Decolonising Intercultural Education ─ Colonial Differences, the Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Inter-Epistemic Dialogue

An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this book interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality and students who have completed a university course on the subject.

Taking a decolonial approach, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. This book suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences, but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, this book argues that emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply intercultural.

The book is truly international in its scope and should be of great interest to educational practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students in in the areas of education, postcolonial studies, Latin American studies and the social sciences more broadly.

Robert Aman is Lecturer in Inclusive Education at the School of Education, University of Glasgow. Aman primarily conducts research on the relationship between education, the geopolitics of knowledge and various forms of exclusion and marginalisation, drawing on decolonial theories. He holds a Ph.D. in Education from Linkoping University and is a former Visiting Fellow with the Program in Literature, Duke University; at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford; and, most recently, at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris.