Interlocking inequalities, conflicts, and crises: COVID-19 and education in the Global South

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Education takes the COVID-19 pandemic as a starting point to interrogate and reflect critically on how crises and pandemics interlock with, and impact on, education in contexts of substantial existing inequities, particularly those in the Global South. We sought contributions that evaluate how pandemics and crises have impacted education choices, the manner in which education decisions have been taken, and how these exacerbate or disrupt existing inequalities. This special issue provides a critical space for reflection on how the pandemic and crises in general afford us an opportunity to rethink and reimagine the purposes and values of education. The pandemic, devastating as it is, is also a wakeup call to deliberate on alternative education imaginaries. Articles in this issue provide critically reflective and empirically grounded perspectives on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and other interlocking pandemics and crises that affect education in the Global South. This special issue opens with a critical editorial essay, Crises and disruptions: Educational reflections, (re)imaginings, and (re)vitalization, by Sayed, Cooper, and John that situates the concept of crisis in its historical, economic, and political contexts. This essay explores a range of images and imaginings in education policy discourses, the media, and everyday life. It provides a robust critique of the dominant images from the deficit-oriented learning loss variety to a hard-sell of Edtech solutions and capitalist-inspired development and policy paradigms, before proposing an alternative vision based on (re)consideration of the purpose of education and whose interests it should serve. It seeks to make sense of how the pandemic has illuminated what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2001) calls a sociology of absences and emergences since certain educational objects have been foregrounded by the pandemic and others have been silenced or marginalised, thus unveiling what has been suppressed and those who “have not been allowed to exist, to become pronounceable as a need or an aspiration” (p. 91). Six of the other ten articles in this issue focus on three sectors of education, University, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), and Schools, with two articles examining each of these sectors. A set of four articles on early childhood education and community engagement, as well as some imaginings and theorization of pedagogy and cognition, together with a book review constitute a final cluster that speaks to a sociology of emergences and absences that resonates with the opening essay in this special issue. The issue concludes with an overview of the field of education scholarship on COVID-19 in South Africa and points to several research gaps that need to be addressed.