David Golding

This study examines Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) as a global assemblage that instrumentalizes colonial governmentality. CAIE is a department of the University of Cambridge that has governed schools in British colonies and former colonies since the mid-19th century. These schools constitute a Cambridge School system with approximately 1 million students around the world who take Cambridge examinations. CAIE invisibilizes its thousands of schools in the global South by enclosing them within privatized discursive spaces it terms “Cambridge School Communities.” CAIE simultaneously assembles and visibilizes an ecology of expertise by connecting a global array of researchers, consultants, businesses, organizations, publication outlets, and conferences. Rather than taking an interest in the “low-performing jurisdictions” of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, CAIE’s ecology of expertise positions British educational culture in relation to a pre-modern “East.” CAIE...

The controversy surrounding Sri Lanka’s privatising education system is one of the most pressing social and political issues facing the country today. This paper explores the history of this debate by drawing connections to broader processes of colonialism and neoliberalism. Particularly, this paper traces the shifting sociocultural functions of education in Sri Lanka. Colonial-era education in Sri Lanka provoked debates about access, cultural identity, and employment that somewhat resemble contemporary discourses on the role of international education in Sri Lankan society. As the world system shifted from colonialism to neoliberalism in the 20th century, Sri Lankan education began to deemphasize government employment for its graduates. Instead, the education system became oriented towards the needs of the economy, especially in terms of private sector employment. While Sri Lankan education finds new purpose in preparing students for employment in the globalizing economy, it also r...

This study examines colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan partner institution of University of London (UOL) through semi-structured interviews with students and faculty. UOL began administrating colonised educational spaces in the 19th century, and now governs approximately 80 partner institutions throughout the global South. Its governmentality structures an arterial topology of power that grants limited inclusion to students while excluding their lecturers from formal recognition. Faculty at partner institutions do not assess students. Instead, assessment consists of annual British examinations, effectuating rote pedagogies that centre European knowledge. This extraction of faculty authority shapes delegitimated and disempowered subjectivities. The same process augments UOL’s expertise on Southern educational spaces, contributing to a broader project of universalising Western epistemology. The findings suggest a need for further research that examines colonial governmentality in international education, and particularly its mechanisms of epistemic extraction.

This article presents a textual analysis of the Nickelodeon animated series Rocko’s Modern Life. Drawing from the theories of Guy Debord and Imamura Taihei, the series is posited as a revelatory lens into the spiritual crisis of late capitalism. The author then argues that the series employs magical realism to depict an animist capitalism in which the fetishization of commodities literally brings them to life. The show’s characters experience the alienation of labour as the draining of their spirit, haunting their workplaces as dead labour reanimated through the necromancy of commodity fetishism. As consumers, the characters attempt to recapture the enervated agency of their alienated selves by populating their lives with commodities. Ultimately, they are unable to find meaningful agency and spiritual fulfilment amidst the distributed agency of animated commodities. Despite its often problematic engagement with both indigeneity and animism, this close analysis of Rocko’s Modern Life supports Imamura’s theory that Western animation appropriates elements of indigenous animism to bring dead labour back to life in the form of fetishized commodities. It also suggests further research into the interconnection and contestation between capitalist animism and indigenous animism within animation.

The controversy surrounding Sri Lanka's privatising education system is one of the most pressing social and political issues facing the country today. This paper explores the history of this debate by drawing connections to broader processes of colonialism and neoliberalism.

This paper intends to contribute to recent developments in the theory of critical peace education. The role of cosmopolitanism in critical peace education is examined, particularly in relation to universal moral inclusion, secularism and universalism. It is then recommended that critical peace education draw from post-universalist and dialogical approaches to cosmopolitanism. Walter Mignolo’s border cosmopolitanism is suggested as a decolonising framework for critical peace education. This would entail the theory of critical peace education orienting itself towards the aim of reconsidering cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality. Connections are drawn between border cosmopolitanism and Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education. The result is a vision for critical peace education to empower participants through centring personal and lived experience in critical deconstructions of cosmopolitan discourses.