Un/learning to Disagree. A Response to "Pragmatist Thinking for a Populist Moment: Contingency and Racial Re-valuing in Education Governance"

Sant, Edda and da Costa, Marta ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8083-2787 (2024) Un/learning to Disagree. A Response to "Pragmatist Thinking for a Populist Moment: Contingency and Racial Re-valuing in Education Governance". Democracy & Education, 32 (2). 9. ISSN 1085-3545

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Abstract

How should education governance respond to increasing polarized perspectives? Drawing on contemporary African American pragmatism, Knight-Abowitz and Sellers’s article "Pragmatist Thinking for a Populist Moment: Contingency and Racial Re-valuing in Education Governance" interrogated the critical case of Black Lives Matters and anti-critical race theory protests in the USA education governance and concluded that inquiry and deliberation are needed to embrace more pluralistic forms of democracy. In our response, in which we engage with decolonial, agonistic, and speculative theories, we share Knight-Abowitz and Sellers’s analytical framings. Yet we wonder to what extent inquiry and deliberation can push off racial habits and whether we should aim to pluralize the same procedures of educational governmental negotiation beyond the traditional pragmatist framework.