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Cleaving the liberal subject: excavating the colonialities of gender, race, class and contexts
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The new Collective Social Futures seminar series opened with a presentation from visiting academic, Professor Mairead Dunne.
Seminar Overview
The struggles for progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries are often blamed on the economic and social excesses of neoliberalism and the ways these produce, sustain and deepen inequalities globally. While neoliberalism has been widely critiqued, significantly liberal thought, on which neoliberalism is founded, has evaded critical scrutiny. Focusing on key axes of inequality and difference this presentation explored how the foundational principles of liberalism frame, shape and inform understandings of social progress and development. The discussion looked at decolonial critiques to highlight liberal assumptions of western superiority, its linear models of social and economic progress and of the human subject as autonomous, masculine and agentic. In reference to research data from the field, the seminar further explored the ways that these assumptions shape the sustained inequalities of gender, race and class across different global contexts. The final reflections raised key questions about the work of education broadly and higher education in particular in sustaining the consequent inequalities and considering possibilities otherwise.
About the Speaker
Máiréad Dunne is a Visiting Professor at ISS21 and Collective Futures. Máiréad is currently Professor of the Sociology of Education and former Director of the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex, UK. She has lived, researched and held visiting positions in a wide-range of countries worldwide, including several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, The Pacific Island nations, Brazil, Japan, China, Australia Germany, Ireland and UK as well as with international development agencies (UNEP, UNESCO, UNGEI, World Bank) and INGOs (Action Aid, OXFAM, CONCERN). Her research has focused on bringing sociological theories and methodologies to understandings of the reciprocal links between society and education in a wide range of local, national and international contexts. Her research explores the social production of identities (gender and sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, nation, religion and age) and the intersecting hierarchies of difference these implicate in multiple contexts of poverty, inequality and conflict. It also engages in historical and contemporary discourses of education, modernity, coloniality and national development and the ways these infiltrate and stagnate in the mundane assumptions and social relations of everyday life. More details of her research and publications are available at https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p10662-mairead-dunne
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Professor Maggie O'Neill (Director of Collective Social Futures and ISS21) chaired the seminar.