Claiming humanity, reclaiming hope: the role of higher education in the 21st century

Clamando por humanidad, reclamando por la esperanza: el papel de la educación superior en el siglo XX

Paul Prinsloo, Research Professor

University of South Africa (UNISA), South Africa

prinsp@unisa.ac.za

Fecha de recepción: 17 de agosto 2018 Fecha de aceptación: 04 de noviembre de 2019

RESUMEN:

Este ensayo explora algunas preguntas sobre quien ha tenido y tiene el poder de definir quién es humano y sobre lo que significa ser humano; además, examina la forma en que la educación superior no es más que uno de los agentes que definen la humanidad y lo que significa ser humano. Este ensayo también examina el potencial de la decolonialidad como una onto-epistemología alternativa crítica tan esencial para (re)clamar y (re)construir la humanidad. Se hace mención a consideraciones específicas adicionales tales como repensar, la desobediencia epistémica, el entrampamiento de la producción de conocimiento entre otros.

PALABRAS CLAVES

educación superior, decolonialidad, humanidad,
Sur Global,
Giro onto-decolonial.

ABSTRACT:

This essay explores questions pertaining to who has had and has the power to define who is human and what it means to be human, and the way higher education is but one of the role-players that define humanity and what it means to be human. It also examines the potential of decoloniality as an alternative and critical onto-epistemology which is essential for (re)claiming and (re)building humanity. Further pointers for consideration are addressed such as rethinking, epistemic disobedience, entrapment of knowledge production, among others.

KEYWORDS

Higher education, decoloniality, humanity,
Global South,
onto-decolonial turn.

RESUMO:

Este ensaio explora perguntas sobre quem teve e tem o poder de definir quem é humano e sobre o que significa ser humano; além disso, explora a maneira pela qual o ensino superior é apenas um dos agentes que definem a humanidade e o que significa ser humano. Este ensaio também explora o potencial de descolonialidade enquanto seja alternativa e onto-epistemologia crítica e enquanto seja essencial para (re) clamar e (re) construir humanidade.

Faz-se menção a considerações específicas adicionais como repensar, a desobediência epistémica, cobrir a produção do conhecimento, dentre outros.

PALAVRAS CHAVE

Ensino superior, Descolonialidade, Humanidade,

Sul Global,
Virada ontodecolonial.

RÉSUMÉ:

Cet essai explore des questions ayant trait à ceux qui ont détenu et détiennent le pouvoir de définir qui est humain et à ce que cela signifie d’être humain. En outre, il examine la manière dont l’éducation supérieure n’est que l’un des facteurs qui déterminent l’humanité et ce que cela signifie d’être humain. Il analyse aussi le potentiel de la décolonialité comme une épistémologie alternative critique aussi essentielle pour ré(clamer) et re(construire) l’humanité. Il fait état de considérations spécifiques supplémentaires telles que repenser, la désobéissance épistémique, le piège de la production de connaissances, entre autres.

MOTS CLÉS

éducation supérieure, décolonialité,
humanité,
Sud Global,
tournure onto-décoloniale.

INTRODUCTION

It is not a secret that higher education as sector, and as individual institutions, face a number of challenges. Some challenges are unprecedented such as, but not limited to, the massification of higher education, a dramatic realignment in funding regimes for public higher education the proliferation of private or for-profit providers (Altbach, Reisberg & Rumbley, 2009), the entrance of academic publishers into educational provision, the dominance, if not hegemony, of New Public Management (NPM) (Bleiklie, 2018; Lorenz, 2012) and managerialism (Blackmore, 2001) on higher education and the continued impact of technology (Becker, Cummins, Davis, Freeman, Hall & Ananthanarayanan, 2017) and ‘technosolutionism’ (Morozov, 2013). Many of these trends are referred to as ‘revolutions’ or ‘revolutionary’ (Collins & Halverson, 2018; Gagliardi, Parnell, & Carpenter-Hubin, 2018; Penprase, 2018). While few would contest that the field of higher education is changing, not everyone would necessarily agree on the scope or lasting impact of these trends.

We also cannot, and should not, ignore or underestimate broader macro-societal realities such as the relentless and increasing (often intergenerational) inequalities (Piketty, 2015; Piketty, Saez, Zucman, Alvaredo, & Chance, 2017), climate change and a drastically changed and changing broader international alignment between countries and alliances. The extent to which these trends impact on higher education is furthermore determined and shaped by context, not only referring to institutional context, or geopolitical definition, but also by broader alignments in knowledge production, socio, political, economic, technological, environmental and legal arrangements as found in the notions of the Global North and the Global South (Epstein, Boden, Deem, Rizvi & Wright, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2013; Hall, 2015).

In this address I would firstly like to locate myself and acknowledge how my identity and location shaped and continue to shape my own understanding of the challenges facing higher education and more specifically, the role of higher education in (re)defining being human.

From the outset I would like locate myself as speaking from, but not on behalf of the Global South. Although I am located in South Africa and identify as African (Prinsloo, 2012), the notion and category of the Global South is much broader and nuanced than other inter-national/socio-economic categories such as the notion of the ‘developing world’. As a point of departure I would like to situate this address in the context of the Global South as not referring to :

…a geographical concept, even though the great majority of its populations live in countries of the Southern hemisphere. The South is rather a metaphor for the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism on the global level, as well as for the resistance to overcoming or minimizing such suffering. It is, therefore, an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist South (Santos, 2016, pp.18-19).

While I do align myself with initiatives and writings protesting against “the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism” (Santos, 2016, p. 18), I cannot disentangle my position of being White and male (a settler) in the Global South and how this identity shaped (and continue to shape) my own privileges, capital and life trajectory (e.g. Baldwin, 2012; Prinsloo, 2014). Each of my identity tags, whether my gender, sex, race or age “has a meaning, and a penalty and a responsibility” (Achebe in an interview with Appiah, 1995, p. 103). (Also see Boellstorff, 2005). I acknowledge and I live with the reality that I “cannot undo my whiteness” (Prinsloo, 2016, p. 3; italics in the original).

My identity furthermore produced and produces a set of power relations that made and continue to make me (more) human than those who were/are not White and male. In the process I did not only become part of a machinery that de-humanized others, but I became de-humanized myself (See Freire, 1973; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). In situating myself it is therefore important to acknowledge that “Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human” (Freire, 1973, pp. 20-21). As such I am committed to the struggle to become “more fully human” and aligning myself with broad range of initiatives that would fall in what Santos (2016) calls “anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist South” (p. 19).

In the rest of this address, I aim to briefly explore questions pertaining to who had and has the power to define who is human and what it means to be human. As I will point out, higher education is but one of the role-players who define humanity and what it means to be human. I will continue then to explore the potential of decoloniality as alternative and critical onto-epistemology as essential in (re)claiming, and (re)membering humanity. I will conclude this address with a number of pointers for consideration.

What does it mean to be human, become human and loose our humanity in the process?

Throughout human history these narratives about who are human and who were not, were told, endorsed, legalized, and sanctioned. I am, in this address, not interested in the rich historical and current debates on defining humanity, but rather want to provide, in broad strokes, a personal sensemaking of the field.

Since the earliest times, being human and what it meant/means to be human were caught up in its binary – what is not human? As such being human and humanity depended on defining the non-human, the other. What made us human, and contributed to our beliefs about our distinctiveness, depended on our definition of the non-human. As such humanity was placed in opposition to animals, plants, the cosmos, animate objects and ‘the other’. Whoever fitted in the category of ‘human’ was not only afforded rights, privileges, and power, but also power over that which was not human. Those in the category of ‘human’ then allocated meaning and importantly, place to everything that was not-human. As such humans could afford rights, a particular status or place to any of the ‘other’. More importantly, those in the category of ‘human’ could revoke the status and rights of any others that may have been part of the ‘human’ category and classify them as ‘other, or ‘non-human’. And throughout human history, this (re)classification formed and continue to form the basis for ‘us’ from ‘them’ who are, for whatever reason, less human and “other”, and formed and continue to form the basis for genocides, epistemicides, femicides and ‘othering’.

For generations, the Vitruvian man as imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1490 resembled the measurement of man, or indeed, what it meant to be human (Hardt, Negri & Mayr, 2017). The choice of a white man in the Vitruvian man was no coincidence. “The unitary subject of humanism – visually represented by Vitruvian Man – reduces all its others to sub-human status” (Hardt, Negri & Mayer, 2017, p. 157). Also see Braidotti (2017).

We need to understand how white ‘Man’ (sic) as center of the universe, created in the image of God and awarded the power to reign over ’others’ – females, nature, gays, lesbians, blacks, and mestizo or whatever combination did and does not look like and/or think like ‘them’. As such crimes by white men, or done to males and females of the white race were treated differently in colonial South Africa (Scully, 1995). And there is ample evidence that white men are sentenced less severely than, for example, black men (e.g. McConnell & Rasul, 2018). We cannot (and should not) ignore (and we need to account for) that our assumptions and beliefs about what it means to be human have been shaped by white men in the Global North and how this became institutionalized and normalized. We cannot ignore the fact how colonialism spread the ideal of the Vitruvian Man throughout the world, and in its wake, declassified, reclassified millions as non or less human. We also cannot and should not underestimate the impact of the Vitruvian Man as part and parcel of the export of Christianity to Africa, the Americas and other parts of the pre-colonial world (Gatsheni-Ndlovu, 2018).

We therefore have to consider the “colonial cartography of power” as suggested by (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p.63)

The colonial cartography of power (adapted from Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p.63)

Figure 1 illustrates, in stark binary terms, the abyssal line between the zone of being and the zone of non-being. This, in a certain sense, if the flipside of the Vitruvian Man. This cartography also illustrates not only who belongs to what zone, but also the lived experiences in these two different zones. It is crucial that we continue to remember that these zones of being result in visceral experiences - “But all our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015, p. 10)

And in the context of this address, we have to ask ourselves how higher education normalized this colonial cartography of being/power. Even more important is the question to consider – ‘What role did/does (higher) education play in confronting and discrediting accounts of the world where some are more human and more worthy than others?’ Grosfoguel (2013), for example, asks:

How is it possible that the canon of thought in all the disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the Westernized university is based on the knowledge produced by a few men from five countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, England, Germany and the USA)? How is it possible that men from these five countries achieved such an epistemic privilege to the point that their knowledge today is considered superior over the knowledge of the rest of the world? How did they come to monopolize the authority of knowledge in the world? Why is it that what we know today as social, historical, philosophical, or Critical Theory is based on the socio-historical experience and world views of men from these five countries? (p. 74)

The role of higher education

It goes without saying that curricula, throughout the ages, whether in institutions of higher learning (both secular and religious), the secret societies, and the craft associations and guilds all not limited access to ‘their’ knowledge, but also determined what knowledge was deemed to be worthy of knowing, and protection. Davenport and Prusak (2000), in discussing the measures taken to protect expertise, note that: “Guilds protected their special knowledge; governments prohibited the export of economically important skills. France, for instance, made exporting lace-making expertise a capital crime: Anyone caught teaching the skill to foreigners could be put to death” (par. 53). (Also see Belfanti, 2004.) As such the curricula, in any particular context, served and perpetuated particular ontologies and epistemologies and were never neutral (Apple, 2004; Bernstein, 1977, 1996; Booth, 1999).

Interestingly, while education and higher education in particular, has been and is central in normalising particular discourses, ontologies and epistemologies, it is crucial to acknowledge that higher education, on its own, cannot be held responsible to address and ‘fix’ all of societies’ ills. Considering the possibility for higher education to impact on the macro-societal trends as mentioned earlier, it is crucial that we remember that “Degrees cannot fix the cumulative effect of structural racism that doesn’t just reinforce the link between family wealth and returns to educational attainment in the labor market but exists as a primary function of that link” (McMillan Cottom, 2014, par. 17). While providing increased access to post-school opportunities may indirectly provide some individuals with increased opportunities and social capital, we have to consider that to “expand education in an unequal society without a redistribution of resources, you will [merely] reproduce inequality” (McMillan Cottom in Prinsloo, 2015).

Having acknowledged the complicity of higher education in perpetuating and endorsing particular views of being human, as well as acknowledging with the constraints to reformulate and normalise alternative definitions of what it means to be human, the next section will explore (re)claiming being human from the specific viewpoint of decoloniality.

Towards (Re)Claiming, (Re)Membering

Central to my own position on (re)imaging what it means to be human and what role higher education can and should play in de-normalising existing and dominant narratives formulated in the Global North, I propose considering the following statement by Ngugu wa Thiong’o:

I am concerned with moving the centre in two senses at least. One is the need to move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. [Eurocentrism] Within nearly all nations today the centre is located in the dominant social stratum, a male bourgeois minority. […] Moving the centre to the two senses – between nations and within nations – will contribute to the freeing of the world of cultures from the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race and gender (emphasis added) (Ngugu wa Thiong’o, 1993, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 4)

As first step to (re)imaging humanity and de-normalizing the Vitruvian man, we need to de-Europeanize the world and center Africa [and other localities] as “legitimate historical unit[s] of analysis and epistemic site[s] from which to interpret the world while at the same time globalizing knowledge from Africa [and other localities]” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 4). Accepting that “Coloniality is not over, it is all over” (Walter Mignolo, 2016, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 44), we have to understand the role of ‘empire’ and the decolonial trajectory as proposed by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018). He proposes that we have to consider three different types of empire, namely (1) physical empire; (2) commercial-military-non-territorial empire; and (3) the metaphysical empire. The decolonial trajectory for each of these empires differ accordingly. Political decolonization is necessary to address the physical empire, while economic decolonization address the commercial-military-non-territorial empire. To decolonize the metaphysical empire, we need to embrace epistemological decolonization (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 55). The exact relationship and chronology or sequencing between these different decolonial trajectories fall outside the scope of this address, but it is interesting to consider to what extent epistemological decolonization can support and result in economic and political decolonization. In the context of South Africa, decolonizing the curriculum in higher education in the context of the need for a broader and radical transformation, is foundational to epistemic justice (Badat, 2016; Cloete, 2014; du Preez, Simmonds, & Verhoef, 2016; Mwaniki, van Reenen, & Makalela, 2018).

Particularly useful to consider is the concept of “hetararchies” referring to the “multiple, vertical, horizontal and crisscrossing strings of ‘colonialities’ that touch every aspect of human life” (Grosfoguel, 2017, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 61). One of the greatest mistakes we can make is to think that the inclusion of one module or the tweaking of a particular curriculum can address the need to shift the center, and to decolonize the curriculum. We have to consider the historical “hetararchies” informing and validating current curricula and the vested power of multiple role-players to not move the center (Prinsloo, 2016).

It is therefore no wonder that, in many contexts, that students classifiedw in the zone of non-being (Figure 1) testify that they cannot breathe - “It is hard for black students to breathe within universities” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 64). The reality is that black students’ very existence is classified into zones of non-being, their ontologies and epistemologies considered to be primitive and in need for some additional support to mitigate the reality that they find themselves as foreigners, their language not understood and their being not acknowledged.

The onto-decolonial turn

Higher education therefore has to account for how the “‘unholy alliance’ of modernity, racism, imperialism, colonialism and capitalism emerged [as] new architecture and configuration of power as well as new … conceptions of the ‘human’ and knowledge” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 71). We therefore have to rethink not only what it means to be human, but what it means for being human when we are but equal and inter-connected with other forms of ‘matter’ (both living and non-living). We need to re-think not only our relationships with nature, the universe, living and non-living but also with one another, how we describe one another, and how notions of heteronormativity, whiteness and humans–as-centers-of-the-universe shape our understanding, our practices and our being. According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018), the ‘onto-decolonial’ turn means

• Re-humanising/re-membering as a quest for wholeness. There is no one way of humaning (as verb) - it is a cultural and social process “which we constantly hone”

• Re-humaning/humaning as “a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others”

• Posthumanism (pp. 76-77).

With regard to the Posthumanism, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) warns that there is a danger in Posthumanism that the “old humanistic subject” who was responsible for countless epistemicides, femicides and genocides, may sneak in through the back door (p. 77, in quoting Cornell and Seely, 2016). He further claims that “Decoloniality is not for a posthuman world. It does not make sense for those people from the Global South who have not yet enjoyed the status of being ‘fully human’ to join forces with those from the Global North who have bene enjoying the monopoly of being human for over 500 years to push for ‘posthumanism’” (p. 77).

Claims for a rethinking of the role of higher education and specifically, an ontological turn is also to be found in the Global North. For example, Barnett (2000) proposes that amidst an increasing number of knowledge producers and contesting view of knowledge and being, higher education needs to move away from being an “endorsing machine to one that seeks to produce radically new frames of understanding [that] would require considerable changes in the ways in which research is funded, evaluated and managed” (p. 417; emphasis added). Barnett (2000) therefore proposes that higher education has an urgent task to critically comment on these claims and to hold these new claims to account. To enable higher education for new roles in an age of supercomplexity, there is not only a need for new epistemologies, but also a radical reconsideration of what it means to be human in the 21st century. He therefore suggests that “being overtakes knowledge as the key epistemological concept” (p. 418; emphasis added). (Also see Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007).

Some pointers from the global south for reclaiming humanity

It is an impossible task to map, in a comprehensive and coherent way, what the contours of an onto-epistemological turn in higher education will look like. Allow me therefore to offer some aspects for consideration.

In order for higher education to (re)claim humanity and commit to epistemologies of wholeness and restoration, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 104) refers to the work of Senghor and Cesaire who propose that we need to “unthink France”, or whatever origins and forms of colonial power we need to confront. This suggestion resembles the proposals by Grosfuegel (2013) to reconsider the origins of our disciplinary bases.

This in its essence will mean the courage by scholars and graduates to embrace epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009, 2011; Morreira, 2017) and to learn to live with the inherent ambiguities when we let go of the inherited (and endorsed) ways of being and thinking. Mignolo (2009), for example, states that “Once upon a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured” (p. 159). Central to understanding the need for epistemic disobedience is understanding the “colonial wound” referring to how “regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally” (p. 161). As such (see the definition of the Global South at the start of this address), people of the Global South refuses to be told or have others speak on behalf of them. Epistemic disobedience means to “engage in both decolonizing knowledge and de- colonial knowledge-making, delinking from the web of imperial/modern knowledge and from the colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo, 2009, p. 178).

The above “delinking” means, in effect, that we need to “rethink thinking” (Odora Hoppers and Howard Richards 2012, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). In ‘rethinking thinking’ we have to face the reality of “disciplinary decadence” due to “its own centering because of a commitment to questions greater than the discipline itself” (Gordon, 2006, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 188). Disciplines decay when “The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world” and where “Like empires, the presumption is that the discipline must outlive all, including its own purpose” (Gordon, 2011, p. 98). Also see Gordon (2014). We cannot ignore the reality that the disciplines that we teach and that have become embedded in institutional structures and hierarchies, are essentially part of an “‘unholy alliance’ of modernity, racism, imperialism, colonialism and capitalism” and their emerged “conceptions of the ‘human’ and knowledge” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 71). We will have to confront the reality of the “multiple, vertical, horizontal and crisscrossing strings of ‘colonialities’” or “hetararchies” that constitute our current disciplines, epistemologies and ontologies (Grosfoguel, 2017, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 61).

There are also other possibilities and spaces of reframing, enunciation and contestation. See for example, the approach by de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, and Hunt (2015) who moot three different spaces of enunciation namely the soft-reform space, the radical-reform space and the beyond-reform space. Without discussing their proposal in full, they map several, often overlapping responses to decolonization due to the reality that the “violences of colonization affect nearly every dimension of being, but also because colonization has multiple meanings, and the desires and investments that animate it are diverse, contested, and at times, at odds with one another” (p. 22). See Prinsloo (2016) for a full discussion of de Oliveira Andreotti et al.’s proposal.

(In)Conclusion: From Dis-membering to Re-membering

In his book, “Epistemic freedom in Africa. Deprovincialization and decolonization”, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) confronts the “reality of continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within Euro-North American colonial matrices of power” (p. 8). Though specifically exploring the scope and need for epistemic freedom in the context of Africa, the “entrapment” he refers to is endemic to other contexts in the Global South. European colonialists literary dismembered the bodies of heads of African leaders and mummified these body parts in different European locations. But it is not only the bodies of African leaders and peoples that were dismembered, but their knowledges, their beliefs, their ways of making sense of the world were ridiculed and erased. In dehumanizing individuals, peoples, communities and cultures, the colonizer also became less human and lost his/her humanity in the process. If higher education were to (re)claim humanity and hope, we will have to re-member, rediscover what was stolen, taken, dismembered, and commit ourselves to “a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 77). Re-claiming humanity allows us to rediscover humanity as human-in-relation to other humans, to the planet who hosts us, and to a vast cosmos that we do not understand.

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