Abstract
Globalization has occasioned a heightened interest in multiculturalism in general and multicultural education in particular. In media studies, the potential of multiculturalism and multicultural education has always been about creating a space for culturally diverse theoretical and pedagogical approaches in the field. However, both have had little transformative impact on social justice inside media classrooms, the imperial university, and wider society. The multiculturalism wave has also seen a deification of critical pedagogy as a philosophy and a teaching method. This chapter argues that while its significance cannot be underestimated, there has been a tendency to overromanticize its efficacy in the Global South. However, in its original Marxist conception, critical pedagogy is problematic concept that may not as empowering to the non-West as its exponents would like to believe. Its privileging of cogito ego sum throws the Global South into the labyrinthine of Hegelian hierarchies of the rational West and irrational non-West. The answer to this problem of a not so liberatory pedagogy in the South is that the South has to develop a decolonial or border pedagogy which is not only anti-capitalistic and anti-imperial, but also post-Cartesian thus allowing the media student to think first and foremost through the lens of their culture, history, language, epistemologies, and social experience. The border pedagogy recasts teaching and learning as inherently dialogic in the deeper sense of cultural and epistemic dialogue between the teacher and students in the struggle for meaning within contexts of duality, liminality, and double consciousness.
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Moyo, L. (2020). Reflections on Critical Pedagogy and Multiculturalism in Media Studies. In: The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_7
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