Reproducing hierarchisation and depoliticisation: exploring discursive micro processes in global education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the growing debates about the criticality of global education (GE). Our study responds to the critical post/decolonial debates that point out that GE remains complicit in the perpetuation of social inequalities in the world. Contrary to the macro discursive character of those studies that show that GE is complicit in the reproduction of hierarchisation and depoliticisation, our aim is to map the concrete micro discursive processes in order to find out how exactly are these processes enacted on the level of language, an academic avenue that has remained underresearched so far. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis to the Slovak textbooks on GE, our study shows how particular socio-semantic uses of language reinforce hierarchisation of social actors and depoliticisation of structural complexities and complicities. We also attempt to set our study into a broader context of debates on the self-positioning of post-socialist Central and Eastern European states. We argue that in the context of Slovakia, GE discourse re-confirms the colonial matrix of power-knowledge-being. As we point out, GE becomes a tool through which Slovakia is able to get rid of the label of the Other and position itself as the superior (Western) Europe.