Challenging dominant education paradigms: posthuman feminist inspirations towards alternate pathways for decolonising the curriculum

Abstract

AbstractSouth Africa’s curriculum, and education system at large, remains humanistic and dominated by Western Eurocentric ways of thinking, doing and being. The ongoing protest action in higher education has made explicit the inequalities that continue to keep epistemic violence, Eurocentrism, and human exceptionalism intact. Central to this protest action has been the need for curriculum inquiry to reinvent itself and go against the pedagogical grain by advocating for a decolonised curriculum. However, the decolonial turn has largely been a structural exercise of abstract and rhetoric intensity fueled by a language of critique that is entrapped in discursive tendencies that inhibit the type of radicalism needed for it to invigorate alternatives that can challenge dominant education paradigms. This article is inspired by posthuman feminist theory that troubles the logic of advanced capitalism, epistemic injustice and dominant education paradigms. Invoked by new materialism, intra-actions of our becoming within and as part of the world are the deep entanglements of ethics, knowing and being that can spur scholarly activism. Four curriculum studies scholar activists shared their narratives of how they are enacting their curriculum to challenge dominant education paradigms. Their lived experiences as material, relational, embodied and embedded incite posthuman tendencies of what it means to teach to transgress. Experimenting with transversal transgressions this article attempts at a non-anthropocentric, feminist inspired perspective for curriculum inquiry to find alternative pathways for decolonising the curriculum so that it can rise to the challenges of our time.