Our Vision

Through collaborative research, Geopolitics of Education for Peace (GEP) aims to highlight some of the ways in which educators and urban community-builders resist the impacts of neoliberalism, imperialism, and colonialism on displaced and subaltern communities. GEP is primarily concerned with urban social justice, hegemonic relations, and structural inequities relating to or emanating from the educational system. Historically, there have been many instances where education has served the interests of the dominant class, reproducing hegemonic discourses, values, beliefs, and practices that have manipulated communities into complacency and servitude to capitalist regimes. Consequently, historical and spatial processes that stigmatize, subvert, exploit and silence marginalized communities have emerged.

However, it is also true that the educational realm (from the formal to the informal) has the potential of creating collective consciousness, political agency, and social transformation, like the continuing historical legacies of the Cuban Literacy Campaign. Through case studies, which include communities in both the Global North and South, GEP explores educational spaces as sites of contestation and struggle and looks at the geographies of nonviolence and peace across scales. Moreover, it emphasizes the importance in understanding spaces of education that encompass anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-neoliberalist struggles. The various case studies describe how GEP conceive of hegemonic relations within this context, and provides a series of papers related to these themes put together by the team.