by NADIRA OMARJEE & SURUCHI THAPAR-BJÖRKERT
History is not the past.
It is the present.
We carry our histories with us.
We are our history.
If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.
James Baldwin (2017, p.107)
Coronavirus has highlighted the incongruencies of education as a public good, re-articulating social injustices which further alienate groups lacking in cultural capital. These injustices, inequalities and exclusions embedded in historical-colonial logics are amplified once again through the pandemic, bringing centre stage two issues within the academy: a) how the new drive of digitalisation is diminishing the gains of decolonial feminism; and b) on a more transnational level, how digitalisation is widening social inequalities between the global South and the global North. These two issues intersect in the ways in which Black Lives Matter (#BLM) has been absorbed by the white capitalist, heteropatriarchal, ableist, majoritarian system that hinders Black lives/voices from fully dismantling the master’s house from within (Lorde 1984).
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