GSE Lecture Series - Professor Arathi Sriprakash (University of Bristol)

Education and Racial Capitalism

In this lecture I examine how education is implicated in interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism and colonialism. Well-established critiques of neoliberalism in education have largely remained ‘colour blind’, overlooking frameworks of racial capitalism. Drawing on ongoing work conducted with Sophie Rudolph and Jessica Gerrard, I discuss three connected relations of racial capitalism and education: (a) the ongoing enclosures and dispossession of land and people, with which the material infrastructures of education are built;  (b) the racialised divisions of labour which education systems not only create but are also premised on, and; (c) the extraction of value in and through education, normalising hierarchised life and steeped in racial capitalism’s defining project of dehumanisation. I will argue that sociologies of education must attend more fully to these relations of racial capitalism if they are to imagine beyond, and mobilise against, education’s role in sustaining white supremacy.

About The Speaker

Professor Arathi Sriprakash, University of Bristol.  Arathi is a co-Director of the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education and co-Convenor of the Race, Empire and Education Collective.

Event hosted by Dr Li Li, Director of Research, and Dr Kerry Chappell, Network Lead for the Creativity and Emergent Educational-futures Network (CEEN).

A recording of the lecture is now available on ELE for Exeter IT Account holders.