Curriculum counter-strokes and strokes: Swimming in non-existent epistemological rivers

Abstract

In this article, we examine how Boaventura de Sousa Santos' Epistemologies of the South speaks to a needed dialogue on US educational and curriculum policy in which capitalism and colonialism produce youth and teachers as nonbeings - another insidious form of nonexistence. We analyze (a) the construction of the dichotomy of Western and non-Western in the context of abyssal thinking and educational policy; (b) the complexities of epistemicides and coloniality in US schools as related to educational reform movements. This analysis reflects the need to struggle for social and cognitive justice and to use the democratic imagination to engage in a praxis for a world of social equality and justice.