Conflicting Epistemic Demands in Poststructuralist and Postcolonial Engagements With Questions of Complicity in Systemic Harm

In this article, I explore complex and contested interfaces between postcolonial and poststructural theories in the context of education, focusing on seemingly paradoxical epistemic demands related to justice and ethics. I start with a brief analysis of the heterogeneous and contested areas of poststructural and postcolonial theories in education, highlighting a common source of important insights in the works of Michel Foucault. Next, I present a concrete example of an academic incident that illustrates how politics of identity and ideas of justice/injustice, innocence, or complicity in harm can mobilize different epistemic demands, conceptualizations of ethics, and educational questions. In keeping with a postcolonial call to first provincialize and to subsequently deprovincialize Eurocentred disciplines, I offer a Quechua narrative as an alternative way to approach questions of justice and ethics, and conclude by suggesting the bridge as a metaphor for education and as a means to connect or to escape different difficult ethical imperatives in different realms of existence.