Pedagogy of Absence, Conflict, and Emergence: Contributions to the Decolonization of Education from the Native American, Afro-Portuguese, and Romani Experiences

Abstract

This article employs the pedagogy of absence, conflict, and emergence (PACE), as an analytical approach to study concrete contributions to the decolonization of education. PACE seeks to transcend Eurocentric knowledge construction, and hence one of its fundamental efforts is to think from and for places, experiences, temporalities, and life projects otherwise rendered absent or negated in dominant education. The nonformal education projects studied are SNAG magazine in the Native American community of San Francisco, California (United States); efforts to “standardize” education among Romani communities in Córdoba, Spain; and hip-hop culture in Lisbon, Portugal. By challenging received practices of education and contributing to thinking of diversity from frameworks unconfined to dominant Eurocentric understandings, the case studies provide important insights to the multifaceted process of decolonization. The article concludes that PACE’s implications for educational research involve the methodological recentralization of the realities ignored by Eurocentric colonial education.