Conference Agenda

Julia Kristeva's philosophy is typically credited with contributing a psychological perspective on cosmopolitanism as well as cosmopolitan education (Kennedy, 2011). Through her Western-European lens and Freud's concept of the 'uncanny' Kristeva registers the empirical and psychoanalytic portrayal of the foreigner as a frightening 'other'. However, I argue in this paper, colonial undertones accompany Kristeva's cosmopolitanism, making its educational application vulnerable to the charge of refashioning colonial narratives and preserving them as ‘old wine in new bottles’. As Kristeva moves between sociopolitical and psychoanalytical landscapes, colonial residues are sensed since her depoliticization of cosmopolitanism neglects the wounds of colonialism and unwittingly carries them forward as building blocks of the cosmopolitan project. Situating cosmopolitanism within the psychoanalytical realm is thus appearing naïve in the face of historical injustices that, to be grasped and explored in the educational realm, require conceptual refinement of cosmopolitan explanatory tools. Accordingly, the research questions I raise are: what problems arise when the discourse of cosmopolitanism is transferred from the sociopolitical realm to the psychoanalytical one? What implications does Kristevan cosmopolitanism have upon cosmopolitan education? And last, but definitely not least, how can responsibility and justice be cultivated through cosmopolitan education?

To address these questions, I first begin by discussing Kristeva’s conception of foreignness in Strangers to Ourselves (1991). This discussion aims to highlight how Kristeva’s adoption of portrayals of foreignness leads to a reproduction and a recycling of Western-colonial narratives of foreignness. This makes her cosmopolitan project centre around the stigmatized foreigner instead of comprising concerns for rights and justice (inter alia one based on international law). Therefore, the inattention to cosmopolitan justice depoliticizes cosmopolitanism by rendering it a matter of sociality and psychological acceptance outside of global power relations. Consequently, Kristeva’s depoliticization of cosmopolitanism is neglecting colonial wounds which are actively shaping cosmopolitan education in Kennedy’s (2011) ‘cosmopolitan curriculum.’ The second section of the paper thus deals with the way Kristevan cosmopolitanism is applied in the education realm and it critically interrogates Kristeva’s and Kennedy’s proposal to incorporate forgiveness into cosmopolitan education. It will be argued that instead of engaging critically with the historical notion of foreignness, Kennedy, like Kristeva, oversimplifies cosmopolitan education by extolling forgiveness and reducing cosmopolitan-educational challenges to cultivating a forgiving culture. More specifically, Kennedy (2011, p.384) follows Kristeva in the distinction between judgment and forgiveness and argues that, in a pedagogical context, the ‘teacher must not rush into the space of judgment quickly,’ which propels me to ask: what would this rushing look like? Would the teacher ‘rush’ if they disclosed historical wrongs such as colonialism, illegal settlements, occupations of the land of others, etc., as a violation of human rights after judging and evaluating historical events? I am not suggesting that Kennedy would agree to this, yet what I aim to highlight is that the distinction between forgiveness and judging fails to bring in a critical dimension to the act of forgiving – a dimension which would require an active resistance against conceptual remains of colonialism prior to requesting forgiveness. In other words, the suspension of judgment in the pedagogical context could diminish the emphasis which should be given to historical wrongs which require a lot more than forgiveness to be held accountable for their acts. While Kennedy is right in claiming that judgment can often be fused in biases that obscure factual truth, what is important for cosmopolitan education is to guide the students into seeing through the fog before asking them to address the unjust past in a psychoanalytical manner. Such an approach to forgiveness can thus cultivate responsibility and a more ethically attuned orientation to cosmopolitanism.

In the late 18^th century, people enjoyed magic lantern shows, which were regarded as phantasmagoria, with their visual and sound effects to arouse certain emotions. The magic lantern slides later became an educational resource and were used in many ways to teach geography, history, and science. Within the visuals of the magic lantern, specific social norms naturalized social practices and perpetuated marginalization and standardization by shaping the mode of reasoning, such as Racial hierarchy or Eurocentrism. Interestingly, the technology of visuals keeps repeating a similar mode of reasoning within the different techniques, even in the 21^st century. AI visuals become a new phantasmagoria, making students excited about the visuals but naturalized about the image itself without questioning.

The research examines how visual cultural materials in the curriculum portray the ideal human and shape people’s thoughts through a postcolonial perspective. Visual cultural materials in the curriculum contain dominant social norms. When students engage with visual cultural materials, these materials shape students' thinking, becoming a cultural experience. The discourse based on dominant norms circulates students’ thoughts and leaves a mark on their thinking. The mark in thinking shapes the affect, and it is created or solidified by cultural experiences. Although the ways of forming the affect are different, the dominant norm circulates among people and shapes the collective mindsets. This research aims to explore the circulation of the notion of the ideal human and how visual discourse can become the dominant norm. Here are three research questions: 1) How can visuals function as curriculum and inscribe social practices onto individuals? 2) What is the coloniality of visuals in the late 19^th-century curriculum, and how do they shape the ideal human figure? 3) What are the educational implications of visuals in the 21^st century?

The research uses two concepts from Sylvia Wynter’s concept of Man (Wynter, 2003) and Sara Ahmed’s concept of affect (Ahmed, 2014)to understand how the ideal ‘figure of Man’ is justified and perpetuates racial hierarchy in the curriculum via visuals. Sylvia Wynter highlights the overrepresentation of Man, who is depicted as white, male, able-bodied, and propertied, in particular historical colonial events. Sara Ahmed emphasizes the importance of the impression the object makes, which can shape collective bodies. The visual impression of the body inscribes the notion of Man, circulating the surfaces of bodies to shape the dominant social norms. The notion of the Man embedded in the curriculum, representing the idealized human figure, becomes the grid of intelligibility for students to follow. The process of impression from visuals to create the grid of intelligibility (Foucault, 1978) is a form of epistemic colonialism, a technology that shapes the self in a particular way by entangling with related cultural experiences. In education, visual materials are used to shape subjectivity, which is not autonomous but rather passive and subjugated. This is the way of producing a colonial subject.

Decolonising undergraduate education is a national, arguably global, initiative that takes on different forms in different disciplines and communities of practice. Being based in a School of Medicine, as a Decolonising Academic Lead raising awareness about this initiative, I believe one way into this work is through reforming how we teach about health inequalities. Graduates of the undergraduate degree in the UK become qualified as doctors and I argue that decolonising their curriculum will equip this future generation to practice equitable and inclusive medicine. Decolonising the curriculum in medicine and health professions has the potential to address health inequalities because it develops the next generation of professionals to be critically aware of the impact that colonial legacies have on patient trust in professionals, research practices and healthcare itself.

However, decolonising in higher education has been challenging for several including:

a) Colonialism and its epistemological, ideological and structural impacts remain today, underexamined and yet are not typically discussed except in certain acedemic disciplines.

b) Competing demands on time and priorities and funding for those ‘on the ground’ means work is done in silos and not sustained or embedded across the curriculum, leaving the changes unstable and potentially incoherent and appearing as a ‘tick box’ exercise to students.

I want to share insights from my projects with medical undergraduates as student-researchers who conduct rapid literature reviews that focus on a specific review question. From these reviews, we identify colonial legacies, colonial principles and global perspectives that can be used to decolonising teaching on health inequalities. We learn from academic disciplines and countries that have researched colonialism.

I argue that we need focused investigations of the legacies that shape the profession (Naidu, 2021): how the profession sees itself (professional identity), how it provides patient care and the how it conducts health research that informs patient care. The reviews of literature provide a basis from which we can critically analyse colonial legacies and their impact on medicine historically and today in order to inform curriculum development (Sowemimo, 2023). There is a gap in the knowledge that underpins health professions curricula. The reviews address one of the ways that the guide produced by the Medical Schools Council in the UK (2025) has identified as an area for decolonising the curriculum.

To move the decolonising initiative forward we have to meet people where they are and build on their existing knowledge and priorities. Given that cultural competency and inclusion health are priority areas for medicine in the UK, we can start there and move the conversation to structural competency (Metzl and Hansen, 2014), considering inequalities due to structure in society. To decolonise, we would then explore ways of re-humanising healthcare and employ a Cultural Safety approach (Lokugamage and Marya, 2023).

The talk will argue for a decolonising approach that considers the education and support of educators to implement decolonial principles into their teaching and curriculum design. Based on the literature reviews and my experience as a Decolonising Academic Lead, I suggest principles and concepts that specifically analyse colonial legacies in relation to health inequalities. The outputs are intended to support educators in decolonising through conversations.

To decolonise a curriculum, educators need to reflect on colonial legacies and the related belief systems. Decolonising is not about imparting a particular ideology but aims to support learning that promotes reflection on how we are brought up in and taught a particular ideology. By diversifying our curriculum we widen the scope of ideas we can use to discuss and understand how belief systems have implications today. In medicine, the argument is that history matters for today’s health inequalities.