination of non-europeans as a central and necessary feature of modernity; 5) the formulation of the link between modernity and coloniality represented in the notion of Eurocentrism as a mode of knowing and hegemonic representation derived from Europe s position as centre that claims universality for itself. The group acknowledges the importance of the internal critique of modernity (i.e. post-modernism and post-structuralism), but recognise its limits in the foreclosure of colonial difference. Their proposal for political articulation can be summarised as the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern groups (Escobar 2004:217). Nelson Maldonado-Torres: epistemic racism Puerto Rican philosopher Maldonado-Torres (2004), drawing on the work of Mignolo, Quijano and others, deploys coloniality of power as an analytical tool that could counter the forgetting of spaciality (expansionist control of lands), epistemic racism (elimination and subjugation of difference) and geopolitics of knowledge production (epistemic violence) in Eurocentric accounts of the making of modernity. He defends that, as an analytical tool, coloniality of power links together racial formation, the control of labor, the state and knowledge production (39). For Maldonado-Torres, Quijano and Mignolo, this analytical tool brings to the surface the darker side of modernity : the fact that modernity depends on coloniality for its existence. Maldonado-Torres (2004) proposes that, if the darker side of modernity is forgotten, what results is a kind of universalism located in a spaceless realm. This spacelessness prompts the emergence of an epistemicaly neutral subject who speaks from Europe (or America/Canada) as a privileged epistemic site adopting a universalistic perspective that does away with the significance of geopolitical location (37). Hence, this neutral epistemic subject will tend to believe that s/he alone can map the world and draw associations between thinking and space (30) that are valid for all the rest of humanity. For Maldonado-Torres, this alleged neutrality and universality, in turn, produces epistemic blindness: At the end, such belief in neutrality, I would like to suggest, tends to reproduce blindness, not in regard to space as such, but in relation to non-european ways of thinking and to the production and reproduction of the imperial/colonial relation, or what I would like to refer to, following the work of the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, as coloniality. (2004:30)

7 Maldonado-Torres (2004) associates the allegedly neutral-universal stance with the search for European (or Western ) roots, which characterises the works of influential philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Negri, Habermas and Derrida. He affirms that these authors reproduce a belief that is at the heart of the project of modernity: the belief that people cannot get by without Europe s theoretical and cultural achievements (32). Hence, this search for European roots results in an epistemic blindness constitutive of both modernity and postmodernity, a will to ignorance that Maldonado-Torres translates (with reference to the work of Frantz Fanon) as the forgetfulness of damnation.(45): The forgetfulness of the damned is part of the veritable sickness of the West, a sickness that could be likened to a state of amnesia that leads to murder, destruction and epistemic will to power with good conscience (2004:36). He also associates this search for roots with epistemic racism. Maldonado- Torres defines this kind of racism as a systemic amnesia that forgets geopolitical relations at work in the making of modernity. This results in the non-recognition of radically different epistemologies: As all forms of racism, epistemic racism is linked with politics and sociality. Epistemic racism disregards the epistemic capacity of certain groups of people. It may be based on metaphysics or ontology but its results are nonetheless the same: the evasion of the recognition of others as fully human beings (2004:34) The criteria for full humanity relates to one s capacity for intellectual creativity and rationality defined in European terms (Maldonado-Torres, 2004). Hence, those who are perceived to lack both intellectual and rational capacity are regarded as not-fully-human. Maldonado-Torres refers to this subject position as the coloniality of being : Coloniality of Being suggests that Being in some way militates against one s own existence. Levinas, a racialized and persecuted subject, had an intimation into this reality. Being was not something that opened to him the realm of signification, but something that seemed to make him the target of annihilation.(2004:43) Maldonado-Torres (2004) notes that conceptions of Being in the works of thinkers ideologically located in Europe differ from those who focus on the way different subjects with different histories and memories experience modernity and respond to its legacies in the contemporary world (42). He asserts that critics of Eurocentrism who are firmly grounded in Eurocentrism itself tend to critique modernity at the same time that they try to rescue it. Such critiques, by leaving out questions of spaciality and coloniality, fail to challenge the racist geopolitics of knowledge at the heart of Western discourse and, hence, reproduce epistemic racism. This rescuing of modernity generally takes the form of a critique of universals that, at the same, reaffirms

8 Europe as a site of epistemic privilege (especially in relation to critical thinking ): This form of hegemonic identity politics would not be so problematic if it did not assume that the critique of instrumental reason is enough to account for the logic of coloniality. There is in much of critical thinking the tendency to recognize critical thought only when it uses the terms of debate that derive from consideration of certain coordinates typically located in crucial spaces for the production of modern and postmodern ideologies (2004: 40-41). Maldonado-Torres (2004) is also critical of multicultural attempts to include different voices in Eurocentric sites of conversation, where difference is domesticated to become palatable and confirm the universalism of European reason. He states that this kind of multiculturalism hides in this way a deeper multiracism that only recognizes the right for difference when peoples are well domesticated by capitalism, the market economy and liberal ideals of freedom and equality (49). These multicultural sites of dialogue are grounded on a belief in dialectical thinking that forecloses its own parameters of intelligibility (or palatability). This leads to a forgetting of constitutive absences in dialectical process. For Maldonado-Torres, these absences relate back to those who are damned : Taking Du Bois and Wynter s lead, I would like to suggest that from the perspectives of the repeatedly racialized groups of modernity, particularly indigenous people and people of African or Afro-mixed exslave descent, but also Jews and Muslims, a concept of Being premised on what is often referred to as the dialectics of modernity and the nation, and their supposed overcoming by the emergence of imperial sovereignty or Empire, miss the non-dialectical character of Damnation (2004:42) In order to address this damnation, the unequal distribution of vulnerabilities, oppression and suffering, Maldonado-Torres (2004) calls for a transgression of Eurocentric boundaries. He states that we would need to introduce ideas that emerge from the experience of colonization and persecution of different subjectivities (44). However, he poses a begged question: How can one communicate with subjects who are a priorily suspected of lacking reason? Part of the answer, for Maldonado-Torres is the introduction of geopolitical relations in the narratives of modernity in order to make its darker side visible, as the Latin American group emphasise. He uses Frantz Fanon s project of decoloniality as an example: Fanon s philosophical geopolitics were transgressive, decolonial and cosmopolitan. He wanted to bring into view what had remained invisible for centuries. He was claiming the need for the recognition of difference as well as the need for decolonization as an absolute requirement for the proper recognition of human difference and the

9 achievement of a post-colonial and post-european form of humanism (2004:36). Maldonado-Torres (2004) project involves a process of epistemic transformation and decolonial cosmopolitanism leading to a movement towards radical diversality: a critique of roots that brings into light both coloniality and the epistemic potential of non-european epistemes (30). In this sense, he contrasts Fanon s project of decolonization as a dislocation of the subject, with Levinas and Heidegger s search for European roots: Decolonization is about the creation of a new symbolic and material order that takes the full spectrum of human history, its achievements and its failures, into view. This side of history is what neither Heidegger nor Levinas could see or did not want to see. Their search for European roots blinded them to this kind of decolonial geopolitics. Instead of giving primacy to the search for roots in Europe or elsewhere, Fanon s decolonial consciousness aims to dislocate the subject through the awareness of a response to those who are locked in positions of subordination. Rather than trying to find roots in the earth, Fanon proposed responding responsibly to the damned of the earth (2004:36). Boaventura de Souza Santos (2007): abyssal lines, abyssal thinking If decolonization is the creation of a new symbolic and material order that takes the full spectrum of human history, its achievements and its failures, into view, Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos (2007) offers a metaphor that enacts this project and complements Maldonado-Torres (2004) contribution to a conversation on the possibility of an approach to global citizenship education that emphasises decoloniality and diversality. His concept of abyssal lines and abyssal thinking make the coloniality of power more visible and accessible to those who have not engaged with these ideas before. Santos (2007) asserts that Modern Western thinking operates as abyssal thinking. He defines abyssal thinking as a system consisting of visible distinctions which are based on invisible distinctions that are established through a logic that defines social reality as either on this side of the abyssal line or on the other side of the abyssal line He explains: The division is such that the other side of the line vanishes as reality becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as non-existent. Nonexistent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the copresence of the two sides of the line. To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the field of relevant reality.

10 Beyond it, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, non dialectical absence (2007:2). He associates this side of the line (i.e. metropolitan societies) with the paradigm of regulation/emancipation and the other side (i.e. shifting colonial territories) with appropriation and violence (committed by this side of the line ). He states that the Modern Abyssal line is not fixed, but that its position at any one time is heavily controlled and policed. He also acknowledges that the displacements of the line have affected the distinction between the metropolitan and the colonial in recent times, in many spaces turning the colonial into an internal dimension of the metropolitan (2007:9). Modern Abyssal thinking thrives in the making and radicalization of distinctions that make the abyssal line in which they are grounded invisible. One example is the distinction between scientific truth and falsehood, which is projected as universal. This universality, according to Santos (2007) is premised on the invisibility of ways of knowing that do not fit parameters of acceptability established by Modern knowledge, law and science in their abyssal mode of operation (akin to Maldonado-Torres epistemic blindness and racism towards the damned ). The result is that, as seen from this side of the line, on the other side of the line there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific enquiry (2). As a result, a vast array of cognitive experiences are wasted. Santos (2007) refers to this trashing of epistemologies as epistemicide (16). In legal terms, it is this side of the line that determines what is legal and illegal based on State or International Law, eliminating the possibilities and experiences of social realms where such distinctions (i.e. State, International, legal, illegal) would be unimaginable as forms of organization: This radical denial of co-presence grounds the affirmation of the radical difference that, on this side of the line, separates true and false, legal and illegal. The other side of the line comprises a vast set of discarded experiences, made invisible both as agencies and as agents, and with no fixed territorial location (Santos, 2007:3). This denial of co-presence translates into a hegemonic contact that converts simultaneity with non-contemporaneity [making up] pasts to make room for a single homogeneous future (3) (hence a search for roots in Europe or in the West!). The project of a homogeneous future justifies the violence and appropriation carried out in its name (Quijano s coloniality of power). Thus, one part of humanity (considered sub-human), on the other side of the abyssal line, is sacrificed in order to affirm the universality of the part of humanity on this side of the line (Santos, 2007). Santos (2007) argues that the struggle for global social justice is inseparable from the struggle for global cognitive justice and that both struggles require post-abyssal thinking (5). This implies that political resistance must be premised upon epistemological resistance (10), which calls not for more

11 alternatives but for an alternative thinking about alternatives (10) (akin to Mignolo s border thinking and Maldonado-Torres decolonial project towards diversality). Such alternative way of thinking about alternatives, for Santos (2007), needs a sociology of emergences (2004) which involves the symbolic amplification of signs, clues, and latent tendencies that, however inchoate and fragmented point to new constellations of meaning as regards both to the understanding and the transformation of the world (2007:10). This recognition of epistemological diversity beyond scientific knowledge, entails a renouncing of any general epistemology. However, he asserts that Throughout the world, not only are there very diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life and spirit, but also many and very diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge and the criteria that may be used to validate it. In the transitional period we are entering, in which abyssal versions of totality and unity of knowledge still resist, we probably need a residual general epistemological requirement to move along: a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology (Santos, 2007:12). He suggests that, from this side of the abyssal line, a recognition of cultural diversity does not necessarily translate into a recognition of epistemological diversity (his critique is similar to Maldonado-Torres critique of multiculturalism). Santos (2007) advocates for an ecology of knowledges based on a recognition of the plurality of heterogeneous knowledges (one of them being modern science) and on the sustained and dynamic interconnections between them without compromising their autonomy (11). In Santos (2007) ecology of knowledges, knowledges and ignorances intersect: as there is no unity of knowledge, there is no unity of ignorance either (12). Given the interdependence of knowledges and ignorances, the ideal would be to create inter-knowledges where learning other knowledges does not mean forgetting one s own (Santos, 2007). Hence, the ecology of knowledges he proposes aims to enable epistemological consistency for pluralistic, propositional thinking (2007:12) where scientific knowledge is not discredited, but used in counter hegemonic ways: Such use consists, on the one hand in exploring the internal plurality of science, that is, alternative scientific practices that have been made visible by feminist and postcolonial epistemologies and, on the other hand, in promoting the interaction and interdependence between scientific and non-scientific knowledges (2007:13) Within the ecology of knowledges, the limits and value of knowledges are attributed according to the notion of knowledge-as-intervention-in-reality and not knowledge as-a-representation-of-reality (Santos, 2007:13). He proposes that the credibility of cognitive construction [be] measured by the type of intervention in the world that it affords or prevents (ibid). He suggests that the ecology of knowledges not only requires a break from the mono-epistemicism of this side of the abyssal line, but also a radical co-presence, or the

12 conflation of contemporaneity with simultaneity, which involves the abandonment of the notion of linear time (11) (as Mignolo also proposes) and the cultivation of a spontaneity that refuses to deduce the potential from the actual (17). The ecology of knowledges is a destabilizing epistemology to the extent that it engages in a radical critique of the politics of the possible without yielding to an impossible politics (Santos, 2007:17) This drive towards egalitarian simultaneity is based on an idea of incompleteness: since no single type of knowledge can account for all possible interventions in the world, all of them are incomplete in different ways. Hence each knowledge is both insufficient and inter-dependent on other knowledges (Santos, 2007:17). Santos (2007) summarises post-abyssal thinking as learning from the South through an epistemology of the South (11). Such thinking should confront the mono-epistemicism of this side of the Abyssal line with an ecology of knowledges. It is in the nature of the ecology of knowledges to establish itself through constant questioning and incomplete answers. This is what makes it a prudent knowledge. The ecology of knowledges enables us to have a much broader vision of what we do not know, as well as of what we do know, and also to be aware that what we do not know is our own ignorance, not a general ignorance.(2007:18) So what? Now what? Implications for global citizenship education In this article, I propose that the conceptual syntheses of the works of Mignolo (2002), Dussel (1998), Quijano (1997), Escobar (2004), Maldonado-Torres (2004) and Santos (2007) presented so far open different possibilities for creating meaning in relation to at least three inter-dependent dimensions of global citizenship education. The first is how educators imagine the globe in global citizenship and education. The second is how educators imagine themselves as global educators and their students as global citizens. The third is how educators imagine knowledge and learning beyond Eurocentric paradigms. I offer a situated analysis of the implications for each dimension with key questions that could guide the pursuit of further conversations towards more emphasis on decoloniality and diversality (beyond eurocentrism) in global citizenship work. In terms of how educators imagine the globe, the strongest message of the conceptual syntheses is that moving beyond Eurocentrism requires an account of the darker side of modernity through an understanding of the coloniality of power (i.e. seeing colonialism as constitutive of modernity rather than derivative from it). In this sense, Mignolo proposes an emphasis on colonial difference as a recognition of the classification of the planet in the Modern/Colonial imaginary (2000:13) and of the epistemic violences of modernity and their effects. Similarly, Maldonado-Torres work emphasises

13 the need to infuse global citizenship education theories and practices with reflections on the geopolitics and spaciality of knowledge production. Santos (2007) metaphor of abyssal lines helps with both propositions. An awareness and analysis of abyssal divisions could be the first step to interrupt the reproduction of abyssal thinking in global citizenship education. Understanding the historical effects of abyssal lines on both sides of the line, can help educators recognise the mechanisms that privilege European/Western epistemologies and forget, silence, repress or damn other epistemologies. Santos (2007) metaphor can also assist educators in recognising some of the problems of representation that arise when someone on this side of the line wants to speak about, for or with the other side. Questions that could guide further explorations in relation to how the globe is imagined in global citizenship could include: how is modernity defined in global citizenship work? What political and ideological frames ground this understanding? How is the relationship between modernity and colonialism defined? Whose notion of time and progress is deployed in this conceptualisation? What analysis of power relations is at work? How are abyssal lines established? How are they contested? What counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts? A recognition of problems of representation takes us to the second dimension I would like to explore: how educators see themselves and their students in relation to the globe. Maldonado-Torres raises important issues that arise when the darker side of modernity is not acknowledged. He warns of the dangers of adopting a neutral-universalist stance that results in epistemic racism and will to power and that reproduces the myth that other cultures would not get by without Europe (or USA/Canada/the West ). Maldonado- Torres associates epistemic racism with an amnesia of the geopolitical making of modernity. This amnesia, on this side of Santos (2007) abyssal line, may prompt educators to believe that development and progress can only be measured by the allegedly universal parameters that they know and which they believe are a result of natural human evolution. Hence, this amnesia can lead to the assumption that on the other side of the abyss, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific enquiry (Santos, 2007: 2). For the neutral-universalist subject Maldonado-Torres (2004) and Santos (2007) suggest that they should take account of where they are speaking from : in terms of the geopolitical economy of knowledge production for Maldonado-Torres (2004) and in terms of the abyssal line for Santos (2007). They also warn against attempts to domesticate difference and include different voices (to tick the box of Eurocentric tolerance) only as long as these voices say what the neutral-universalist subject wants to hear (Maldonado-Torres, 2004). Questions that could lead to further explorations in relation to this dimension include: Where is one speaking from as a global citizen or global educator? How is one socially and historically constituted in this position (e.g. as a dispenser or receiver of knowledge, rights, charity, etc. who is helping, researching or studying who, why and how come)? What are

14 the non-negotiable universals in a global citizenship project (if there are any)? Whose perspectives are represented in these universals? Whose epistemology forms the basis of this project? Whose perspectives or epistemologies could have been silenced or absent in this project? Does this work reinforce the belief that people cannot get by without European/American help, ideas or intervention? How can we move beyond depoliticised projects that focus on individual skills towards a broader understanding of ideology, culture and political-economies? How can we undo the consciousness of superiority lodged in the self (Spivak, 2004:534) through over socialisation on this side of the line that affirms that the price of greatness is responsibility for the other (ibid)? How do we support learners in the difficult stages of this undoing when they face the uncertainty, fear, anger and possible paralysis that comes in the early stages of the renegotiation of (and of disenchantment with) epistemic privilege? In terms of imagining knowledge and learning beyond Eurocentric paradigms, Mignolo (2002), Maldonado-Torres (2004) and Santos (2007) propose complementary projects that suit different subject positions. For those who are able to cross from the other side of the abyssal line to this side, Mignolo (2000) calls for the use of border thinking as an epistemic principle that aims to crack the Modern/colonial imaginary making the darker side of modernity and the coloniality of power visible. Similarly, for those on this side of the line and those crossing, Maldonado-Torres (2004) proposes a decolonial grammar of critical analysis which would recognise its own vulnerability (52). He calls for an examination of the mechanisms that create subordination and invisibility, as well as of our own complicity with patterns of domination. He states that this examination is more about searching for invisible faces than searching for imperial roots; more about radical critique than about orthodox alignments against what are persistently conceived as the barbarians of knowledge (2004:51). This would require the creation of a new symbolic and material order that takes the full spectrum of human history, its achievements and its failures, into view (Maldonado-Torres, 2004:36). Maldonado-Torres (2004) and Mignolo s (2000;2002) insistence on diversality requires the making of a space for the enunciation and expression of non- Western cosmologies and for the expression of different cultural, political and social memories (2000:51). This space would help make visible the existential conditions of people with different legacies, cosmologies and aspirations for the transformation of the world and of the ego (Maldonado- Torres, 2004). For this space to grant equality, it cannot be based on dialectics (as constitutive of European universalist epistemologies) or a veiled aspiration for consensus (as also constitutive of European universalist epistemologies). In Mignolo s (2000) words this space needs to accord people the right to be different because they are equals (311). This space demands an alternative thinking of alternatives (Santos, 2007: 10). This alternative thinking needs to conceptualise knowledge, culture and identities as verbs (Bhabha, 1994) and resists homogenisations while affirming specificities. The implication for education is that educators would need to let go of the aspiration for fixed blueprints of futures and ideal societies (projected from a single worldview to be imposed worldwide) that are traditionally constitutive of

15 the project of schooling (as imagined from an European perspective and imposed around the world). This entails a renegotiation of epistemic privilege (on this side of the line) that is pedagogically difficult as it is generally perceived first as a loss (of grounds, and certainties: chaos, the end of everything - see Andreotti 2010). The notions of an ecology of knowledges and post-abyssal thinking proposed by Santos (2007) complement the idea of diversality defended by Mignolo (2000; 2002) and Maldonado-Torres (2004) in three different ways. First they focus on the inter-relations and insufficiency of all knowledge systems. Second, they bring to the fore the problematic and provisional nature of creating a general epistemology that could work in the unmaking the abyssal lines. In addition, they emphasise the need to rethink the parameters of validation and limits of knowledge and truth in terms of knowledge-asintervention-in-reality rather than knowledge as-a-representation-of-reality (Santos, 2007:13). Santos (2007) aligns with Mignolo (2000; 2002) in the suggestion that in post-abyssal thinking, ecologies of knowledge or projects of diversality, the will to transform (the coloniality of power or abyssal lines) should precede the will to truth (which anchors the coloniality of power/abyssal lines) (Mignolo, 2000:26). Santos (2007) also aligns with Mignolo (2000;2002) in his call for an abandonment of the notion of linear time (and hierarchical categories such as traditional/modern) that enables the conflation of contemporaneity with simultaneity (i.e. an abandonment of the idea that the first/developed/western world is ahead in progress/time). In education, this would require what Trinidadian scholar Jacqui Alexander (2005) has called a re-scrambling of our here and now (of this side of the abyssal line) with the then and there (that we attribute to the other side) towards a here and there and then and now (2005:190). Maldonado-Torres (2004) suggests some questions that could guide this kind of work in global citizenship education: Why not engaging seriously Muslim intellectuals? Why not trying to understand the deeply theoretical claims that have emerged in contexts that have known European coloniality? Why not breaking with the model of the universal or global and furthering the growth of an epistemically diverse world? (2004:50). I would add five one million-dollar questions to his list: 1)How can one engage with different epistemologies ethically, responsibly and critically without homogenizing, essentialising or romaticising them? 2) How can one interrupt one s own assumptions in order to engage with other epistemologies on their own terms? 3) How can one avoid absolute relativism (i.e. knowledge systems seen as homogeneous, static and independent rather than dynamic, contingent and inter-dependent)? 4)How can one do this successfully without reproducing the belief that precisely by doing this I am necessarily better, I am necessarily indispensable, I am necessarily the one who rights wrongs, I am necessarily the end product for which history happened (Spivak, 2004: 532)? 5) How can one avoid creating new abyssal lines in the work against abyssal lines? These questions are part of a debate

16 that is ongoing and they highlight the fact that the inclusion of Other epistemologies and the undoing of abyssal lines in pedagogical work (or anywhere else) cannot be a quick fix exercise with simple tick-this-box standards of success (Spivak, 2004). Conclusions: towards a pedagogy of dissensus So, what would decoloniality and diversality look like in global citizenship education practice? And are educational projects that emphasise decoloniality, diversality, post-abyssal thinking, border thinking or ecologies of knowledge possible in contemporary educational institutions, which can be seen as official producers of neutral-universal subjectivities firmly grounded on this side of the abyssal line? My response to the first question is that global citizenship work informed by these principles would show a high level of engagement with other epistemologies and social movements, as well as a number of key characteristics. These would include (but not be exclusive to): - a strong emphasis on the geopolitics of knowledge production in order to enable learners to face abyssal lines and work through their unmaking; - a focus on the development of hyper-self-reflexivity, not as a form of hyper-rationality, but as an opening to modes of being not anchored in (allegedly) universal reason; and - a pedagogical emphasis on dissensus in order to support learners in the development of their ability to hold paradoxes and not be overwhelmed by complexity, ambiguity, conflict, uncertainty and difference. My postcolonial lens would also like to see in this decolonial global citizenship a commitment to ongoing critical engagement with decolonial theory itself. Although there are some safeguards in the ideas outlined here against absolute relativism and identity politics, there is still a risk of territorializing difference and homogenizing modernity if educators adopt a half-baked, simplified version of it (which is a serious possibility given the increasing instrumentalist drive in education). My situated response to the second question related to the feasibility of this kind of work in contemporary educational institutions is that it depends on the discursive possibilities at work in a specific context, as well as the educators ability to negotiate between discourses (i.e. their ability to border think ). In my own work I have found it very useful to make strategic alliances in spaces privileging internal critiques of modernity - even those that could potentially sanction dangerous neoliberal practices and reinforce abyssal lines, such as discourses of knowledge societies and 21 st century education. My argument is that between enunciation (e.g. of a neoliberal educational agenda) and interpretation in a specific context (e.g. teachers on the ground ) lies a space of negotiation and creative opportunity that is always pregnant with (risky) possibilities. This space is extremely useful for those who can re-work these discourses and interfere in the geopolitical economy of knowledge production