Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context

Abstract

The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, reflections, and desires of young people in different parts of the world as they seek to understand where they fit in imperial constellations that cross generations, borders, and oceans.

Historical geographies of alternative, and non‐formal education: Learning from the histories of Black education

“…(2022, p. 2) have urged extra attention be paid to ‘research in and from the Global South’ if the dominant conceptual and empirical frames that proliferate within geographies of education today are to be decolonised. While this call rightly echoes Jazeel (2017) and others, historical research on non‐formal education should also be attentive to the ways historical education in the global north was often ‘relational and in motion’ (Gergan et al., 2023, p. 677), bound up in decolonial and anticolonial politics hailing from transnational contexts that spanned north and south rather than remain siloed within local or national contexts. Thus, to overlook global north contexts as part of efforts to decolonise geographies of education in favour of global south contexts threatens to occlude the complex material and ideological transnational geographies and mobilities that flowed from the global south to the global north and vice versa, and which underpinned radical, decolonial and anti‐racist education spaces operating from Britain and other global north contexts in the second half of the 20th century.…”

“…As well as considering the geographies of Black supplementary schooling from a fine‐grained, poststructuralist perspective, the paper also argued for closer attention to be paid to a politics of decoloniality. A key point here was that historical geographies of non‐formal education are well placed to acknowledge the relational nature of educational knowledge production as it was fused to the politics of decoloniality, rather than (inadvertently) reproduce coloniality's urge to dissociate and segment (McKittrick, 2021; Lowe, 2015, cited in Gergan et al., 2023) educational knowledge production as situated either in the global south or north. By uncovering the historic transnational networks and practices of decolonial, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist solidarity and organising woven through London's non‐formal education spaces in the late 20th century, the above discussion demonstrates how the difficult task of decentring and decolonising geographies of education might be just as fertile beginning from global north as well as south contexts.…”

“…With decolonial interventions in contemporary geographies of education and youth now established (see e.g. Abebe & Biswas, 2021;Gergan et al, 2023), Kraftl et al (2022, p. 2) have urged extra attention be paid to 'research in and from the Global South' if the dominant conceptual and empirical frames that proliferate within geographies of education today are to be decolonised. While this call rightly echoes Jazeel (2017) and others, historical research on non-formal education should also be attentive to the ways historical education in the global north was often 'relational and in motion' (Gergan et al, 2023, p. 677), bound up in decolonial and anticolonial politics hailing from transnational contexts that spanned north and south rather than remain siloed within local or national contexts.…”

“…Geographers have attempted to ‘insert … [them]selves into ongoing dynamics of coloniality’ (Noxolo, 2017, p. 318) by engaging with these ideas (see e.g. Craggs & Neate, 2020; Esson et al., 2017; Gergan et al., 2023). Overlapping with the imperatives of critical, feminist, postcolonial, black, indigenous, and subaltern geographies, Radcliffe and Radhuber (2020) argue that decolonial geographies problematise knowledge, subjectivity and power, magnifying and amplifying the liberation and resistance of indigenous, racialised groups against the interrelated violence of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and anti‐blackness (see also Daigle & Ramírez, 2019).…”

“…With decolonial interventions in contemporary geographies of education and youth now established (see e.g. Abebe & Biswas, 2021; Gergan et al., 2023), Kraftl et al. (2022, p. 2) have urged extra attention be paid to ‘research in and from the Global South’ if the dominant conceptual and empirical frames that proliferate within geographies of education today are to be decolonised.…”