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Human Rights, Postcolonialism, and Education

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Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory
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Introduction

It should be a complex task to connect the notion of human rights to postcolonialism both historically and in the present. To position education as both an enabler and explainer of human rights in the postcolonial raises further questions about how to understand these couplings. Indeed, there exists a Western bias in the construction and understanding of human rights, education, and even postcolonial discourses. Moreover, assumptions of fixed meanings often override the multiplicities of meaning, origin, and operationalization of the concepts. Thus, while the birth of human rights discourse is geographically multifarious, its historicization has been dominated by a Western imaginary and epistemology.

The problematic occidentalization, to borrow a Saidian line (Said 1978), of human rights in their praxical notations from the past millennia and half and into current political and cultural settlements is an issue that needs to be investigated. The first section of this entry...

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Correspondence to Ali A. Abdi .

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Abdi, A.A. (2017). Human Rights, Postcolonialism, and Education. In: Peters, M.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-588-4_183

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