1. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-, et al.
(author)
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Associations of Ethnical, Cultural and Religious minorities from a Perspective of Social Pedagogic
- 2010
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Historically the majority society in Sweden has categorized minority groups out of different inconsistent characteristics. It can be out ethnical or cultural belonging but sometimes it is out of religious believes and the point of departure for those categories can only be understood out of a historical perspective. Examples of those historically well established patterns of categorizations are Romans and Muslims. In the group of Romans there might be several different religions represented, and in the Muslim group there might be several ethnical belongings represented. The categories, Romans and Muslim, are historically often used to distinct people from a belonging to the majority in Sweden which has an excluding effect as it separates us from them. As an answer to this excluding or marginalizing process, the groups themselves have organised their activities within groups of associations. Those associations have served several purposes depending on the specific group of interest, such as education, culture issues, or building up communities of fellowship. From one perspective those associations can be seen as segregated groups which run the risk to strengthen the marginalization for their participants. But the associations themselves argue that they instead have a crucial role for the integration of marginalized categories of citizens, on both a group and an individual level. In this paper we discuss associations which origin from two minority groups (Muslims and Romanise) with a theoretical frame of social pedagogic. They are built upon different categories, ethnicity and religion, but participants themselves says that the need for their associations origin from experiences of exclusion and marginalization from the majority society as well as needs for social cohesion within the groups. The aim is to develop knowledge and discuss the associations own purposes where the dichotomy between adaptation and mobilisation are of certain interest, and moreover, adaptation or mobilisation, to what? Such a question entails a discussion about the relations between minority groups and the majority society. One core question is – how can this kind of associations be understood from a social pedagogical perspective? Is it a place where the groups can experience community or a place where knowledge, traditions and values can be transferred from one generation to another? Or is it more platforms for mobilization and consciousness awareness about the relation to the majority society, where the relations itself are seen as having a great impact on everyday life? The empirical data derives from interviews with stakeholders from the associations and observations of group activities. Theories about participation and communities form the base for our analyses and understandings about the associations own work with issues like education, fosterage, commitment and mobilisation. We also lean on theories about multi-culturally politics of identity to analyse the associations’ relation and position to the surrounding society. The expectations are that the results will show which meaning the associations have for the minority group’s inclusion and relation to the majority society where the question of us and them is significant.
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2. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
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Bridging the gap to those who lack : intercultural education in the light of modernity and the shadow of coloniality
- 2013
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In: Pedagogy, Culture & Society. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1468-1366 .- 1747-5104. ; 21:2, s. 279-297
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Academic courses on interculturality have become a rapidly growing discipline in the West, where supranational bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO promote intercultural education as a path towards improved global cultural relations. Through interviews with students who completed a university course on interculturality, this essay investigates the tenets of interculturality and problematises whether this discourse merely reproduces a classificatory logic embedded in modernity that insists on differences among cultures. The argument put forward is that in the analysed context, interculturality tends to reproduce the very colonial ideas that it seeks to oppose. In doing so, interculturality reinforces the collective ‘we’ as the location of modernity by deciding who is culturally different and who is in a position that must be bridged to the mainstream by engaging in intercultural dialogue.
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3. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
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Construyendo ciudadanos europeos : la Unión Europea entre visiones interculturales y herencias coloniales
- 2012
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In: Cuadernos Interculturales. - : Universidad de Valparaiso. - 0718-0586 .- 0719-2851. ; 10:19, s. 11-27
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- El presente artículo se centra en la problematización de reclamación de la Unión Europea, según la cual, el diálogo intercultural constituye un método para hablar a través de las fronteras culturales, basadas en la empatía mutua y no la dominación. Más precisamente, el objetivo es analizar qué se está construyendo como contraparte del diálogo intercultural a través del discurso producido por la Unión Europea. Para responder a la pregunta, los documentos de la política europea sobre el diálogo intercultural se analizan sobre la base de una perspectiva postcolonial. Como una interpretación, la Unión Europea se apropia de los símbolos históricos y figuras del pensamiento colonial para autorizar y legitimar sus objetivos actuales. En el ámbito de la Unión Europea, los europeos son retratados como una existencia a priori histórica, mientras que los excluidos de este concepto son evocados para demostrar su diferencia en comparación con el europeo. Sin embargo, los resultados muestran que los sujetos no considerados como europeos sirven como marcadores de la actual multiculturalidad del espacio europeo. Por lo tanto, el diálogo intercultural parece consolidar las diferencias entre europeo y Otro - el “nosotros” y el “ellos” en el diálogo - y no, como en línea con su objetivo, acercar a sujetos entre sí.
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4. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
-
Educating for decolonization: Interculturality in the Andes
- 2013
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The thrust of this essay is to study how interculturality, as a path to decolonization, is being articulated and understood among indigenous alliances in the Andean region of Latin America. Empirically, the analysis is based upon interviews with students and teachers from local academic courses on interculturality in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Although interculturality and intercultural education are common features also in Western educational rhetoric, the imposition to learn from indigenous movements have failed to attract any substantial interest in the West (cf. Deere & Leon 2003; Patrinos 2000). To illustrate this further, Robert Young (2012) argues that indigenous struggles seldom are regarded as a central issue even within postcolonial studies, a disjunction related to the use among indigenous movements of paradigms not easily translated to the Western theories and presuppositions commonly used in this scholarship (Young 2012). Given this picture, there are strong reasons for engaging seriously in a discussion about the proposition for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernity, progress, salvation – as it lingers on in official memory; and there are also good reasons to problematize the universalizing claims that have characterized Western philosophy in the implicitly assumed epistemological hierarchies.In this paper, I will focus specifically on visions of decolonization in terms of retrieved languages, reinscribed histories, production of knowledge; beginning the essay with an elaboration of the logic of domination as rooted in the modern/colonial world – here referred to as coloniality. Shortly thereafter, with reference points drawn from the work of Walter Mignolo and his notion of delinking, I introduce the theoretical backdrop that guides my analysis. In the major part of the paper, I develop an argument for interculturality to be understood as inter-epistemic based on knowledge produced beyond the discursive order of Western educational systems.
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5. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
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El indígena ‘latinoamericano’ en la enseñanza : Representación de comunidad indígena en manuales escolares europeos y latinoamericanos
- 2010
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In: Estudios pedagógicos. - 0718-0705. ; 36:2, s. 41-50
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- El presente escrito compara la representación de los indígenas y su cultura en libros escolares en Suecia con sus equivalentes en Colombia. El objetivo es indagar si existen diferencias y similitudes en la reproducción de la comunidad indígena en ambos países. El estudio concluye que aunque los libros escolares de Colombia profundizan en el rendimiento de los hechos, en cuanto a la extensión textual para la descripción y explicación de los hechos, en ambos países es consistente la tendencia a representar a los indígenas como diferentes y considerarlos como inferiores. Específicamente en la forma de explicar su forma de vivir y sus conocimientos, donde encontramos explicaciones de lo que tenían y no tenían, lo que conocían y no conocían: todo hecho desde un punto de vista euro céntrico.
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6. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
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En la lengua del Otro : la Unión Europea y el diálogointercultural como instrumento de exclusión
- 2012
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In: Universitas. - 1390-3837. ; 10:17, s. 51-68
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- El presente artículo se centra en la problematización de reclamación de la Unión Europea, según la cual, el diá- logo intercultural constituye un método para hablar a través de las fronteras culturales, basadas en la empatía mutua y no la dominación. Más precisamente, el objetivo es analizar qué se está construyendo como contrapar- te del diálogo intercultural a través del discurso producido por la Unión Europea. Para responder a la pregunta, los documentos de la política europea sobre el diálogo intercultural se analizan sobre la base de una perspecti- va poscolonial. Como una interpretación, la Unión Europea se apropia de los símbolos históricos y figuras del pensamiento colonial para autorizar y legitimar sus objetivos actuales. En el ámbito de la Unión Europea, los europeos son retratados como una existencia a priori histórica, mientras que los excluidos de este concepto son evocados para demostrar su diferencia en comparación con el europeo. Sin embargo, los resultados muestran que los sujetos no considerados como europeos sirven como marcadores de la actual multiculturalidad del espacio europeo. Por lo tanto, el diálogo intercultural parece consolidar las diferencias entre europeo y Otro -el “nosotros” y el “ellos” en el diálogo– y no, como en línea con su objetivo, acercar a sujetos entre sí.
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7. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
-
Impossible Interculturality? : Education and the Colonial Difference in a Multicultural World
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.
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8. |
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9. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
-
Interculturality for decolonization: Indigenous alliances in South America, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Subaltern Paradigms
- 2013
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The thrust of this essay is to study how interculturality, as a path to decolonization, is being articulated and understood among indigenous alliances in the Andean region of Latin America. Empirically, the analysis is based upon interviews with students and teachers from local academic courses on interculturality in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Although interculturality and intercultural education are common features also in Western educational rhetoric, the imposition to learn from indigenous movements have failed to attract any substantial interest in the West (cf. Deere & Leon 2003; Patrinos 2000). To illustrate this further, Robert Young (2012) argues that indigenous struggles seldom are regarded as a central issue even within postcolonial studies, a disjunction related to the use among indigenous movements of paradigms not easily translated to the Western theories and presuppositions commonly used in this scholarship (Young 2012). Given this picture, there are strong reasons for engaging seriously in a discussion about the proposition for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernity, progress, salvation – as it lingers on in official memory; and there are also good reasons to problematize the universalizing claims that have characterized Western philosophy in the implicitly assumed epistemological hierarchies.In this paper, I will focus specifically on visions of decolonization in terms of retrieved languages, reinscribed histories, production of knowledge; beginning the essay with an elaboration of the logic of domination as rooted in the modern/colonial world – here referred to as coloniality. Shortly thereafter, with reference points drawn from the work of Walter Mignolo and his notion of delinking, I introduce the theoretical backdrop that guides my analysis. In the major part of the paper, I develop an argument for interculturality to be understood as inter-epistemic based on knowledge produced beyond the discursive order of Western educational systems.
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10. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(author)
-
Kista folkhögskola - den första muslimska folkhögskolan
- 2011
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In: Mångfaldig (folk)bildning för det offentliga samtalet?. - Stockholm : Folkbildningsrådet. - 9789188692474 ; , s. 49-67
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Denna rapport är resultatet av ett ettårigt forskningsprojekt som Folkbildningsrådet finansierat. Projektet har genomförts av en grupp forskare vid Linköpings universitet: Lisbeth Eriksson, Martin Lundberg, Thomas Winman och Robert Aman.Forskarna undersöker hur olika religiösa och etniska gruppers skapande av “egna” folkbildande verksamheter kan förstås. I rapporten beskrivs de processer som lett fram till etablerandet av Kista folkhögskola, Agnesbergs folkhögskola, studieförbundet Ibn Rushd samt Samernas utbildningscentrum.
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