Around the world, curriculum – hard sciences, social sciences and the humanities – has been dominated and legitimated by prevailing Western Eurocentric Anglophone discourses and practices. Drawing from and within a complex range of epistemological perspectives from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe, and Latin America, this volume presents a critical analysis of what the author, influenced by the work of Sousa Santos, coins curriculum epistemicides, a form of Western imperialism used to suppress and eliminate the creation of rival, alternative knowledges in developing countries. This exertion of power denies an education that allows for diverse epistemologies, disciplines, theories, concepts, and experiences. The author outlines the struggle for social justice within the field of curriculum, as well as a basis for introducing an Itinerant Curriculum Theory, highlighting the potential of this new approach for future pedagogical and political praxis.

Towards a Just Curriculum Theory: The Epistemicide responds to a need for ‘alternative ways of thinking about alternatively’ about education and curriculum. It challenges the functionalism of both dominant and specific counter-dominant education and curriculum perspectives and in so doing suggests an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) as a new path for the field. The volume brings challenges critical educators to decolonize and to deterritorialize, providing scholars and educators a more nuanced analysis. By offering strategies to achieve a just curriculum theory, and by positioning curriculum theory to establish social and cognitive justice, this book aims to educate a more just and democratic society. With contributions from leading scholars across the field education, this volume argues that to deny the existence of any epistemological form beyond the Western mode can be a form of social fascism, which leads to an uncritical reading of history. Together, the essays offer and encourage a more deliberative, democratic engagement that seeks to contextualize and bring to life diverse epistemologies, value-sets, disciplines, theories, concepts, and experiences in education and beyond.

Around the world, curriculum – hard sciences, social sciences and the humanities – has been dominated and legitimated by prevailing Western Eurocentric Anglophone discourses and practices. Drawing from and within a complex range of epistemological perspectives from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe, and Latin America, this volume presents a critical analysis of what the author, influenced by the work of Sousa Santos, coins curriculum epistemicides, a form of Western imperialism used to suppress and eliminate the creation of rival, alternative knowledges in developing countries. This exertion of power denies an education that allows for diverse epistemologies, disciplines, theories, concepts, and experiences. The author outlines the struggle for social justice within the field of curriculum, as well as a basis for introducing an Itinerant Curriculum Theory, highlighting the potential of this new approach for future pedagogical and political praxis.

This volume uncovers the colonial epistemologies that have long dominated the transfer of curriculum knowledge within and across nation-states and demonstrates how a historical approach to uncovering epistemological colonialism can inform an alternative, relational mode of knowledge transfer and negotiation within curriculum studies research and praxis. World leaders in the field of curriculum studies adopt a historical lens to map the negotiation, transfer, and confrontation of varied forms of cultural knowledge in curriculum studies and schooling. In doing so, they uniquely contextualize contemporary epistemes as historically embedded and politically produced and contest the unilateral logics of reason and thought which continue to dominate modern curriculum studies. Contesting the doxa of comparative reason, the politics of knowledge and identity, the making of twenty-first century educational subjects, and multiculturalism, this volume offers a relational onto-epistemic network as an alternative means to dissect and overcome epistemological colonialism. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in curriculum studies as well as the study of international and comparative education. Those interested in post-colonial discourses and the philosophy of education will also benefit from the volume.

In this important book, Nicholas Hartlep and Daniel Scott’s detailed analyses on both visual and historical representations of Asian Americans in textbooks and teacher manuals used in our elementary and secondary schools poignantly tell us that generations of children are growing up being fed this single story about Asian Americans. As Hartlep and Scott write. Asian Americans have once again been constructed as the “good minority” that can succeed on their own and be used as a political instrument to shame the Blacks for their underachievement and their fight for equality. Over and over again, the media has been telling “a single story” about Asian Americans to the public for the past fifty years. The consequence of this fabricated story is that it “discourages others—even Asian-Americans themselves—from believing in the validity of their struggles” (Linshi, 2014, p. 1).

This book challenges educators to be agents of change, to take history into their own hands, and to make social justice central to the educational endeavor. Paraskeva embraces a pedagogy of hope championed by Paulo Freire where people become conscious of their capacity to intervene in the world to make it less discriminatory and more humane.