This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE)

Speaker: Dr Francine Menashy, Brock University

Longstanding critiques of racism within the international development and humanitarian sectors have recently gained traction in mainstream press, practitioner groups, and social media in the Global North. Moreover, heightened attention to the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 spurred educational actors, organizations, and government agencies across the world to acknowledge and reckon with entrenched White supremacy.

And yet limited attention has been paid to race within global education circles.

In a recent study, Dr. Zeena Zakharia and I explored this disregard for racial issues and aimed to advance philosopher Charles Mills’ concept of White ignorance for understanding power hierarchies in global education governance, with a particular focus on the education in emergencies sector. Via an analysis of key informant interviews, organizational documents and websites, this study uncovered the ways in which global education organizations adopt euphemisms which in turn sanitize racial inequities and silence conversations on race. The data also exposed how within global education bodies, racism has been largely considered a US-based problem, thereby denying White supremacy as a global system rooted in coloniality. Finally, the study showed how White ignorance has inhibited structural change in education in emergencies policies and practices.

We argue that without addressing global White ignorance, education scholars fail to interrogate a core element to structural global inequities, and policy and advocacy leaders serve to re-inscribe power hierarchies within the colonial education in emergencies sector. Global educational inequities and power asymmetries cannot be remedied without attention to the intersecting issues of racism, White supremacy, and coloniality; if race continues to be silenced due to controversy or deemed a uniquely US problem, inequities in global education governance, and by extension, education in emergencies practice, will endure.

I look forward to sharing this research and engaging in a meaningful conversation about race, global White supremacy, and education in emergencies.

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