Decolonizing Social Sciences Curriculum

Decoloniality, as posed here, does not imply the absence of coloniality but rather the ongoing serpentine movement toward possibilities of other
modes of being, thinking, knowing, sensing, and living; that is, an otherwise in plural. In this sense, decoloniality is not a condition to be achieved in a linear sense, since coloniality as we know it will probably never disappear. Decoloniality is also not a condition of illumination or enlightenment that some possess and others do not. Such assumption sets the stage for intellectual disputes over who is more decolonial.

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor.

What matters is not economics, or politics, or history, but knowledge. Better yet, what matters is history, politics, economics, race, gender, sexuality, but it is above all the knowledge that is intertwined in all these praxical spheres that entangles us to the point of making us believe that it is not knowledge that matters but really history, economy, politics, etc. Ontology is made of epistemology. That is, ontology is an epistemological concept; it is not inscribed in the entities the grammatical nouns name. If we could say today that beyond Western world-sense that privileges entities and beings (ontology; Martin Heidegger’s Being), there are world-senses that privilege relations

The traditions of thought associated with postcolonialism and decoloniality are long-standing and diverse. Postcolonialism emerged as an intellectual movement consolidating and developing around the ideas of Edward W Said,2 Homi K Bhabha3 and Gayatri C Spivak.4 While much work in the area of postcolonial studies has directly addressed issues of the material, of the socio-economic, there has also been a tendency for it to remain firmly in the realm of the cultural. In contrast, the modernity/coloniality school emerged from the work of, among others, the sociologists Anibal Quijano5 and María Lugones,6 and the
philosopher and semiotician, Walter D Mignolo.