Towards Ustopia

In this blogpost, Pravin Balakrishnan, drawing on Margaret Atwood’s notion of Ustopia, argues that grassroot movements offer rich and insightful alternatives to the utopian visions promoted by international organizations. This blog was previously published by BAICE.

In Maria Balarin’s opening speech ‘The imperative of the future’ at the UKFIET 2023 Conference, two key arguments in relation to a just education stood out. First, less politically challenging topics have a greater chance to make it into policies and practice, and second, the depoliticization of education policies undermines the potential for justice. Balarin’s arguments are fundamental in interrogating the inequalities of the Global North-South relationship for a just education at the present time. Against this background, this essay makes two arguments in relation to debates about just education – (1) the utopian visions promoted by international organizations fail to engage underlying structural inequalities that impede equitable education, and (2) Global South and grassroot movements can serve as a source of inspiration in the knowledge-making of a just education. I draw inspiration from Margaret Atwood’s Ustopia, which denotes the collective imagination of the human species where tensions are acknowledged yet everyone has what they need to thrive.

The Utopian Visions of International Organizations

International organizations, predominantly employing experts from the Global North, deploy utopias to shape the future of education through technologies of government (Tikly, 2004), such as foresights, anticipation, and scenario planning. Utopian visions are deeply problematic because they gloss over complex and complicated realities, and often times exaggerate the ease to achieve desirable futures. By assuming the role of ‘guardians’ of education (Robertson, 2022), such utopian visions do not engage with a just education in a meaningful way, rather they are used by International organizations to legitimize the considerable influence they hold over education futures. Examples of such future-making visions are UNESCO’s Reimagining our Futures Together and the OECD’s The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030 and Digital Education Outlook. While UNESCO advocates a “new social contract” with justice at its core, the OECD promotes “soft” skills and technologies as panaceas to tackle an uncertain future (Robertson & Beech, 2023). Given the influence and reach of IOs and their visions through global agendas such as SDG4, Global South countries are compelled to embrace educational agendas that are based on Western values and epistemologies, representing a form of new imperialism (Tikly, 2004).

Against the background of Hannah Arendt’s warning that utopian visions can have depoliticizing effects and yield totalitarian outcomes (Arendt, 1951), it is important to critically unpack these educational visions put forward by International organizations. Based on an analysis of several OECD and UNESCO reports, Elfert (2023) highlighted the emergence of two policy strands – ‘sustainable futures’ and ‘technosolutionism’. Although both policy strands have different ontological underpinnings – sustainable futures are associated with the humanistic-emancipatory agenda such as lifelong learning, and technosolutionism is related to the ‘economics of education’ movement and represents the unwavering belief that technology will save us all, Elfert (2023) carefully illustrates that educational visions stemming from both these policy strands have the potential to undermine democratic principles. For example, she argues that UNESCO’s notion of the social contract, outlined in Reimagining our Futures Together, diverts attention away from political action and creates potential for the abuse of higher collective ideals. Meanwhile, the OECD’s emphasis on enhancing the understanding of human learning through scientific evidence serves the commercial interests of educational technology (EdTech) companies. Since the pandemic, EdTech companies have successfully embedded themselves in public education bypassing national laws (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). Companies such as Google For Education and Microsoft Education play an influential role in the digital education landscape offering technological solutions and leveraging their tools in the promise of enhanced education. Subsequently, such EdTech corporations not only have a say in global education policymaking, but also insert themselves in global and local networks that afford them legitimacy. Additionally, there is a growing influence of EdTech in education in the structure of global governance around the Sustainable of Development Goals (Patil, 2024). The rise of global governance and the influence of EdTech corporations challenge our vision of a just education, particularly with regard to the unequal North-South relationship.

Elfert’s (2023) work on the utopian visions of international organizations pushes us to think about how justice in education can be achieved without being grounded in an analysis of structural inequalities? UNESCO’s social contract was meant to be a collective imaginary in the face of the age of ‘Anthropocene’. The intensification of ‘scientific evidence’ in education was meant to advance human knowledge to make sense of the uncertainties in a volatile world. If utopia itself is ambiguous, and international organizations are shaping visions of how they want the world to be through imperial technologies of government, where would this leave marginalised communities in the Global South? Therefore, Elfert’s (2023) arguments show that these global educational discourses do not bring us closer to the supposed utopia, rather they contribute to the widening inequalities between the North-South. Owing to this, new sources of inspiration, such as reparations (Sriprakash, 2023) are needed to imagine a just education for the future.

Drawing Inspirations from Grassroot Movements

In a recently published book, titled Laboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Education and Knowledge-making in the Global South, Mario Novelli, Birgul Kutan, Patrick Kane, Adnan Celik, Tejendra Pherali, and Saranel Benjamin highlight grassroot examples of justice in education from the Global South, namely in Turkey, Colombia, Nepal, and South Africa (Novelli et al., 2023). Their collaborative research sheds light on how the South can produce vital knowledge as they struggle for a better world. If anything, the social movements’ struggle for a just education for their communities were achieved by confronting the structural inequalities. These grassroot movements, referred to as ‘laboratories of learning’ offer rich and innovative insights into advocacy work for and by marginalized groups and provide evidence of the role of Global South in the knowledge-making process, particularly in the context of equitable education. Another example is Rebecca Tarlau’s (2019) research on the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, focusing on how the social movement of rural workers struggled for agrarian reform. Tarlau highlighted that the social movement was able to push for co-governance of rural public schools to encourage youth to remain in the countryside. With the rising influence of EdTech corporations, it is also pertinent to look at examples of Ustopias from a technological perspective. In her latest book Viral Justice, Ruha Benjamin (2022) highlights how technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination through automated decisionmaking. As a counter example, in Barcelona, a digital platform for citizen participation called Decidim collectively create policies that respond to citizens’ needs, without the influence of technology companies. In Atlanta, people utilized their imagination and mobilized digital tools against the construction of a police facility that would lead to destruction of one of Atlanta’s largest forests. The mobilization of these young communities from marginalized backgrounds shows that technological power can be harnessed for a better and just society.

The struggles of these self-mobilized and politically-motivated social movements and digital initiatives represent Ustopias in action, powerful counter-visions to the depoliticized global utopias promoted by international organizations, that can serve as inspirations to realize an education that is more just and meaningful for communities around the world.              

The Author:

Pravindharan Balakrishnan is a PhD student in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. He is researching on the intersection of the increasingly complex architecture of global governance of education and the professional work of teachers. Previously, Pravin pursued a master’s degree in education policy in Loyola University Chicago with a Fulbright scholarship. Prior to that, Pravin worked as a teacher at secondary school level close to a decade in Malaysia which informed his interest in the flow of global education policies to the local level.