Other sociologies of education: providing critical perspectives from the Global South and North

The idea for this Special Issue came about just after the series of lockdowns ended during the covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic education experienced global dynamics that saw the use of digital devices as prominent, promoted by international organisations mostly based in the Global North and according to criteria of (distance) learning mainly set by Western countries (Reimers 2023). The limited solutions identified to face the crisis, on the one hand, recreated the Global South as in need to catch up with digital education and opened new markets for Edtech businesses and corporations (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter 2020). On the other hand, through the digital divide, they created new forms of exclusions, in particular along racist, ableist, classist, gendered, and indigeneity lines and, consequently, new subjects to be included (Peruzzo and Allan 2022). Sociologists of education have denounced the workings of a neoliberal reason as a manifestation of capitalism behind these dynamics, looking into how the economy has shaped the needs and demands of governments in the race to be the most digitally efficient country.

Indeed, the pandemic made visible all the societal, economic, cultural, and political aspects that have interested Sociologists of Education in the last 30 years (Brooks 2019) including the reproduction of inequities in education (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) and their increasingly intersectional nature (Reay 2020); the relentless advance of privatisation in education and its commodification (Verger, Fontdevila, and Zancajo 2016; Bonal and Bellei 2020); the globalisation of education and the exportation and mobility of policies (Ball, Junemann, and Santori 2017). However, problems and solutions for such issues have been framed and addressed through the same Global North, and in particular Eurocentric, episteme. Kendall and Winkham (1999, 67; see also Foucault, 1972, and Collet-Sabé, 2023 in this Special Issue) identify the episteme as our limits of intelligibility, both of the existing reality and ourselves, shaping an ‘understanding of the world which is specific to a time and place’. It is a grid that not only orders things (Foucault, 1972) but also makes educational subjects and aims of schooling and education intelligible, according to certain truths connected to historical and contextual necessities and contingencies.

Back in 1959, Mills indirectly called for Sociology in the Western part of the world to expand the limits of this episteme. Connecting the private, the individual and the biographical with the public, structural and history, he argued that Sociology connects between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’, enabling the act of giving sense to the world and opening up for imagination. Nonetheless, during the pandemic, solutions that were preferred and adopted made clear how the epistemic order re-organised old and well-established relations of power between the North, and in particular Europe, and the South of the world, continuing to reproduce neo-colonial hierarchies in the present (Mills 1959).

Indeed, Sociology of Education emerged as a discipline in the Global North, with the scope to analyse and denounce the inequities embedded in education systems. By exposing how education and its curricula were reproducing the very same social structure they were meant to overcome (Young 1971; Bowles and Gintis 1976), it focused on social inequality and how state education could fix them. Denouncing the perpetration of a certain global hierarchy, a decolonial approach would argue that Mill’s appeal to imagination was already too narrow at its inception (Santagati et al. 2019; Thomas et al., 2023) and that Sociology of Education was focusing on the promotion of inclusion, equity and social justice as a way of tackling the very same exclusions, inequities and power imbalances the system was itself originating (see Perales Franco and Sartorello in this Special Issue).

For such reasons, in this last decade, more and more sociologists from the Global South have been arguing how modernity in the Global North has been built and developed by not acknowledging how all that exists in the Westerned part of the world could not be built and theorised without its Other (Mignolo 2011; Grosfoguel 2013; Quijano 2000; Rivera Cusicanqui 2019). This missed acknowledgement enabled the emergence of a Sociology of Education built on a narrow understanding of the world as Eurocentric, and with theories and analytical tools developed and utilised to investigate and answer to problems created by the North and imposed on the South (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007; Lander 2000). With its roots in the Enlightenment period, the project of modernity positioned scientific knowledge as the only possible guidance whereby truth can be found in reality. It ordered things, people, and systems of knowledge on a global scale, imposing the scientific Eurocentric thought with its modalities of thinking, doing and being (Connell 2007). By doing so, it made impossible and untrue all systems of knowledge that could provide different experiences of learning and being in the world, in particular those of the Global South (Mignolo 2011). Moreover, by exporting a model of mass education and right to education which emerged in the context of the state and its connection to capitalism and the economy as the ‘developed’ modality to educate society, the Global North ‘erased the other forms of socialization youth experienced before arriving there’ (Fernández González, 2023 in this Special Issue).

In our present, as Acuña and Corbalán (2023, in this Special Issue) maintain, neoliberalism plays a crucial role in framing both the imagination of sociologists of education and the inequities in education systems, in the Global North and South. Through strategies of power and relying on competition, metrics and accountability processes for education systems to perform efficiently, it produces a hierarchy of winners and losers in education. On a micro level, it marginalises and excludes all the subjects that cannot keep up with the educational race, and on a macro level it constantly constructs the Global South in need of catching up and rehabilitating itself according to the Global North criteria. Moreover, with its extractivist and economicised nature, rooted in the fundamental premise that modernity/coloniality was a project that connected capitalism and colonialism, neoliberalism creates education as an enclosure, therefore creating new forms of exploitation (Riedemann et al. in this Special Issue), privatization (Fernández González, 2023 in this Special Issue) and ‘axes of domination to the analysis (class, gender, race, ableism, genders, territory…)’ (Collet-Sabé, 2023 in this Special Issue).

This Special Issue aims to open a space that broadens the imagination of the Global North Sociology of Education, and a space for reckoning the limits, hierarchies, inequities and invalidities that the project of modernity brought to our epistemic understanding of education. It seeks to build the premises for Other Sociologies of Education, providing critical perspectives to sociologists of education from the Global North and South that are both becoming more aware of colonial and neo-colonial epistemic erasures in education, and questioning the present analytical validity of the concepts of equity and social justice as shaped by the Global North Sociology of Education. The articles collected in the Special Issue intend to enable perspectives that embrace the increased challenges formal education is facing, being increasingly reshaped by informal and non-formal education within local communities and families (Garcia-Arias et al., 2023 in this Special Issue; Pitzalis and Spanò, 2023 in this Special Issue), as a legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic that exposed the porosity of school walls and national borders. The intent is to provide analytical tools and methods that enable the expression of new experiences and new fluid subjectivities in education (Ardiles et al., 2023 in this Special Issue), that can inform new policy solutions respectful of the singular and the all in governing processes, objects and subjects of education (Butler, 2023 in this Special Issue).

The division between Global North and Global South is political as well as geographical (Connell 2007). We use this division to highlight the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000) and acknowledge how the Global South can also be found in the Global North (see Pitzalis and Spanò, 2023 in this Special Issue). However, this does not entail that the Sociology of Education of the Global South should replace the Global North Sociology of Education. The aim of the contributions in the Special Issue is to expand the epistemic imagination, make it global but not universal, as Collet-Sabé proposes in his contribution, addressing the imbalances of power relations and the global hierarchies that the project of modernity/coloniality has produced. The aim is to enable intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue across Sociologies of Education, to capture the moving boundaries of education, and asymmetric dialogue, to challenge the hierarchies onto which Sociology of Education was imagined. The intention is not to create a new hierarchy or verticality, but to build this new field of knowledge horizontally. Embarking on these Other Sociologies of Education which places in the centre the dialogue between the Global South and North it makes it possible to explore and think collectively from what has been developed in different places and how we can learn together to trespass and expand the Sociological imagination of the educational field.

Decolonising practices through the editorial process

When we began to think about the idea of this Special Issue it was clear to us that talking about Other Sociologies of Education was not only an analytical/theoretical exercise but that it would require us, as editors, to be able to take the objectives proposed for this Special Issue to practical levels. This is because we are convinced that the invitation to think about other ways of doing Sociologies of education requires thinking about how we practise it, for example when editing a Special Issue for a journal.

In this way, we start from the notion of the existence of different epistemologies or ways of knowing (Mignolo 1995) that restrict and/or make it possible to address the decolonisation of the discipline. From a decolonising perspective (Walsh 2012), we recognise that the university, as an institution, has for a long time relegated and delegitimised these different ways of knowing and the different forms of knowledge. In doing so, it has positioned certain theoretical and methodological paradigms and modalities of communication and dissemination of knowledge as unique, legitimate and/or privileged references. In relation to the latter, we would like to point out in this section that the way in which the results or findings of research in the field are communicated, for example, through scientific writing and journals, should also be a way of decolonising the discipline. In this way we can give greater visibility to certain topics, methodologies, languages, which have been historically invalidated in the construction of knowledge.

With all the above in mind, as editors we have set ourselves the aim, thanks to the support of the journal, of including certain practices in the editorial process that seek to be a practical way of decolonising certain aspects of the academy. The first editorial decision you will find in this Special Issue was to challenge the monolingualism that sometimes occurs in journals. Thus, although the British Journal of Sociology of Education only publishes in English, each article in this Special Issue will have its abstract in a second language of the authors’ choice. Thus, we can observe the abstracts of each paper that composes this Special Issue in Spanish, Italian, French, Bemba and Nyanja.

Secondly, throughout this issue, we will see different text formats, some more like accounts of research processes, but also theoretical writings, pedagogical experiences, and reflective pieces. Also, in some cases, these writings are presented as first-person accounts in such a way that they resemble autoethnographic exercises. Even though each of the papers went through a peer review process, as editors we were also close to this, pushing certain evaluations that seemed more traditional in nature to think beyond the boundaries of the typically academic review process.

We hope that all these practices that we tried to carry out will allow the reader to capture the essence of this Special Issue, which seeks above all to make it possible to explore and think collectively about what has been developed in different places and how we can learn together to trespass and expand the Sociological imagination of the educational field.

Exploring other sociologies of education from the knowledge production of the global south and north

This Special Issue is divided into four parts: epistemic order and changes; subjectivities; communities; and pedagogies. In the first part, three papers explore new axes of knowledge construction as an alternative to the hegemonic rationalities of the Global North thinking. Each of these papers discusses the need to understand education and society by recognising other forms of knowledge and proposes more hopeful narratives of social change and epistemic justice. On the one hand, Jordi Collet-Sabé, in Pre-modern epistemes inspiring a new Global Sociology of Education Imagination, suggests a Sociology based on knowledge of ancestral matriarchal societies and pre-modern European societies. From an archaeological perspective, he investigates the notions of truth, place and order to conclude that a new sociological approach requires recovering other sources of knowledge from historical experiences. Noelia Fernández González in Re-enchanting education: Bachilleratos Populares in Argentina as a commoning experience, analyses a popular educational alternative that challenges traditional understandings in relation to the construction of the common good, new utopias and the creation of knowledge that considers the horizontality between subjects and the autonomy of institutions. She proposes that Latin American authors think about community experience and education as a democratising tool. Finally, the paper by Andrea Riedemann, Fernanda Stang, Sara Joiko, Josefina Palma and Antonia Garcés, Teaching about colonialism, nationalism, and neoliberal patriarchy during the Chilean social outbreak focuses on the authors’ experience of a course at the first popular university in Chile recently established. Using a decolonial perspective, the authors reflect on the democratising possibilities of popular education for adults as a space to question colonialism, nationalism, and neoliberal patriarchy in the Chilean social context. These three articles explore theoretical alternatives to understand the dilemmas that non-hegemonic societies experienced by including different voices which value popular views as expressions of contextualised, horizontal and pertinent knowledge.

The second part of the Special Issue focuses on subjectivities. In Giving space to the subject’s potential present: Zemelman’s contributions to Sociology of Education Felipe Acuña and Francisca Corbalán revisit the work of Latin American intellectual Hugo Zemelman to add new perspectives of analysis to the field of critical Sociology of Education. They reflect on the notions of subject and indeterminacy as axes to understand educational systems that have been forged in neoliberal times, deploying cultural aspects that emerge from the history of Latin American to construct subjectivities that distance themselves from the hegemonic rationalities of the Global North. Tebi Ardiles, Paulina Bravo González and Corina González Weil in Decolonising master’s supervision by queering/enfletando the process: opening decolonial cracks through fleta reflexivity, reflect about sex education and gender diversity in science teacher education. The use of a queer gaze allows for the decolonisation of teacher education in what the authors call ‘enfletar’ and, at the same time, promotes a critical transformation of the subject that is training future teachers. Both articles emphasise that subjectivities are central to the ways in which educational systems are configured, showing how they embody knowledge that does not comply with the traditional parameters established through educational policies.

The third part comprises two articles that analyse local communities to illustrate how the South is not only a geographical location but also an imaginary and symbolic realm. Marco Pitzalis and Emanuela Spanò, in Sub-alterities: schooling in Southern Italy, articulate the existence of European territories as both physical and imaginary, and made subaltern by the experience of exclusion and marginalisation. Using concepts from Bourdieu and Gramsci, they look at the case of Italy, both in its macro structure and in its local school communities, to explain the dynamics of subalternity that are practised within Europe in relation to education systems. In the second paper, Cristina Perales Franco and Stefano Claudio Sartorello, School and community relationships in Mexico. Researching inclusion in education from critical and decolonial perspectives investigate two Mexican school communities from an ethnographic perspective. They suggest that the notion of inclusion has been constructed by Western educational policies and therefore does not address the question of power within Latin American communities. In this case, a decolonial approach is relevant to think of inclusive processes as being traversed by processes of ‘substantive power’ and ‘formal power’ that require narratives that link inclusion to social justice. These two articles provide examples of how to resist the normative impositions of hegemonic educational policies, presenting theoretical proposals that incorporate notions of power, subalternity and domination into their epistemologies.

Finally, this Special Issue ends with a section on pedagogies which includes three papers that consider pedagogical and counter-hegemonic processes. Alana Butler, in her article titled Decolonial love as a pedagogy of care for Black immigrant post-secondary students, mobilises the notion of ‘decolonial love’ created by indigenous intellectuals colonised by European countries. The author presents the narratives of black immigrants in universities in the USA and Canada and argues that pedagogical practices that reaffirm the identity of these students to combat racism can have a high impact on academic results. Jorge Garcia-Arias, Silvina Corbetta and Bruno Baronnet in Decolonizing education in Latin America: critical environmental and intercultural education as an indigenous pluriversal alternative use ethnographic methods to present two indigenous communities in Rosario and Chiapas that implement bilingual schools. The authors denounce how the notion of ‘education for sustainable development,’ disseminated by UNESCO, is not neutral, arguing that by imposing a notion of universal sustainability it ignores the intercultural dimension of educational communities. Finally,¹ Matthew A. M. Thomas, Janet Serenje & Ferdinand Mwaka Chipindi, Reconsidering and teaching Sociologies in Zambian teacher education: seeking Mbuyi, Mulenga, and Munkombwe, studies the teaching and learning processes on Sociology of Education in a group of pre-service teachers at the University of Zambia. The authors question the relevance of teaching a classical Western Sociology to future teachers, and they review the weight of European colonisation in universities’ epistemological structures. Through decolonial thinking, they argue for an epistemologically plural teaching of Sociology of Education that considers sub-Saharan and not only Anglo/European authors and perspectives. In this last section, the three articles delve into educational teaching and learning processes of teachers and their communities, reflecting on how decolonial approaches have long proposed pedagogies that are both based on local knowledges and built on critical visions of colonialist and Eurocentric educational approaches.

Learnings and imperatives from these collective reflections and experiences

The papers in this Special Issue offer exciting glimmers of radical possibility for invoking Other Sociologies of Education through the encounter of the Global South and North. They also highlight the enormity of the task ahead if we are to trespass and expand the sociological imagination within the field of education. The cost of not doing so, and of remaining confined, narrow and Eurocentric, is enormous and inevitably perpetuates the violent disregard of the Other in education.

Thinking ahead and taking inspiration from the papers in this Special Issue, we identify several imperatives for those seeking to take further the project of reckoning for Other Sociologies of Education through engagement with the Global South.

1. Criticality that is informed by intersectionality and which is ‘fearless’ (Connor 2013, p. 1229), ‘causing people to think about what is going on’ (Tomlinson 2014, 9). Kimberley Crenshaw’s (1991) vision of intersectionality was the interruption of the tendency to treat categories such as race and gender as mutually exclusive. However, the deployment of intersectionality and its theoretical parameters have not always been clear (Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara 2023). A key element of advancing the imperative of intersectionality is seeking out and validating those usually subjugated voices.

2. Positioning that actively engages with power and privilege of the researcher and the research. Crucial here, and central to decolonising methodologies, it is a rethinking of the role of researcher as an activist, working with and on behalf of the community rather than taking from it. Boveda and Annamma (2023) articulate the central role of positionality and positioning in surfacing the intersecting forms of oppression, particularly in relation to race and disability. Their framework, which includes addressing professional situatedness, power dynamics, and the interrelatedness of sociohistorical elements of positioning, provides a vital starting point and clear direction. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012, 139) underlines the importance of the researcher working with decolonising methodologies being ‘humble,’ and working to debunk the outside expert role (Perales and Santarello in this Special Issue).

3. Risk taking and adventure in the engagement with methodologies, methods and theories. Art based and participatory methodologies and methods and theories such as DisCrit are powerful examples which offer to open up to new fluid subjectivities that can, in turn, influence new policy directions.

4. Rethinking equity and social justice through the discourses and knowledges of the Global South. Both, whilst universally lauded, remain ill-defined and can mean many different things and this is particularly the case for equity in education (Levinson, Geron, and Brighouse, 2022). Future conceptualisations of equity and social justice in education may need to involve a series of trade-offs that take account of the scarcity of resources and the need to accommodate multiple and diverse outcomes (Levinson, Geron, and Brighouse 2022). There is much to be learned from the non-scientific knowledges and education practices of the Global South that force a confrontation with the power imbalances that produce and sustain inequities in education (Connell 2007; Peruzzo and Allan 2022).

5. Reimagining inclusion in ways that go beyond considerations of (school) placement and who is and who is not included and is informed by those most closely affected, children and young people and their families. Once again, the discourses and knowledges of the Global South will inspire and incite if they are allowed to (Walton, 2018).

This Special Issue has been a vital and liberating arena for experimenting and engaging with the discourses and knowledges of the Global South. The contributors have forged a path towards more activist, and even militant, forms of Sociology and offer analyses that are properly critical, not necessarily negative but embodying the ‘thick democratic norms and values that stand for what neoliberalism denies’ (Apple 2019, 286). They have faced up to multiple inequities and sought to address them hand in hand with communities. They inspire hope and confidence and open up possibilities for future efforts at trespassing and expanding the sociological imagination within the field of education.

Francesca Peruzzo
School of Education, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
[email protected]
Sara Joiko
Instituto de Estudios Internacionales, Universidad Arturo Prat, Chile
[email protected]
Julie Allan
School of Education, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
[email protected]
María Teresa Rojas
Facultad de Educación, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
[email protected]

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following a production error, this contribution to the special issue was mistakenly published in Issue 44:7 of the journal (doi: 10.1080/01425692.2023.2256987). The Abstract in English, Nyanja and Bemba is as follows:

English abstract: 

Global movements to decolonise sociology have gained significant momentum in recent decades and offer far-reaching implications for the field of education. One understudied area of research, however, concerns the sociologies of education taught and experienced in teacher education outside of Anglo/European contexts. This paper uses post-/decolonial theory to explore the teaching and learning of sociology of education for pre-service teachers at the University of Zambia. It draws on data from surveys (n = 318) and five focus groups with pre-service teachers (n = 20), a focus group with tutors (n = 3) working on the course, and reflections by course lecturers to examine Zambian pre-service teachers’ experiences and perspectives of sociology. We argue that a sociology of education which includes some elements of the classical canon but is grounded more firmly in sociological perspectives related to local social issues, contexts, and epistemologies may lead to a more informed and inspired cadre of pre-service teachers, and by extension, citizens.

Nyanja abstract: 

Nchito za magulu amene apenya pa kusilizilatu za ulamulilo wa utsamunda (ulamulilidwa ndi antu akumaiko ena) mumaphunziro a zamkati mwa anthu padziko lonse lapansi zilikupita patsogolo mudzaka makhumi angapo amene apita. Nchito izi zikuonekera mu chigawo cha maphunziro. Dela limodzi lamaphunziro limene silina fufuzidwe kwambiri, ndi dera lomwe lipenya pa kaphunzisidwe ndiponso pa kaphunzilidwe ka maphunziro a za mukati mwa anthu mumadera asali madera a Chingelezi.  Phunziro ili lisebenzesa dongosolo la maganizo lomwe lipenya pa kusilizilatu za ulamulilo wa utsamunda lochedwa post-/decolonial theory kufufuza kaphunzisidwe ndiponso kaphunzilidwe ka maphunziro a za mukati mwa anthu mu aphunzisi ophunzira amene akalibe kulembedwa nchito; amene aphunzira pa sikulu lapamwamba (yuniveziti) la University of Zambia. Ofufuza mu phunziro ili azatola nkhani mwa ukatsiri (n = 318)  ndiponso azatola nkhani ku azipunzisi akalibe kulembedwa nchito omwe ali pa sukulu amene azankhala mu magulu asanu (n = 20). Azatolanso nkhani ku amene athandizira aziphunzisi aku yuniveziti (n = 3). Momalizila azatola nkhani ku azipunzisi amene aphunzisa pa yunivezi amene aphunzisa awa aziphunzisi ophunzira amene akalibe kulembedwa nchito. Chilingo chotola nkhani izi, nikufuna kufufuza momwe ophunzira apenyera maphunziro a za mkati mwa anthu.  Tiyima pa ganizo loti, maphunziro a zamkati mwa anthu amene aima pa kuphunzisa  za za kale ndiponso za mkati mwa anthu zimene zipenya pa zokhuza anthu mkati-kati kamadera awo angathe kuthandizira kukhara ndi aziphunzisi ophunzira ozindikira akatwiri amene azindikira zinthu mwakuya. Ndipo mowonjezera inchi chingathe kuthandiza kukhara ndi anthu a mudziko anzeru ozindikira zinthu mwakuya.

Bemba abstract: 

Utubungwe tufwaya ukwalula ifyo icisambililo capamikalile yabantu cisambilishiwa natukumana isonde lyonse kabili twalikoselakofye mumyaka ukucila peekumi iyapita kabili nacikuma saana iciputulwa camasambililo. Ukusoma kumo umo bashafwailisha saana kulanda pa masambililo yafyo abantu bekala ayapusanapusana ayo basambilisha mumasambililo ya bukafundisha mu ncende shaba kunse ya bulaya nelyo kunse ya fyalo fya ku Europe. Ili isambililo lileebomfya itontonkanyo lya masambililo ilyaishilebako pa numa yabamwisa pa kuti lifwailishe imifundile na imisambilile ya cisambililo capafyo abantu bekala icifundwa mumasambililo ya bukafundisha pa University of Zambia. Ili isambililo lileebomfya ifyebo ukufuma mu kufwailisha kwa (n = 318), na ukufuma mu tubungwe tusaano umuli abalesambilila ifyabukafundisha utwa (n = 20), ibumba umuli abafunda abalesambilila bukafundisha ilya (n = 3), elyo na masambililo yambi ayacitwa nabakafundisha ba peesukulu likalamba ilya University of Zambia ayalanda pafyo abasambilila ifyabukafundisha mu Zambia bapitamo elyo na imimwene yapusanapusana iya fyo amasambililo yamikalile yabantu. Tuleepaasha atuti isambililo lyakumfwikisha ifyo abantu bekala ilikwetemo amasambililo yakale lelo ilileumfwana saana na imyumfwikishishe ya ifyo abantu bekala iilingenekufilecitika na ifyo abantu baleepitamo mu ncende imo, na isambililo ilikwetemo itontonkanyo lya kwishiba imisambilile yapusanapusana, apo ukufwailisha kwe sambililo kwapela na umulandu isambililo libeleleko kuti fyatwala mufyakufumamo ifyaumfwika bwino bwino kabili kuti lyaba isambililo ilisuma ilyakwafwilisha abalesambilila bukafundisha elyo kuti lyayafwilisha na bekala caalo pa numa.