On (Not) Being Heard in the Swiss School Context – Postcolonial Orders and the Construction of Hegemonic Knowledge

In this paper, we explore the question which and whose knowledge is constructed as hegemonic in the context of European postcoloniality, utilizing negotiations surrounding (neo-)linguicism as an example. Following Castro Varela (2016), we understand epistemic orders as contested and assume that a hegemonic “epistemic matrix” is, among other spaces, also enforced in educational institutions (ibid., p. 48). This happens by delegitimising and dethematising pre-colonial knowledge or knowledge marginalised in the context of European migration societies and by consolidating hegemonic eurocentric regimes of truth. We aim to understand, how this process works by looking at an empirical example. Within the context of a research project in Switzerland, analysing parents’ experiences of schools via subjectivation-theoretical biographical research (Rose 2019; Spies 2019), we explore, how a racialized parent, speaking one of the national languages of Switzerland, has to struggle to be heard in the school context, as her language skills are devalued as a “migrant language” within a hegemonic setting which usually prides itself on national language plurality. On this basis, we propose a situated postcolonial view on the dichotomy ‘non-hegemonic/hegemonic’ that understands this distinction itself as embedded in (post-)colonial relations. Building on this, we reflect (not without a pinch of pessimism) on how “epistemic change” (Castro Varela 2016) can actually occur – without falling prey to “impasses/apories” (Boger und Castro Varela 2021) and “without replicating the grammar of violence” (Hartman 2008:4).

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• Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. „Venus in Two Acts“. Small Axe 12(2):1–14.