Africana Studies, Education & Globalization Studies

The Caribbean region, per capita, is one of the most violent in the world. Trinidad & Tobago (TT), an economic powerhouse, has been bedeviled by violence. Unsurprisingly, school violence has escalated; however, there is a paucity of data. In this c a s e study, I employed a critical p e a c e education and postcolonial studies framework to examine how school violence is conceptualized. The research site - a product of postcolonial educational expansion - is a co-educational secondary school in TT, and is nationally stigmatized for its violent notoriety and persistent academic underperformance. Observations, 33 semi-structured interviews, and 9 focus groups/classroom discussions (with a total of 84 students) were conducted over a 7-month period in 2010, with a 3-week follow-up in 2013. My data illustrate how youth are the main analytic unit in the discourse around school violence; a
discourse from which the structural role of the school is mostly omitted, as well as the lingering impact of a contemporaneously bifurcated educational system that was created during the colonial era. These omissions may serve to reinforce/perpetuate TT’s class-stratified society; this constitutes discursive violence, but more specifically, as its iteration in this case study, postcolonial structural violence. Such discursive violence is both a neocolonial product and enabler of the structural violence that maintains educational inequity in TT.

In this article, I argue that one of the gifts of the Age of Enlightenment, the ability to measure, to experiment, to predict—turned rancid by hyper-positivism—is re-asserting itself globally in the field of education (including music education). I see a neoliberal, neocolonial connection—in terms of the ideologies that fuel them—between some of the homogenizing, epistemologically/culturally imperialist aspects of globalization and this resurgent hyper-positivism that has been accompanied by a corporatization of education. I posit that critical education, including critical music education, is an essential component of a necessary—if rancorous—dialogue in maintaining a definition of education that is as varied and diverse as those students we wish to educate. In essence, I argue that critical education is one of many tools to help us fight a ‘re-colonization’ by this resurgent hyper-positivism in education.

In this featured article in the newsletter for the Global Campaign for Peace Education, I use a systems analysis to discuss the need for a global critical peace education. I talk about my own journey through poverty, and my research on school violence in Trinidad to explore how decolonization isn't over, as evinced by a contemporary global neo-imperialism that biopolitically curtails comprehensive freedoms.
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At the end of the article, I offer recommended readings of/links to critical peace education, and complexity science and dynamical systems approaches to peace and conflict.

This is a book review of the 2012 book, Fragile States. The book's authors are  by Lohar Brock, Hans-Henrik Holm, Georg Sørensen & Michael Stohl.
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In this book – a quick read that covers much ground – the authors wade into the conceptual waters of state fragility with the following aims: i) sketching more clearly its conceptual parameters, including its core characteristics; ii) dissecting its connection to violent conflict; iii) analyzing the role that international society has played in relation to fragile statehood; and iv) laying out two proposals for tackling its intractability. These analyses are conducted through the prism of three case studies: The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Afghanistan, and Haiti.

The Encyclopedia of Peace Education  is a slim primer. It is an edited book by Monisha Bajaj and is divided into 4 sections:  I) The historical emergence of influences on peace education, II) Foundational perspectives in peace education, III) Core concepts in peace education and IV) Frameworks and new directions for peace education.

This is a pdf with information on how to purchase the book, in which my chapter is located.

Abstract (of my chapter):

This chapter intends to shed light on the incongruence of positivist evaluation with the epistemological and ontological logics of peace education. To provide sufficient, solution-oriented contrast, the latter part of the chapter will then present the case for the types of evaluation methodologies commensurate with critical peace education. The chapter is organized into various subgroups, which are tagged by several subheadings. I discuss how the lofty vision of peace education is its inspiration and its curse, as well as its potential incongruence with the logic of positivist evaluation. I also address the challenges that the discipline of evaluation itself faces and present the concept of peaceableness as a potential way for augmenting peace education’s evaluability. I conclude with participative evaluative methodologies as well as a brief example from personal research experience to highlight the need for such methodologies, especially when working with less empowered and marginalized communities.

I co-edited this issue (2008) of the graduate research journal with Kirsten Downey. It features a foreword by Prof. Gita Steiner-Khamsi.

Editors' Note:

Investigations into the complexities of South-South cooperation and transfer reveal the difficult task of adhering to any monolithic definition of the term. For example, some scholars conflate the terms ‘transfer’ and ‘cooperation,’ using them interchangeably. Others promote a sharp distinction between the two, characterizing ‘transfer’ as a mimicry of the disequilibrium of North-South power relations and ‘cooperation’ as a more equanimous interaction between countries of the ‘South’ (itself a contentious term). The research and ideas presented herein capture this robust intellectual pull-and-tug through a unique set of approaches to the topic. Several authors focus on specific examples of South-South transfer and cooperation from around the world, highlighting various problematiques of the transfer itself; for example, considerations of culture force us to critically appraise the illogical assumption that policies born in one ‘Southern’ context will be automatically compatible in another. Pushing even deeper, we want to challenge the prevailing Pollyannaish deification of South-South relations which has contributed to an ‘underexploration’ of possible alternate configurations of South-South transfer and cooperation such as, according to one author, the ‘de-indigenization’ of a hugely successful Southern-based NGO. Other authors present more conceptual understandings of the topic, highlighting its multidisciplinary nature as well as its theoretical challenges (challenges that could, in fact, bring about a possible ‘reconceptualization’ of the topic). The nexus of all this presents us with an incredibly appealing platform for further substantive research on the topic of South-South transfer and cooperation.
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The authors discuss several countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba and India.

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Contents:
Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi: p. xiii Foreword

Kirsten B. Downey & Hakim A. Williams: p. xix Editors’ Note

ARTICLES
Peter Cronin: p. 1 What’s in a Name? The Dilemma of South-South Transfer

Suzana Andrade: p. 13 Cross-Cultural Tensions in South-South Transfer: Reinventing Freirean Critical Pedagogy in the Context of Índia

Jen Steele: p. 29 Yo, Sí Puedo: South-South Educational Collaboration in Practice

Tavis D. Jules & Michelle Morais de SÁ e Silva: p. 45 How Different Disciplines have Approached South-South Cooperation and Transfer

Jeremy Rappleye: p. 65 Reflections on Some Challenges Facing Resurgent Interest in South-South Transfer in Education: A Case for Re-Conceptualization

Notes on Contributors: p. 79

In my research on school violence at a secondary school in Trinidad, I found that students and school personnel spoke often of ‘rank’. ‘Pullin rank’ is an emic term that refers to a hyper-exertion of authority and power, and as the name suggests, it refers to a social hierarchy. In this article, I employ this term as an explanatory framework for the various configurations of hegemonic masculinity that I documented during this qualitative research project. I discuss how masculinities intersect with school violence, not only among students and school personnel, but also on a structural level. By focusing on both direct/material and structural violence, my analysis reveals a spectrum of what I call ‘masculinist posturing’ that is in itself violent and perhaps contributory to violence. Masculinist posturing, as I employ it here, is qualified as both dispositional/ behavioral and structural. I posit that the instances of direct/material violence I witnessed are influenced by and nestled within a wider web of structural violence; a structural violence that has a neocolonial character to it. Thus the term: neocolonial hegemonic masculinity. The data provided in this article have been sourced from observations, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and classroom discussions conducted over a 7-month period in 2010, with a 3-week follow-up in 2013.

Based on research in Trinidad, I argue that ‘school’ violence is reduced to ‘youth’ violence, and that the predominating discourse about what constitutes school violence itself, and its drivers/‘causes’, takes on a limiting and individualizing nature. As a result, the principal interventions that emanate from such a discourse are correspondingly narrow and therefore fail to reveal the structural violence in which youth violence in schools is embedded. I posit this discursive violence as a lingering coloniality, which is a blockade to sustainable peace education in Trinidad’s schools. I discuss the perils of focusing on more negative peace oriented interventions over those of a positive peace orientation, by centering my analysis on three government initiatives that do not address the structural violence within the educational system; they merely narrowly train their gaze on the ‘symptoms’ of school violence. I conclude with suggestions on how to more comprehensively address school violence.

I reappropriate the image of a space-time warp and its notion of disorientation to argue that colonialism created a warp in Trinidad’s educational system. Through an analysis of school violence and the wider network of structural violence in which it is steeped, I focus on three outmoded aspects as evidence of this warp – hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies – by using data (interviews, documents and observations) from a longitudinal case study at a secondary school in Trinidad. Colonialism was about exclusion, alienation, violence, control and order and this functionalism persists today; I therefore contend that hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies are all enforcers of these tenets of (neo)colonialism in Trinidad’s schools. I conclude with some nascent thoughts on a Systemic Restorative Praxis (SRP) model as a way of destabilizing the warp, by stitching together literature/approaches from systems thinking, restorative justice and Freirean notions of praxis. SRP implies that colonialism (and this modern-day warp) has rendered much psychic and material damage, and that any intervention to address structural violence has to be systemic and iterative in scope and process, include healing, be participatory and foster an ethic of horizontalization in human relations.

Full paper on my website (Accepted Version): https://hakimwilliams.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/neocolonial-warp_final_hmawilliams2016.pdf

Zero tolerance, punitive, and more negative peace-oriented approaches dominate school violence interventions, despite research indicating that comprehensive approaches are more sustainable. In this article, I use data from a longitudinal case study at a Trinidadian secondary school to focus on the role of teachers and their impact on school violence; I show that institutional constraints are not fully deterministic, as teachers sometimes deploy their agency to efficacious ends. In combining Noddings’ postulations on care and Freire’s notions of praxis as a symbiosis of reflection and action, I explicate the nascent praxes of care of six teachers at this school, as they strive for more positive peace-oriented approaches to school violence. I characterize these praxes as nascent because they are not fully interrogative of the structural violence of the entire system. However, I do argue that these nascent praxes possess decolonizing and transgressive potentiality in the face of a logic of coloniality that reinforces hierarchy, exclusion, and marginalization in the Trinidadian educational system. I conclude by contending that these nascent praxes must be scaled-up to more mature, radical praxes, including the cultivation of a systemic praxis of care; in other words, a deeper and broader postcolonial peace education.

Full paper on my website (Accepted Version): https://hakimwilliams.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/praxes-of-care_acceptedversion_jpe_1dec2016.pdf