Toward an awareness of the “colonial present” in education: Focusing on interdependence and inequity in the context of global migration

Abstract

Across the world, the number of displaced people has risen to unprecedented levels. In the United States, rightwing politicians call for closing borders to Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. These conditions lead the authors to ask how to educate with and for immigrant students who are positioned as enemy aliens–“impossible subjects”–within their new nation? We take a comparative approach, looking across our studies with Palestinian immigrant and Cambodian refugee youth in the US to think about how their experiences in US schools can inform an education for justice. In looking across two ethnographies, done more than a decade apart from each other, we illustrate the remarkable similarities between discourses about these different groups of students. In this article, we focus on three stances toward immigrant incorporation that the young people in our research studies encountered–stances through which they learn about the meanings of and expectations for citizenship and belonging. Our argument is that despite the differences between these stances, all three erase the “colonial present” that shapes the lives of immigrant youth and their families. We call for an education that decentres the nation, and focuses attention on the co-dependent inequities at the centre of our global interdependence.