Interrupting the Coloniality of Knowledge Production in Comparative Education: Postsocialist and Postcolonial Dialogues after the Cold War

The article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of southeast/central Europe and the former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms “delinking,” to fracture the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge and enable comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal possibilities for imagining postsocialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of the spatially partitioned world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities.