Abstract
This chapter argues that a decolonising approach in HRE needs to examine human rights issues through a critical lens that interrogates the Eurocentric grounding of human rights universals and advances the project of re-contextualising human rights in the historical horizon of modernity/coloniality. This alternative configuration of HRE as ‘critical’ and ‘transformative’ offers pedagogical and curricular possibilities that go beyond conventional forms of HRE and create openings for pedagogical praxis along social justice lines. The quest to create these openings and possibilities is a fundamental element for decolonising the theory and pedagogical practices of human rights. It is argued that the move to create spaces for decolonising pedagogy and curriculum in HRE can take HRE theory and practice to a less Eurocentric outlook and thus a more multiperspectival and pluriversal understanding of human rights—one that recognises the histories of coloniality, the entanglements with human rights and the consequences for social justice projects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) work offers a profound way of linking various forms of violence (e.g. colonialism, slavery, capitalist exploitation), while remaining attentive to their particularities (see also Wynter in Mignolo 2015). Her point is that while there are important distinctions among various social justice projects, the political struggles that seek to redress these violences have to critique the dominant version of the human she calls “Man” (i.e. a Western bourgeois conception of the human).
References
Acuña, R. (2013). Critical human rights and liberal legality: Struggling for ‘the rights to have communal rights’. Philosophy Study, 3(2), 246–261.
Albrecht-Crane, C. (2005). Pedagogy as friendship: Identity and affect in the conservative classroom. Cultural Studies, 19(4), 491–514.
Al-Daraweesh, F., & Snauwaert, D. (2013). Toward a hermeneutical theory of international human rights education. Educational Theory, 63(4), 389–411.
Amsler, S. (2011). From ‘therapeutic’ to political education: The centrality of affective sensibility in critical pedagogy. Critical Studies in Education, 52(1), 47–63.
Athanasiou, A., Hantzaroula, P., & Yannakopoulos, K. (2008). Towards a new epistemology: The ‘affective turn’. Historein, 8, 5–16.
Bajaj, M., Cislaghi, B., & Mackie, G. (2016). Advancing transformative human rights education: Appendix D to the report of the global citizenship commission. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
Barreto, J.-M. (2012). Decolonial strategies and dialogue in the human rights field: A manifesto. Transnational Legal Theory, 3(1), 1–29.
Baxi, U. (2007). Human rights in a posthuman world. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
Bhabha, H. (1999). The postcolonial and the postmodern: The question of agency. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 189–208). London: Routledge.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Brayboy, B. M. J. (2006). Toward a tribal critical race theory in education. The Urban Review, 37(5), 425–446.
Broeck, S. (2013). The legacy of slavery: White humanities and its subject. In J. M. Barreto (Ed.), Human rights from a third world perspective: Critique, history and international law (pp. 102–116). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Brown, W. (2004). “The most we can hope for”: Human rights and the politics of fatalism. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3), 451–463.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Coysh, J. (2014). The dominant discourse of human rights education: A critique. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 6(1), 89–114.
Donnelly, J. (2003). Universal human rights in theory and practice (2nd ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Douzinas, C. (2000). The end of human rights: Critical legal thought at the turn of the century. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing.
Gilroy, P. (2010). Darker than blue: On the moral economies of black Atlantic culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gonçalves, G. L., & Costa, S. (2016). The global constitutionalization of human rights: Overcoming contemporary injustices of justifying old asymmetries? Current Sociology Monograph, 64(2), 311–331.
Gorski, P. (2008). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonising intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 515–525.
Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jansen, J. (2009). Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Keet, A. (2010). Human rights education: A conceptual analysis. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing.
Khoja-Moolji, S. (2017). The making of humans and their others in and through transnational human rights advocacy: Exploring the cases of Mukhtar Mai and Malala Yousafzai. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(2), 377–402.
Mignolo, W. (2000). The many faces of cosmo-polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism. Public Culture, 12(3), 721–748.
Mignolo, W. (2003). Philosophy and the colonial difference. In E. Mendieta (Ed.), Latin American philosophy (pp. 80–88). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Mignolo, W. (2006). Citizenship, knowledges, and the limits of humanity. American Literary History, 18(2), 312–331.
Mignolo, W. (2009). Who speaks for the ‘human’ in human rights? Human rights in Latin American and Iberian cultures. Hispanic Issues, 5(1), 7–24.
Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: What does it mean to be human? In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 106–123). Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.
Mutua, M. (2002). Human rights: A political and cultural critique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Osler, A. (2015). Human rights education, postcolonial scholarship, and action for social justice. Theory & Research in Social Education, 43, 244–274.
Santos, B. (2013). Human rights: A fragile hegemony. In F. Crèpeau & C. Sheppard (Eds.), Human rights in diverse societies: Challenges and possibilities (pp. 17–25). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars.
Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. London: Penguin Books.
Smith, L. (1999). Decolonising methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.
Spivak, G. (2004). Righting wrongs. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3), 523–581.
Subedi, B. (2013). Decolonising the curriculum from global perspectives. Educational Theory, 63(6), 621–638.
Tejeda, C., Espinoza, M., & Gutierrez, K. (2003). Toward a decolonising pedagogy: Social justice reconsidered. In P. Trifonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social justice (pp. 10–40). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Tejeda, C., & Gutierrez, K. (2005). Fighting the backlash: Decolonising perspectives and pedagogies in neo-colonial times. In P. Pedraza & M. Rivera (Eds.), Latino education: An agenda for community action (pp. 261–294). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonisation is not a metaphor. Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Worsham, L. (2001). Going postal: Pedagogic violence and the schooling of emotion. In H. Giroux & K. Myrisides (Eds.), Beyond the corporate university (pp. 229–265). New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.
Yang, K. W. (2015). Afterword: Will human rights education be decolonising? In S. R. Katz & A. McEvoy Spero (Eds.), Bringing human rights education to US classrooms: Exemplary models from elementary grades to university (pp. 225–235). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yeğenoğlu, M. (1998). Colonial fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of orientalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Yoon, K. H. (2005). Affecting the transformative intellectual: Questioning “noble” sentiments in critical pedagogy and composition. JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture & Politics, 25(4), 717–759.
Zembylas, M. (2013a). Critical pedagogy and emotion: Working through troubled knowledge in posttraumatic societies. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 176–189.
Zembylas, M. (2013b). The ‘crisis of pity’ and the radicalization of solidarity: Towards critical pedagogies of compassion. Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 49, 504–521.
Zembylas, M. (2014). Theorizing ‘difficult knowledge’ in the aftermath of the ‘affective turn’: Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 390–412.
Zembylas, M. (2016). Toward a critical-sentimental orientation in human rights education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(11), 1151–1167.
Zembylas, M., & Bozalek, V. (2014). A critical engagement with the social and political consequences of human rights: The contribution of the affective turn and posthumanism. Acta Academica, 46(4), 30–48.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zembylas, M., Keet, A. (2019). Decolonial Strategies and Pedagogical/Curricular Possibilities. In: Critical Human Rights Education. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27198-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27198-5_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27197-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27198-5
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)