The Cultural Turn in Comparative and International Education: Decolonizing the Field in an Era of Post-Humanist Pluriverse Thinking and Racial Capitalism

The field of comparative and international education (CIE) occupies a noteworthy epistemic domain, explicating and studying the workings of foreign education systems, policies, and practices while simultaneously discerning the nuanced interplay with socio-cultural, political, and economic matrices. Today, we live in an era characterized by socio-political movements such as #Black Lives Matter and settler-colonialism, state violence, racial capitalism, numerous wars, rising authoritarianism, and anti-Blackness, which have emerged as salient themes necessitating meticulous examination within CIE (see jules & Salajan, 2024; Salajan & jules, 2024). Yet, it was not until recently that the field began to address the importance of racial capitalism – the complex interplay between race and economics – in shaping its historical trajectory. Scholars have called for the decolonization of the field, arguing that we must deconstruct macro-level structural forces that inadvertently perpetuate colonial effects within the scholarly domain and exacerbate existing disenfranchisements (jules & Salajan, 2025; Scott & Bajaj, 2023; Takayama et al., 2017). This is crucial because we often forget that “Whiteness is a transnational ideology that stems from colonial dispossession,” which has been fueled by processes of racialization that have “created hierarchies, rationale for forms of domination, and unequal social and educational opportunities across the globe” (Scott & Bajaj, 2023, pp. 2–3). Thus, within the scholarly purview, decoloniality is the latest concept du jour and has emerged as a politico-cultural imperative, signaling the deliberate unraveling and nullification of the harmful consequences wrought by the historical edifices of Western expansion, colonialism, enslavement, and indentureship. Consequently, racial capitalism, which is inextricably linked to the rise and sustenance of colonialism, is not a variation, stage, or period in the more extensive history of capitalism; instead, it acknowledges that since the commencement of the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racialized, originating social and economic worth from racial labeling and social stratification (Jenkins & Leroy, 2021).