Decolonizing the Westernized University - (Paperback)

About the Book

This volume focuses on the westernized universities, in the US and abroad and examines the various dimensions of the education crisis and provides a sharper understanding of the crisis and the responses to the westernized university at multiple sites around the world.

Book Synopsis

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 on the westernized university, in the US and abroad. 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. Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without 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, Africana 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.

Review Quotes

This volume offers a highly insightful contribution to debates in critical pedagogy as well as to practices of decolonisation more generally.... [T]he volume unambiguously succeeds in conveying the urgency with which the Westernised university needs to be decolonised.
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

About the Author

Ramón Grosfoguel is associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkley.

Roberto D. Hernández is assistant professor of Chicana/o studies at San Diego State University.

Ernesto Rosen Velásquez is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dayton.