The special focus of the 2021 conference will be the question about the need, methods, and scope of decolonization of knowledge. A few years ago, the social movement “Rhodes Must Fall” shook universities across the globe. The movement was precipitated by a call by students at the University of Cape Town to remove a statue of British colonial leader Cecil Rhodes from the campus. In 2017, a number of statues of Confederate leaders were removed from the campus of the University of Texas, Austin following protests.
In many countries, students and academics have demanded to rethink the relationships of power formed by colonialism and neocolonialism. In addition, it has been argued that the time has come to reflect more on alternative thinking, to take into account a broader pluralism of perspectives, worldviews, ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. Slogans such as "decolonize the university," "liberate my degree," and "my curriculum does not have to be white" have taken hold.
All of this poses a fundamental question about the unity of knowledge. Is it universal or particular? It also raises questions about the content of the curriculum and the purpose of education.
Reflection on the status of knowledge in the context of power relations is obviously not new. The seminal works of Michael Foucault from the '60s and '70s brought this issue to the center of academic interest and laid the foundations for the multi-threaded intellectual currently portrayed by the collective name of postmodernism in the '80s. The next chapter of intellectual reflection on this issue arguably stemmed from social practices promoted by the ideas of multiculturalism.
Today, it is worth returning to this topic. For several years we have been witnessing the intensification of demands for the decolonization of knowledge. However, in contrast to traditional phenomena associated with decolonization, this time such demands have not stayed in the periphery; they are present in the center. As a response, many important academic centers of the global north have decided to systematically determine to what extent the success of these institutions has been directly related to colonial domination and exploitation. For the first time, these institutions are beginning to take seriously the question of what to do to make this knowledge helpful in creating a more pluralistic picture of the world, and how to maintain universalism while at the same time being open for particularisms.
Assistant Professor, Institute for European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
The Twenty-eighth International Conference on Learning featured plenary sessions by some of the world's leading thinkers and innovators in the field.
Professor, Institute of Sociology, Jagielonian University, Kraków, Poland
Head of Media, Transformation, Georg Eckert Institute of International Textbook Studies, Germany
Professor, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany
Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States
College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States
Professor, University of Granada, Granada, Spain
For each conference, a small number of Emerging Scholar Awards are given to outstanding graduate students and emerging scholars who have an active research interest in the conference themes. Emerging Scholars perform a critical role in the conference by chairing the parallel sessions, providing technical assistance in the sessions, and presenting their own research papers. The 2021 Emerging Scholar Award Recipients are as follows:
Schulich School of Education - Nipissing University, Canada
University of the Free State, South Africa
University of South Africa, South Africa
University of the Philippines, Philippines
University of Massachusetts, USA
University in Canada, Canada
The University of Quindío, Columbia
Louisiana State University, USA
Anahuac University, Mexico
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Griffith University, Australia
Pontifical Bolivarian University, Colombia
Lyceum of the Philippines University, Philippines
Krakow, Poland
