Decolonizing the Westernized University: Philosophers Confronting the Education Crisis

An underlying assumption undergirding institutions of higher education is that they serve as a means to upward socioeconomic mobility and, in turn, a way to address poverty that is tied to certain racialized/sexualized bodies. Although the education crisis is not an American or European problem in the geographic sense, but instead a global problem that plays itself out differentially across space and time, this volume focuses its analysis on the westernized university, particularly in U.S. contexts. It asks questions about what is westernized about the university, what its aims are, and how those who work in, through and outside these sites of knowledge production with local or global social movements can participate in the slow careful process of decolonizing the westernized university in the United States. Decolonizing the Westernized University: Philosophers Confronting the Education Crisis provides a sharper understanding of the crisis and the responses to the westernized university at multiple sites around the world. As an intervention in the philosophy of education discourse, which tends to assume the university is a neutral space, this collection will be of particular value to students and scholars working in philosophy of education, Latina/o philosophy, African-American philosophy, social epistemology, education, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, as well as to intellectual activists in the United States, south of the border, and around the world."