Pedagogical Content and Political Control: Education for Omnicide?

Abstract

In reviewing submissions to the Comparative Education Review (CER), I see few that address structural racism and the environment. I am juxtaposing these two since they are considered as connected by some scholars. The first topic, that of structural racism, has been the themeof a special issue onBlack LivesMatter that is being published jointly with this issue. We also have a special section on the African Diaspora that will be published in November 2023. As for the topic of the environment crisis, the 2023 theme of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) encourages us to reflect on the coalescing challenges of the “global emergency of climate change, in anuncertain era postCovid” in which “the people and communities most impacted by these crises are already vulnerable.” Moreover, the August 2022 issue of CER curated by Elizabeth Sumida Huaman had as its theme “Comparative Indigenous Education” (2022), and many essays dealt with indigeneity, colonialism, and land. The CIES 2020 Annual Meeting had as its theme “Education beyond the Human,” with “comparative education as a space of attuning to and engaging with multiple, more-than-human worlds—the worlds of Nature’s seasons and spirits, of ecosystems and environments, of cyborgs and goddesses, or artificial intelligence and ancestors—the worlds that at present remain beyond the horizon of mainstream comparative education.” Iveta Silova, who was central in developing the theme, in her CIES presidential address describes “the impacts of colonial devastation and the effects of destructive development projects, exposing the deep fault lines of colonialism and their direct linkages with environmental exploitation, resource extraction, and extermination of Indigenous cultures, languages, and peoples” (2021, 589). Both Silova (2021) and Sumida Huaman (2022) demonstrate that structural racism and environment degradation are intimately connected and related not only to the historic processes of colonization but also to current political structures of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. Likewise, in his new book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a