Absences and Epistemologies of Ignorance: a Critical Multi-Sited Study on the Teaching of the Danish Colonial and Slave Trading Past
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2018 Absences and Epistemologies of Ignorance: A Critical Multi-Sited Study on the Teaching of the Danish Colonial and Slave Trading Past Naja B. Hougaard The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2716 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ABSENCES AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF IGNORANCE: A CRITICAL MULTI-SITED STUDY ON THE TEACHING OF THE DANISH COLONIAL AND SLAVE TRADING PAST by NAJA BERG HOUGAARD A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 i © 2018 NAJA BERG HOUGAARD All Rights Reserved ii Absences and Epistemologies of Ignorance: A Critical Multi-Sited Study on the Teaching of the Danish Colonial and Slave Trading Past by Naja Berg Hougaard This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Developmental Psychology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________ _______________________________________ Date Anna Stetsenko Chair of Examining Committee _________________ _______________________________________ Date Richard Bodnar Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Cindi Katz Wendy Luttrell Terrie Epstein Eduardo Vianna THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Absences and Epistemologies of Ignorance: A Critical Multi-Sited Study on the Teaching of the Danish Colonial and Slave Trading Past by Naja Berg Hougaard Advisor: Anna Stetsenko The present study is a critical investigation of the production of subjectivities through the teaching of the history of the Danish slave trade within the current neoliberal multicultural (Melamed, 2006) landscape of education. By conducting a study of teaching on this subject in the context of a Danish high school, the aim is to understand how the teaching-learning of the Danish slave trading history shapes the ground for Danish high school students to develop their own positionings with regards to the past as it ties into present day issues of nationalism and xenophobia in Denmark. Drawing on the concept of history-in-person (Holland & Lave, 2001, 2009) and premised on Marxist notions of history as the continuous and contradictory flows of social practices to which our contributions matter (Marx, 1975; Vygotsky, 1966; Stetsenko & Vianna, 2006), the aim is to explore how the teaching of the past of the Danish slave trade, as a particularly fertile ground for a critical pedagogical intervention, facilitates students’ interrogation of both the past and the present, as well as their future orientations (Stetsenko, 2013; Taylor, 1991). The design employed is a critical multi-site case study that draws on the insights of counter-topography (Katz, 2004) and multi-sited ethnography (Weis, Fine & Dimitriadis, 2009) iv of tapping into the local-global nexus by moving across sites. The high school’s participation in the UNESCO project Breaking the Silence, an international collaboration aimed at developing best practices in the teaching of the history of slavery and with corresponding goals of promoting global citizenship, provides the second site for interrogation. By first following a Danish high school classroom during the implementation of the curriculum on the Danish slave trading past in Denmark, and then later following two of those same Danish high school students in their educational visit to the U.S. Virgin Islands, the analytical focus is to explore how engaging with the same history across the two different geo-political sites affords students’ positionings vis-à- vis the two different curricula. In exploring the local and global dynamics in education, including colonial tensions in the global citizenship paradigm, the study examines how global citizenship as an educational discourse intersects with, contradicts, or compliments the positionings of national identity and “Nordic Exceptionalism” (Jensen & Loftsdóttir, 2012) in the context of the teaching of the history of slavery. The analysis is conducted by drawing on insights from critical race theory Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998; Nasir & Hand, 2006; Leonardo, 2002; Leonardo & Manning, 2017), including by exploring how collective colonial forgetting in Demark is tied into epistemologies of ignorance (Mills, 1997, 2007; Tuana, 2006). Keywords: history education, positioning, slavery, colonialism, nordic exceptionalism, critical race theory, epistemologies of ignorance. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As I have finally come to the end of this long journey of pursuing my doctoral degree, there are many people who I would like to not only thank but also honor for their contributions to this work. Although the responsibility for the work undoubtedly is mine alone, this thesis at the same time would not have come about if it had not been for so many important people who have shaped and contributed to its becoming in different and invaluable ways. First of all I would like to thank Anna Stetsenko for her unwavering support of my academic development over the last decade. I first met Anna in California in 2008 at her presentation at the ISCAR conference at UCSD. Her unique perspective and ability to weave psychological research together with a strong political analysis, always by anchoring herself rigorously in a wide range of research, disciplines and theory was incredibly inspiring then, and still is today. I feel grateful to have had Anna as my advisor and humbly reflect on how my relationship with her has transformed my life. I would like to thank Wendy Luttrell for providing me with insightful perspectives as I developed this project, in particular, but not only with regards to the development and articulation of the methods and analysis. Cindi Katz’ work in part inspired the desire to be able to develop a project that connects the local with the global. Thank you to Terrie Epstein for giving me access to her community of history education scholars, as well as for her valuable and critical insights on how to revise the manuscript in ways that undoubtedly improved it. It was seeing Terrie’s work presented at a brown bag meeting many years ago that laid the initial seed for the development of this thesis and I am grateful to have had her on board. Finally, thank you to Eduardo Vianna for being a reader, as well as being an influential and inspiring colleague throughout my entire academic trajectory in New York. Both in my academic work and in my teaching I owe so much to Eduardo. I feel very grateful to vi have worked with all of these incredible scholars who have improved my thinking and practice in so many ways. I would have never been able to finish this dissertation without my partner in crime and love, Andy. He has been my dissertation doula throughout all the years: he has patiently listened to me, lovingly questioned my work and always helped me develop my ideas and I am so grateful for that. Andy’s love and support has carried me through the many rough patches and doubts that were part of the process, and he never questioned once that I would be able to finish, even when I tried my hardest to convince him. I am so incredibly grateful for the community of friends and scholars who I have met in my years on the 6th floor at the CUNY Graduate Center, as part of the adjunct organizing network as well as part of my work in the Peer Activist Learning Community at LaGuardia Community College. Some colleagues and friends have played key roles, not only in providing support but also by shaping my work: Svetlana Jović, Tia Fletcher, Wen Liu, Christin Bowman, Francisco Medina and Mike Rifino, to mention a few. A big thank you to my family, in particular my parents who have supported me throughout the years. Being so far away from them has been and still sometimes is really tough and I am grateful that they have been able to support me in spite of the distance. Thank you to my sister, Astrid for listening to countless worries and supporting me throughout the process. Thank you to Cindy for being a supportive and inspiring friend. And finally thank you to my kids, Theo and Ramona for making me laugh after a long day at the library. vii Table of Contents Contents Chapter 1: Introduction and Theoretical Foundations ........................................................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1 Research Questions ................................................................................................................................. 6 Theoretical Foundations ......................................................................................................................... 8 Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Learning, Cultural Tools and Development. ............................... 9 Learning and Subjectivity: Positioning (or History-In-Person) as the Continuous and Contradictory Instantiations of Subjectivity. ................................................................................. 17 The Practice of Teaching History. ..................................................................................................