The ascension of populist leaders (e.g., Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the US, Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka) keenly supported by ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic groups and movements in democratic societies is a global phenomenon in the past decade. In their struggle for power neo-nationalist groups (e.g., Boko Haram in Nigeria, Buddhist-nationalists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Bharatiya Janata Party of India) have led to crimes against humanity testing the strength and boundaries of democratic societies and their values. Neo-nationalist movements have impacted education systems making schools and other educational institutions a site of struggle between proponents and detractors of ethnocentric education.
Normalization of violence towards racially and/or ethnically identified groups is central to colonial processes in the past (e.g., Indian boarding-school era in the US and Canada) and in the present (e.g, Xinjiang internment camps) under the pretext of education. While there have been increasing attempts to narrowly control school curriculum to perpetuate ethnocentrism (e.g., anti-CRT and LGBTQI education in the US, neo-Zionist discourse in the civics curriculum in Israel) educators and educational institutions work towards creating curricula and pedagogies towards more just and livable societies globally (see Core Principles Statement of the Department of Teacher Education, MSU).
We invite graduate students to submit papers (abstracts preferably not more than 150 words) that resonate with the issues and tensions expressed above. Our attempt through this symposium is to create a safe and enabling space to share graduate students’ work that disrupts the banality of evil (Arendt, 1963) in educational spaces. We hope this symposium will lead to more discussions on this topic at MSU and future publications.
Submission deadline: January 20, 2023.
Please see the attached flyer for more information. If you have any questions, please write to Darshana or Kasun.
The symposium will be held on 3rd March, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm in Room 252.
