policy – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Sarfaroz Niyozov and Stephen A. Bahry

This chapter in Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021 reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan.

The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonization in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonization discourse.

The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonization of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.

Read this chapter here.

By Stephen Garton

Australians and New Zealanders were active participants in international dialogues and movements seeking to promote the propagation of the fit and prevent the multiplication of the inferior. This article deals with the reasons for failure of eugenics to have the influence its proponents hoped and its failure in achieving its aims. It also discusses eugenic ideas and policies as scientific, useful, and essential to the repertoire of policies that governments and reformers should pursue to promote social progress. It presents reasons for little success of eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand in enforcing even segregation. It discusses the conventional areas of eugenic concern namely, segregation, sterilization, marriage advice, maternal and infant welfare. It examines particular policies in detail, and more importantly shifts the focus from the discourses contesting to shape policy to the outcomes of those contests.

Read the article here.

By Greg Blyton

The Eugenics movement that emerged in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century was a continuance of European scientific racism sustained by a flotilla of political and academic ignorance that defined human credibility by hereditary traits, including colour and race. The movement may be defined as a European intellectual promotion to scientifically improve western societies through state systems that regulated human reproduction. In Australia, the foundations of the eugenics movement were heavily influenced by two former Cambridge University students, English scientists, Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882). It was a case of intellectual imperialism with colonial policymakers in Australia willingly adopting eugenics ideologies from their two English tutors. However, it would be unfair to blame a single man for the sanctimonious ways his concepts and theories were applied in policy and practice in relation to the treatment of Aboriginal Australians by Australian federal and state governments.

Read the full chapter here.

Tag: policy

Decolonization of Education Research, Policy-making, and Practice in Central Asia: The Case of Tajikistan

Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science

Australia: Tainted Blood—Scientific Racism, Eugenics and Sanctimonious Treatments of Aboriginal Australians: 1869–2008