RESPONSE TO POLICY AND PRACTICE CALL ON DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION SILENCES: REFLECTIONS ON A PEDAGOGY OF NON-SILENCE – RESISTING THE POLITICS OF HOPELESSNESS

This Viewpoint article responds to the Policy and Practice Call for Contributors on ‘Development Education Silences’, briefly considering how silence may be a root cause as well as a symptom or effect. It brings the sociology of ignorance to consider the broader context of financialised higher education. The discussion reflects on silences surrounding Palestine, connecting silencings of neoliberal restructuring and climate crisis, following on from a silenced pandemic. Pointing to the central arguments emerging at the high-level 2022 Transforming Education Summit, the discussion links problems of silences and silencing in and through education to the silencing of critical questions about education’s fundamental purposes, and how it is to be funded. Silencing may lead to moral injury as contradictions mount amidst a global order in a state of disintegration. The article returns to embrace Freire’s pedagogies of oppression, freedom and hope, to critically counter emerging threats from silenced inaction and its political correlate, liberal fatalism.