FreshEd #308 – White Ignorance in Global Education (Francine Menashy & Zeena Zakharia)

Welcome to the first episode of 2023! We are thrilled to be starting another year and have a great line-up of guests for you. Before we kick things off, I’d like to encourage any graduate student who wants to make a narrative-based podcast about their research to apply for a FreshEd Flux Fellowship. The application deadline is Feb 17. So if that’s you, head over to FreshEdpodcast.com/flux for more details. Also, FreshEd will be holding an online Annual General Meeting on February 20 at 8:30 am Eastern Standard Time. This will be an opportunity for our listeners to learn about the inner workings of FreshEd. You can ask us questions, meet the team, and provide input into our future direction. More details will be shared on our website soon. Stay tuned and I hope you can join us. -- Today we focus on a hugely important issue but one that is generally absent within the organizations and structures that make up the global education architecture. The issue is race. My guests today, Francine Menashy and Zeena Zakharia, have spent years speaking with staff members at various global education organizations – you know, places like UNESCO, UNCIEF, the World Bank, and the Gates Foundation. They also scrutinized hundreds of publications these organizations have published. Francine and Zeena come to the conclusion that few if any of these organization deal with race and racial power relations between the global north and south in any meaningful way. Francine Menashy is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and Zeena Zakharia is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their new article in Harvard Educational Review is entitled White Ignorance in Global Education. It’s open access until March 9. https://freshedpodcast.com/menashy-zakharia/ -- Get in touch! Twitter: @FreshEdpodcast Facebook: FreshEd Email: [email protected] Support FreshEd: www.freshedpodcast.com/donate