Their form of education sustains itself through modern day colonialism, what we know as racial capitalism – challenging the hegemonic narratives presented to us in debate on an epistemological level is key to dismantling the system

I Education as enclosure and dispossession If education holds the promise of renewal and justice, it is also a practice that has been based on enclosure and dispossession. Education’s capacity for violence has received significant attention in critical scholarship, particularly in relation to the role of mass schooling in cultural assimilation, linguistic erasure and ‘epistemicide’ – the systematic destruction of knowledge (Santos 2014). In the settler colonial context of New Zealand, for instance, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has argued that schooling systems are part of state projects of enclosing Indigenous people, key vehicles for epistemological violence in which culture, life and being are dispossessed. There is a growing body of work that examines how modern schooling, even in its ‘progressive’ forms, contains or encloses people through its enduring ‘civilising’ missions (Fallace 2015; Simpson 2007) and its colonial and racialised hierarchies of knowledge (Coloma 2017; AUTHORS; Bain 2018). However, the material conditions of enclosure and dispossession that underpin these epistemic relations have not received as much attention. These are the foundational conditions of racial capitalism which we focus on here. Enclosure is the process of extracting value from land and in doing so dispossessing the people whose livelihoods and lifeworlds are connected to it. As Marx (1952) documents in the case of England, capitalism was characterised by the mass enclosure of ‘the commons’ and subsequent dispossession of land through the displacement of peasants. This act of enclosure and dispossession fundamentally altered the social relations of work and livelihood, but also the social relations of land (Melamed, 2015). In Marx’s (1952, 355) terms, this is a part of primitive accumulation: the act of enclosure was a moment when ‘great masses’ were ‘forcibly torn from their subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, [their] separation from the soil, is the basis of the whole process’. In other words, enclosure necessarily requires dispossessing, and this dispossessing involves radically denying the existence and worth of those who live there. For Marx and Engels? (2010, 21) this dual process of enclosure and dispossession was central to the colonial relations that underpinned the development of capitalism, as it ‘opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie’. We bring enclosure and dispossession together analytically to denote the constitutive mutuality of these two forces in the practices of racial capitalism. Working with Aileen MoretonRobinson’s (2015) examination of the ‘white possessive’, enclosing/dispossessing can be understood as a fundamental act of colonial violence. Writing about settler colonialism, Moreton-Robinson (2015) suggests that ‘possessive logics’ create the taken-for-granted conditions of settler colonisation in which land becomes propertied, a ‘thing’ to be laboured on and have value extracted from it. This foundational act of possession is at the same time an act of enclosure. In this act Indigenous people are rendered ‘propertyless’ and subjects of the colonial state to be controlled, contained, and – ultimately – possessed. Possession is centrally concerned with valorisation and the capacity to own and to make value from land, things, and people and is carried out by the state. As settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe (2001, 868) notes, ‘settler colonialism introduced a zero-sum contest over land on which conflicting modes of production could not ultimately coexist’. Here then, the colonial state becomes the ‘possessor’, and the project of enclosing/dispossessing continues to be carried out in the name of nationhood. The logics of the ‘white possessive’ under British settler colonialism as set out by MoretonRobinson, relates to Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed and Reddy’s (2018) discussion of ‘economies of dispossession’. Writing from the US context, they contend that economies of dispossession are used to articulate how ‘modes and relations of production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction’ are materially enacted and create ‘a specific systemic organization or logic of circuits of interaction and exchange’ (Byrd et al, 2018, 2). In this way, enclosing/dispossessing is centrally concerned with creating particular relations to land, value, labour, and things that are underpinned by capital and property. Private property holds that land can be worked on to extract wealth, making land something to be owned, laboured upon, and commodified. In the Australian context, the logics of the ‘white possessive’ became rationalised through the assertion of ‘terra nullius’, an idea made possible by understanding land as a property requiring particular forms of ‘settlement’, ownership and labour, and by the wilful dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, care and labour (Pascoe, 2014). The colonial capitalist nation state is founded upon, and continues to be steeped in, this declaration of terra nullius: the denial and dispossession of Indigenous people continues to legitimise settler ‘ownership’ of land - a clear example of how capitalism is racial capitalism. The racial regime of ownership under settler colonialism requires, as Brenna Bhandar (2018, 9) outlines, ‘continual renewal and reinstantiation to prevail over other ways of being and living’. Education, we suggest, has been a potent force for this renewal. Indeed, enclosure/dispossession is at the very foundation of education institutions. Consider, for example, the material buildings of schools and education institutions. As Sharon Stein (2020) documents in the US context, the Morrill Act of 1862 established oft-celebrated public (state) land grants that aided the formation of higher education institutions.1 This expropriation of Indigenous land re-embeds practices of enclosure/dispossession which denied – and continue to deny – Indigenous claims to the land upon which these institutions sit (Stein, 2020). Stein’s analysis points to the ongoing processes of enclosing/dispossessing in which social institutions of the nation state – such as public education – cannot escape its past-present-future relation to racial capitalism (see also Bhambra & Holmwood, 2018). Indeed, in her discussion Stein argues that critiques of, and resistances to, neoliberal privatisation of education need to take better account of the violence of such ‘public’ claims, and how these ‘public institutions’ reinforce racial divisions even as they claim to broaden access to education. As Clayton Pierce (2017, 42) discusses, the ‘public’ school system in the U.S., often held up as a site for democratic potentiality, is built upon racialised divisions in humanity, and ultimately the ‘fungibility of Black bodies’ (original emphasis). There are many more examples of enclosure/dispossession in education we can point to: the building of international branch campuses as part of the expansion of education institutions,2 1 For details, maps and narratives, see the database at Land Grab Universities https://www.landgrabu.org/ 2 There is a growing literature on ‘off-shore’ university campuses, much of it focusing on pedagogic models and experiences (Siltaoja et al. 2019; Dobos 2011). However we were unable to identify studies that focused explicitly on matters of land acquisition, material infrastructures, and displacement/gentrification in relation to the expansion of Higher Education through international branch campuses. the infrastructures of platform capitalism in education,3 and the securing of ‘public’ land, which is unceded Indigenous land, by private schools.4 Take for example Eliot Tretter’s (2015) analysis of how US universities’ increasing role as ‘land developers’, particularly through industry partnerships, is rationalised through anti-Black racism. Under projects of ‘urban renewal’, universities are actively involved in land seizures and clearance, and therefore the displacement and impoverishment of existing communities (Tretter, 2015; see also Baldwin 2021). Tretter (2015, 54) examines two urban renewal schemes by the University of Texas where, ‘approximately one thousand people were displaced, mostly African Americans, and countless businesses, many African American-owned, were forced to close’. University-led expansion occurs, Tretter argues, through a racist theory of value, an idea we return to later. He suggests University of Texas administrators and city officials worked with the assumption that African American neighbourhoods, households, and bodies were simply less valuable and desirable than those of whites. Since the university was going to change the ‘colour’ and character of the neighbourhood by removing its inhabitants, it was also going to improve its value. (Tretter, 2015, 49). As these examples attest, the expansionist and extractivist projects of education systems under capitalism – the capitalisation of land, buildings, infrastructures – require racialised enclosing/dispossessing.