Let’s Talk About Racism in Education and International Development

Leon Paul Tikly
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Arathi Sriprakash, Sharon Walker University of Cambridge

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasises the need to address inequalities between and within countries. It offers an opportunity to recognise more fully how multiple inequalities are interconnected across the globe. One such abiding inequality is racism;its division, classification, and control of people and their social, political, economic, and epistemic rights. While there exists significant scholarship on how modern world history has been shaped by projects of racial domination, there has been a noticeable silence about the conditions of racism and its production of inequality within contemporary development studies including within the field of CIE. This is despite a long history of campaigns against racism in UNESCO and the prominence of global campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall and Why is our Curriculum White?

The paper commences with an overview of how issues of racism have been conceptualised in the field. It is suggested that analysis has been notable by its absence but that where it has been addressed this has been in terms of understanding race as an empirical category and in terms of issues of culture and identity that have often elided questions of power and inequality. Drawing on the idea of ‘racial formation’, the paper sets out an understanding of how discourses and practices of racism have evolved since colonial times intersecting with gender and class inequalities. The paper then sets key challenges for policy in challenging racism in the context of the SDGs. These focus on meeting the educational needs of racialised minorities including refugees;challenging the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum;and, preventing racialised violence. The paper argues that attention must also be paid to racial inequalities in the global governance of education and within our own practices as educational researchers.