Boaventura and Education

ON (DE)COLONIALITY: CURRICULUM, WITHIN AND BEYOND THE WEST Volume 1

Series Editor:

João M. Paraskeva, School of Education, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Scope:

On (De)Coloniality: Curriculum Within and Beyond the West is a beacon in the struggle against epistemicide and the colonialities of being, power, and knowledge. It attempts to bring to the fore an analysis that focuses on non-Western/non-Eurocentric epistemological frameworks. In a world that still struggles to see its own overt epistemological diversity, On (De)Coloniality is an open space in which to challenge epistemological fascism. It encourages curriculum scholars to engage in dialogues about non-Western/non-Eurocentric epistemologies within and beyond the Western Eurocentric platform. We invite ‘complicated conversations’ that dig into new avenues such as those of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT), and, in so doing, introduce a new language that will take us to alternative levels of articulation and re-articulation of meanings, through endless and spaceless processes of coding, decoding, recoding, and ‘encoding.’

Boaventura and Education

Inês Barbosa de OliveiraRio de Janeiro State University, Brazil

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6300-996-6 (paperback)ISBN: 978-94-6300-997-3 (hardback)ISBN: 978-94-6300-998-0 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,P.O. Box 21858,3001 AW Rotterdam,The Netherlandshttps://www.sensepublishers.com/

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review.

Translated from the original Portuguese manuscript by Nelson Santiago, 2014

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2017 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR BOAVENTURA AND EDUCATION

“Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ groundbreaking theories on epistemology, politics, and society are weaved into brilliant focus against the backdrop of educational practice. What emerges is a powerful exposé of political tensions, contestations, and ruptures, inherent to the struggle against the persistent colonizing forces in the lives of oppressed populations. Central to this decolonizing treatise are the paradigmatic transformations essential to an education truly in the service of democratic life.”– Antonia Darder, Leavey Endowed Chair of Ethics & Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Education, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

“A must read for educators and for students. Boaventura and Education allows one to understand the importance of the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos that is essential for those who struggle for another world; that is more just, democratic, and united. It is urgent to understand the diversity of realities, cultures, and knowledges in schools and, thus, to be able to understand, collaborate, and coexist with ‘those others’ whom we have only erroneous, distorted, and undervalued images in the vast majority of the textbooks. It is urgent to question the imperialism of Eurocentric knowledge and the exclusivity of positivist rigor and assume a plurality of epistemologies as an instrument of empowerment against the hegemonic points of neoliberal globalization and in favor of a new type of cosmopolitanism from the bottom up in order to understand and intervene on the complex physical and social realities that characterize life on our planet.”– Jurjo Torres Santomé, Professor, Universidade de A Coruña, Spain

“In her work of art, precision, and clarity on the work of Boaventura, who is one of the most original thinkers of the moment, Inês Barbosa de Oliveira offers us a new framework with which to analyze and critically understand education. The ideas and reflections on Boaventura de Sousa Santos are an inexhaustible source of suggestions to develop a barrage of contention against pessimism, ignorance, and dogmatism both in the field of curriculum and in educational theory and policy. Oliveira’s Boaventura and Education is

a fundamental tool for thinking critically for all those who oppose the mental paralysis that harasses us; we cannot be less than grateful for this work.”– José Félix Angulo Rasco, Professor of Education, University of Cadiz, Spain, Professor of Education, Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Series Introduction: On (De)Coloniality: Curriculum Within and Beyond the West ix

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: The Crisis of the Paradigm of Modernityand Post-Modern Science 7

From Science to Prudent Knowledge 7The Theoretical Conditions of Crisis 9The Sociological Condition of Crisis 11Thinking the Emerging Paradigm 13All Natural-Scientific Knowledge is Social-Scientific – 1st Thesis 14All Knowledge Is Local and Total – 2nd Thesis 15All Knowledge Is Self-Knowledge – 3rd Thesis 17All Knowledge Aims to be a Common Sense – 4th Thesis 19The Post-Modern Science and the Double Epistemological Rupture 21Social and Theoretical Conditions of Second Epistemological

Rupture 25From Progress to Decent Life 27The Conflict Regulation/Emancipation in the Contemporary 28Subjectivity, Citizenship and Empowerment in Post-Modern

Paradigm 36

Chapter 3: The Sociology of Absences and the Sociology of Emergences 43

The Critique of Metonymic Reason and the Sociology of Absences 45The Archaeology of Invisible Existences in Education and Research 56The Critique of Proleptic Reason and the Sociology of Emergences 58The Idea of Translation: Fundaments, Conditions, Procedures, and

Motivations 63

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Chapter 4: Education, Democratic Subjectivities Formation, and Social Democracy 71

The Central Aspects of the Pedagogical Experience 74Knowledge-as-Regulation and Knowledge-as-Emancipation 76Cultural Imperialism and Multiculturalism 80From Nonconformist Subjectivities to Democratic Subjectivities 83The Subject Networks and Structural Spaces of Social Insertion 84Networks of Democratic Subjectivities Weaving Democracy 88

Chapter 5: Conclusion: Learning Processes and the Fabric of Social Emancipation 91

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On (De)Coloniality: Curriculum Within and Beyond the West

The field of curriculum studies is theoretically shattered and profoundly disputed to such an extent that disputes have become an endemic part of the field’s DNA. Such quarrels, on some occasions, have been intellectually sanguinary. Sometimes the field appears to be an estuary of ideological debris upon which new cultural battles will be fought. What/whose knowledge is of most worth, for whom, as well as the way such knowledge has been produced, packaged, legitimized, taught, and evaluated have all always been sites of open ideological carnage among different groups – dominant and counter-dominant – aiming to conceptualize and perpetuate a specific power matrix. The struggle for curriculum in the United States was always a struggle for the ideological foundation of its society. As a social construct, curriculum was always both a starting and arrival point of acute political battles, imposing itself as one of the most refined mechanisms of economic, cultural, and political segregation of capitalist societies. The nexus, or the lack thereof, of curriculum and society colonizes the field’s theory and development.

The curriculum field, as we know it, is a eugenic ‘agora’ perpetrated by a Western Eurocentric power matrix that takes no prisoners. Blinded by the cult of positivism as the ‘only’ pedagogical scientific power, curriculum was always a beacon of epistemological cleansing and witnessed countless crucial critical transformative projects championed by counter-dominant groups and individuals, only to succumb, despite certain noteworthy achievements, in the face of the ever-demanding challenges of a threatening capitalist society. As such, curriculum is epistemicide. An epistemological field of blindness supported by a specific growth pattern of knowledge and science that simultaneously fertilizes noisy silences and shameful absences framed by traditional power and interest groups. Such groups have been facing severe challenges from a myriad of counter-dominant movements and intellectuals fighting for a more just, equal, relevant curriculum, one that could promote a more democratic society. However, while counter-dominant groups – especially those working from and within radical and critical platforms – were able to score some major victories by challenging some conservative curriculum reforms, the truth of the matter is that such counterhegemonic perspectives ended up being as functionalist as the functionalism they

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criticized, and thus attempted to smash the hegemonic curriculum from traditional dominant positions. To be more precise, counterhegemonic traditions with radical and critical impulses fail to understand the need to expand their epistemological latitude within and beyond the Western Eurocentric epistemological terrain. The results of such distraction were and are devastating: ‘conscientized’ epistemicide and the production of more and more invisibilities in the richness and diversity of knowledges.

On (De)Coloniality: Curriculum Within and Beyond the West is a beacon in the struggle against epistemicide and the colonialities of being, power, and knowledge. It attempts to bring to the fore an analysis that focuses on non-Western/non-Eurocentric epistemological frameworks. In a world that still struggles to see its own overt epistemological diversity, On (De)Coloniality is an open space in which to challenge epistemological fascism. It encourages curriculum scholars to engage in dialogues about non-Western/non-Eurocentric epistemologies within and beyond the Western Eurocentric platform. We invite ‘complicated conversations’ that dig into new avenues such as those of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT), and, in so doing, introduce a new language that will take us to alternative levels of articulation and re-articulation of meanings, through endless and spaceless processes of coding, decoding, recoding, and ‘encoding.’

On (De)Coloniality is about ‘curriculum from the South in the Global South and curriculum from the South in the Global North,’ as connected with the different metamorphoses of coloniality. It unpacks the Western, Eurocentric, Anglo-Saxon epistemological fascism subsumed in the true colors of policy and reform matters, as well as in daily life within classrooms. It intends to help establish a multifarious corpus of scholarship that will open the curriculum canon to foster social and cognitive justice in itinerant theory and impel movement toward a non-abyssal curriculum; work that fosters such shifts is a crucial part of our collective commitment to the struggle against epistemicide.

To materialize what this series attempts to do, one could not have a better example than Oliveira’s Boaventura and Education. In this volume, Ines Barbosa de Oliveira examines the importance of leading critical decolonial thinker Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ work for the curriculum field. Santos’ work speaks volumes to so many frustrations, obstacles, and challenges one faces today in the struggle for a more just curriculum. As Boaventura and Education shows, Santos’ work exhibits quasi endless latitude, which acts as a powerful magnet for diverse epistemological lines that help us think in ‘new alternatives of alternatives.’ Oliveira dissects not just Santos’ work and

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its implications within the field – both theoretically and at the level of the practice – but, in so doing, exposes the importance of Santos’ commitment to opening the veins of a specific Western Eurocentric canon, thus respecting epistemological diversity and a concomitant political trajectory in search of ‘a prudent knowledge for a decent life.’ In Oliveira’s examination, Santos straightforwardly calls for a new paradigm, that

can not only be scientific, insofar as it emerges in the context of revolutionized society by science itself. Therefore, it needs to also be a social paradigm, what he calls, even today, the paradigm of a prudent knowledge for a decent life…[Moreover, Santos] understands that the dichotomous distinction between natural and social sciences has lost its meaning and usefulness and that overcoming it tends to make the knowledge of the emerging paradigm non-dualistic, founded, as it is, in overcoming the distinctions between nature and culture, natural and artificial, living and inanimate, mind and matter, observer and observed, subjective and objective, collective and individual, animal and person. The remaining question is how to know the meaning and content of this overcoming, and which sciences, therefore, would be significant for the determination of its parameters. Contrary to what some critics of so-called post-modern thought have said, Santos contends that the natural sciences have been increasingly appropriating the concepts and explanatory models of the social sciences, which allows us to suppose that the overcoming of the dichotomy would be under the aegis of the latter. (Oliveira, Chapter 2)

Santos’s approach, Oliveira argues, pushes us to rethink knowledge, democracy, and emancipation; with this rethinking, Boaventura and Education helps us to better grasp curriculum as ‘the epistemicide.’ It shows us how to ‘complicate the conversation’ (Pinar, 2004) by not necessarily depoliticizing it – and to work towards a deterritorialized and decolonized path by engaging in an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT).

As I have explained elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011, 2014, 2016a, 2016b), ICT did and does try to say something to the field. It posits new terrains and theoretical situations. ICT participates in a complicated conversation (see Trueit, 2000; Pinar, 2000) – one that cannot bend under the yoke of Western academicism – challenging Western curriculum epistemicides and alerting us to the need to respect and incorporate non-Western epistemes. William Pinar (2012, 2013) acknowledges the influential synopticality of ICT in his recent Curriculum Studies in the United States. He (2013) states:

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There are other discourses influential now, sustainability perhaps primary among them. Arts-based research is hardly peripheral … One sign is the synoptic text composed by João M. Paraskeva. Hybridity is the order of the day. Pertinent to the discussion is that even Paraskeva’s determination to contain in one ‘critical river’ the multiple currents of understanding curriculum politically floods its banks; he endorses an ‘itinerant curriculum theory’ that asserts a ‘deliberate disrespect of the canon’ (2011, 184). In Paraskeva’s proclamation, this ‘river’ has gone ‘south’ (2011, 186). That South is Latin America, where we can avoid ‘any kind of Eurocentrism’ (2011, 186) while not ‘romanticizing indigenous knowledge’ (2011, 187). Addressing issues [such as hegemony, ideology, power, social emancipation, class, race, and gender] implies a new thinking, a new theory … an itinerant curriculum theory. (p. 64)

Although Pinar’s reading of ICT is crucial, I would clarify (maybe complexify) that ‘the’ South is not just Latin America. Again, Santos (2009) is vital here:

The South is metaphorically conceived as a field of epistemic challenges, which try to address and repair the damages and negative impacts historically created by capitalism in its colonial relation with the world. Such conception of South overlaps the geographical South, the group of nations and regions in the world that were subjugated to European colonialism and that, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, never achieved levels of economic development similar to the Global North (i.e. Europe and the United States of America). (pp. 12–13)

Thus, we ‘designate the epistemological diversity of the world by South epistemologies’ (Santos, 2009, p. 12). In this way, ICT addresses Santos’ (2006) claim about the need for a new critical theory, a new emancipatory praxis (p. xi). As he (2006) states, ‘contrary to their predecessors, [such] theory and practices must start from the premise that the epistemological diversity of the world is immense, as immense as its cultural diversity and that the recognition of such diversity must be at the core of global resistance against capitalism and of alternative forms of sociability’ (p. xi).

ICT is an unblemished claim against dominant multiculturalist forms that are ‘Eurocentric, a prime expression of the cultural logic of national or global capitalism, descriptive, apolitical, suppressing power relations, exploitation, inequality and exclusion’ (Santos, 2007, pp. xxiii–xxiv), which have been legitimizing a monoculture of scientific knowledge that needs to be defeated and replaced by an ecology of knowledges (Santos, 2003). ICT

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challenges the coloniality of power and being (cf. Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2007); it is sentient that the ‘politics of cultural diversity and mutual intelligibility calls for a complex procedure of reciprocal and horizontal translation rather than a general theory’ (Santos, 2007, p. xxvi). ICT, Su ssekind (2015) reinforces, helps one to re-think one’s own arrogant ignorance within the curriculum as lived experience toward social and cognitive justice. Formalizing ICT in my mind, through my writing, through dialogues with others and the wor(l)d has meant, and still does, considering the intricacies of its conceptions and assertions. Yet its conceptualization and creation is a natural complex interaction with the wor(l)d, as was perhaps the case for Michelangelo and Picasso with their art.

When one day Michelangelo was asked how a certain frame was painted, i.e. where his idea came from, he answered, ‘I had no idea. The figure just stood there, looking at me. I just gave it life/birth.’ Picasso had a similar dialogue with a Gestapo officer. In occupied Paris during World War II, a Gestapo officer who had barged into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: ‘Did you do that?’ ‘No,’ Picasso replied, ‘you did.’ Writing is, Gilles Deleuze (1995, p. 141) argues, ‘bringing something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight.’

These words of Michelangelo and Picasso also highlight the theory of translation that works through art. Similarly, ICT is a theory of translation that attempts to prevent the ‘reconstruction of emancipatory discourse and practices from falling into the trap of reproducing, in a wider form, Eurocentric concepts and contents’ (Santos, 2007, p. xxvi). Translation is crucial to the processes of coding and decoding

between the diverse and specific intellectual and cognitive resources that are expressed through the various modes of producing knowledge about counter-hegemonic initiatives and experiences aimed at the redistribution and recognition and the construction of new configurations of knowledge anchored in local, situated forms of experience and struggle. (Santos, 2007, p. xxvi)

In such a context, examples such as Yacouba Sawadogo, an African farmer of Burkina Faso who has been restoring the soil damaged by centuries of drought (and desertification) through traditional farming techniques, cannot be arrogantly minimized or eugenically produced as non-existent or non-science, just because this work cannot be translated and framed within Western scientificity. Western intellectuals need to consciously acknowledge that the Western epistemological platform – both in its most sophisticated dominant

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and/or radical critical counter-dominant perspectives – is insufficient and inadequate to explain and change its own effects (Seth, 2011). A new system cannot emerge from the ashes of the old. It is pointless to think about the future just with(in) the Cartesian modernity model. It is hopeless to frame the present within such a dated model.

Western counter-dominant perspectives are crucial in the struggle for social and cognitive justice, yet not enough. As Sandra Corazza (2002) courageously argues, ‘we need to start taking seriously the task of a real theory of curriculum thought’ (p. 131), one that opens the Western canon of knowledge and is responsive to the need for a new epistemological configuration. Such a journey of belligerent struggles – against the dominant and within the counter-dominant Western epistemological platforms – aims to replace the so-called monoculture of scientific knowledge for an ecology of knowledges. Such ecology of knowledges is

an invitation to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues among knowledges, granting equality of opportunities to the different kinds of knowledge engaged in ever broader epistemological disputes aimed both at maximizing their perspective contributions to build a more democratic and just society and at decolonizing knowledge and power. (Santos, 2007, p. xx)

As with any other theoretical exercise intended to understand the educational world in order to transform it (see Pinar, 2004), ICT exhibits a certain latitude and longitude in borderless space to deepen certain claims. For example, among many issues, ICT highlights the linguistic imperialism framed by the English language and culture as an aspect of genocide. Conscious of this linguistic imperialism as a crucial part of genocide, ICT allows one to respectfully understand, for example, how ‘camfrenglish’ – ‘a language used in Cameroon’s cities, created daily by Cameroon’s urban youth’ – deliberately violates the linguistic rules of French and English and, in so doing, desacralizes these imperial languages (Marc Ella, 2013, p. 24). In cities such as Yaounde, camfrenglish is the people’s language.

Antonia Darder (2012), in her superb exegesis of the political economy of cultural theory and politics, brings language to the core of the battle against eugenics. As Darder claims, ‘the complexity of language and how the students produce knowledge and how language shapes their world represent a major pedagogical concern for all educational settings’ (p. 105). Language, Darder argues, is more than a tool that epitomizes a specific learning theory or the cult of a flamboyant method. The language question intersects other

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social non-epiphenomena such as the question of authority, reframing equality as well as social and cognitive justice. Any critical theory that aims at cultural democracy cannot ignore the power of biculturalism as a poesis that determines culture and power relations in classrooms (Darder, 2012).

ICT also warns about the need to challenge any form of indigenitude, or the romanticization of indigenous cultures and knowledges, and it is not framed in any dichotic skeleton of West–Rest. In fact, it challenges such functionalist forms. Its itinerant dynamic pushes the theorist to a pluri-(or not-necessarily-)directional path.

More importantly, ICT confronts the subject with a permanently unstable question: ‘what it is to think?’ Further, ICT pushes one to think in the light of the future, as well as to question how ‘we’ can actually claim to really know the things that ‘we’ claim to know, if ‘we’ are not ready specifically to think the unthinkable – and to go beyond the unthinkable and master its infinitude. ICT is to be (or not to be) radically unthinkable. ICT is a metamorphosis between what is thought, non-thought, and un-thought, but also fundamentally about the temerity of the colonization of the non/un/thought within the thought. ICT attempts to understand and to domesticate the infinity of thought and action. If one challenges infinity, and ‘then it is chaos because one is in chaos;’ that means that the question or questions (whatever they are) are inaccurately deterritorialized and fundamentally sedentary. The focus is to grasp that ICT implies an understanding of chaos as domestic, as public, as a punctum within the pure luxury of immanence. In such multitude of turfs, ICT needs to be understood as poesis. It plays in the plane of immanence. Being as immanence is ‘a life,’ ICT is ‘a life’. A life paced by a poesis or a revolution? ‘Yes please,’ in a full Žižekian way. ICT is a poesis that itinerantly throws the subject against the infinity of representation to grasp the omnitude of the real(ity) and the rational(ity), thus mastering the transcendent. Being more poesis than just theory (and not because it is less theory), its itinerant position epitomizes a transcendent nomadography.

ICT challenges book worship (Tse Tung, 2007, p. 45). In fact, ICT also encourages us to pay attention to the multiplicity of forms to read the wor(l)d. The verbalization of pain and oppression is quite visible in Africa, for example, in art forms such as dance and painting. Dance, Marc Ella (2013) argues, in a country financially and economically moribund, is not just a way to face inequality and oppression. It is, he (2013) states, ‘the very best way to face discouragement’ (p. 26). ICT is an attempt to help us to think in another form of being. Corazza’s (2002) insightful framework is crucial here as well. As she claims, and I honestly think ICT addresses

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her claim, the challenge is to fight against what she coins as assentado curriculum towards a vagamundo curriculum; that is ‘to create [or co-create] a vagamundo curriculum one needs to question how can one think about the inaddressable, the unthinkable, the non-thinkable of the curriculum thought, the exteriorities, the self different, the self other, the other self’ (Corazza, 2002, p. 140). Corazza (2002) adds, that

such curriculum thought is meaningless, a real vacuum, without the effective forces acting upon such thought, as well as without the effective indeterminations that force such thought [or forms of thought] to think otherwise, differently, through the creation of new concepts required by real experience and not just by possible experience, thus allowing new life experiences. [In fact] the strength of (an)other knowledge, as well as a new philosophy, will be measured by the concepts that it is capable of creating, or its capacity to renew meanings which impose a new framework on things and to assentados actions, shuffle their syntax, and organize their thought in a clumsy logic. (p. 140)

Corazza’s (2002) sharp take equips intellectuals with the necessary extraordinary tools to understand why some African scholars, such as Axelle Kabou (2013), Jean Marc Ella (2013), and others justifiably counter the Western and non-Western hegemonic apparatuses with the following question: ‘What if Africa refuses development?’

The definition of development must be seen through other lenses beyond its Western monocultural conceptualization as the development needed by the Global South. Whose purpose does this development serve? What is the cost to those beneath its grinding wheel of so-called progress? In such a context, ICT is really a matter of human rights as well, due to its commitment to social and cognitive justice. This is a commitment that challenges dominant multicultural forms, creating the conditions for an intercultural reconstruction of human rights and moving towards an intercultural post-imperial form of human rights that respects, among other issues: (a) the right to knowledge, (b) the right to bring historical capitalism to trial in a world tribunal, (c) the right to democratic self-determination, and, (d) the right to grant rights to entities incapable of bearing duties, namely nature and future generations (Santos, 2007). ICT is a clarion call to challenge curriculum epistemicides by engaging fully in the complex struggle for social and cognitive justice. It is also a call to decolonize the ‘decolonized.’ This is an intergenerational matter of justice as well.

The struggle against epistemicides and curriculum epistemicides is difficult but necessary. That it is impossible is a fabricated fallacy. Bragança’s ‘walking

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and being’ is a wake-up call to all of us really committed to the struggle against curriculum epistemicides. It allows one to grasp ICT as a political yarn that works within and beyond the capitalist system or against ‘world system theory.’ ICT is also a human rights issue, a challenge to the dichotomy of ethics and chaos since it is an ethic of [needed] chaos. ICT praises the consistency of inconsistencies and fosters a reckless philosophy of praxis above and beyond the rumble of ‘being-non-being’; it is a eulogy of ‘being.’ ICT is à la Marti, ‘an infinite labor of love,’ one that perceives that the act of thinking is not just theoretical. ICT works in a never-ending matrix determined by sensations, forces, fluxes, ‘happenings,’ all of which are linked and reacting against the modes and conditions of production of the capitalist system.

ICT is a curriculum turn. A ‘pluri-versal’ not ‘uni-versal’ turn. A decolonial turn. ICT needs to be seen within the cartography of a decolonial being. Mignolo (2011a, 2011b) is of great help here, arguing that the genealogy of decolonial thinking

is pluri-versal (not uni-versal). As such, each knot on the web of this genealogy is a point of de-linking and opening that re-introduces languages, memories, economies, social organizations, and at least double subjectivities: the splendor and the miseries of the imperial legacy, and the indelible footprint of what existed that has been converted into the colonial wound; in the degradation of humanity, in the inferiority of the pagans, the primitives, the under-developed, the non-democratic. (2011b, p. 63)

Such inquiry implies, as Deleuze and Guattari felicitously unveil, that an itinerant theory is not just a war machine that judiciously collides with ossified truths and fossilized realities. Its itinerant existence is actually only possible in a permanent theater of war. Needless to say, ICT is not cavalier with history. Nor it is just a pale reaction against the way history has been quasi suffocated by hegemonic and particular counterhegemonic traditions. While a concept – arguably a geophilosophical one – it goes well beyond an aesthetic wrangle between sedentary theoretical hegemonic and particular counterhegemonic platforms, and toward nomad(ic) approaches free from walls, dams, and institutionally-backward bourgeois turfs. ICT implies a nomadic inquiry, but one in which the foci occupy the truly total itinerant capacity of space(less)ness, a permanent smooth itinerant position, a perpetual search that wholeheartedly aims at saturation. The nomadography of such theory is framed in the nonstop itinerant posture in which creators of poesis seem to be part of the history of thought but escape from it either in

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a specific aspect (or in specific aspects) or altogether. ICT attempts to turn curriculum theory against itself as well. It is a philosophy of liberation, which is sentient of the pitfalls of the internationalization of dynamics within the curriculum field. ICT helps us understand how to situate curriculum theory in the project of modernity/colonialism/decolonization.

ICT contends that it is no longer viable to carry on with and in the same epistemological framework. Relying on Habermas, Mignolo (2008) argues that

[i]t is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to ‘think’ from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of inclusion. The limit of Western philosophy is the border where the colonial difference emerges, making visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from Right and Left, hid and suppressed. (p. 234)

(An)other science is not just really possible. It is real. ICT is a claim for a just theory; a claim for just science. It is possible for an itinerant curriculum theory – which we argue is the best path for critical progressive curriculum scholars – not only to grasp precious concepts and dynamics, such as hegemony, ideology, power, social emancipation, class, race, and gender in the complex age of globalization (Santos, 2008) or globalisms, but also to better (re)address the towering questions of curriculum, starting with the one asked by Counts in the last century: Dare the schools build a new social order? So long as poverty and inequality keep multiplying, this question remains central. The devastating impact of neoliberal policies forces the intemporality of certain challenges. Given these conditions, ICT challenges the critical curriculum project to go beyond its counter-dominant and dominant-within-the-counter-dominant positions, thus turning the struggle for curriculum relevance into a struggle for social and cognitive justice. As we will see later on in examining Chomsky’s (1971) approach, while the transformation of society is crucial, understanding it accurately is no less important.

I am not claiming that ICT is a perfect theory; I’ve actually claimed that there is no such thing as a perfect theory (see Quantz, 2011). Obviously, there is room for critique; for instance, the clashes within the post-structural positions could be expanded. The ecological domain should not be so silent. ICT questions the linguistic imperialism of English and other Western imperial languages. It also challenges the way science has been defined and

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legitimized based on the cultural politics of academic writing, which are not only social formulas but also legitimize ‘the modern epistemicidium,’ and are thus real obstacles to social and cognitive justice. ICT also challenges the momentum of internationalization, as well as in whose language this epoch is occurring. ICT is alert to the fact that the very struggle to internationalize the field of curriculum studies is a relatively recent phenomenon for the United States’ academic milieu.

ICT aims precisely at ‘a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology.’ It is an itinerant posture that is profoundly engaged in its commitment to a radical co-presence. It is non-abyssal since not only challenges the modern Western cult of abyssal thinking but also attempts to dilute such fictional vacuums between the lines. ICT is an act of resistance also at the metaphysical level. That is, the struggle against modern Western abyssal thinking is not merely a policy matter. It is also above and beyond that: It is an existential and spiritual question. The struggle against the Western Cartesian model cannot signify the substitution of one Cartesian model for another. Also, the task is not to dominate such a model or to wrap it in a more humanistic impulse. The task is to pronounce its last words, to prepare its remains for a respectful funeral. The task is not to change the language and concepts, although these are key elements. The task is to terminate a particular hegemonic geography of knowledge, one which promotes an epistemological euthanasia.

ICT denounces how internationalization has been, in so many ways, the new apparatus through which modern Western epistemologies have been expanding the very process and significance of ‘what it is to think.’ It has exposed even more the open wound created by ‘the archives of Western knowledge and the question of cultural domination exercised by countries of advanced capital over imperialized countries’ (Ahmad, 2008, p. 2). ICT is undeniably a call for a new ‘never stable gathering epistemological point.’ While it is strongly evident that the struggle against epistemicide is a human rights issue, it is also clear that such a struggle cannot be won with old weapons (Latour, 2005).

Oliveira’s Boaventura and Education maps out Santos’ insightful call for an ‘epistemological discussion and the process of building a new epistemology aimed at overcoming scientism.’ In this context, Oliveira examines how Santos edifies his approach by underlining the value ‘of different ways of knowing and being in the world, as relevant to the debates around the knowledge that integrates the conceptions and practices of formal education.’ Through this work, the reader will be exposed not only to a

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massive and transformative new vocabulary – epistemicide, sociology of absences and sociology of emergences, cognitive justice, prudent knowledge – quite integral to debunking the epistemicide perpetrated by one of the most Western Eurocentric lethal apparatuses, the curriculum, but also to a new powerful approach that will help one understand (and be better equipped for) a possible future for our field.

João M. ParaskevaSeries Editor

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