Book Review: Education, Equality and Justice in the New Normal: Global Responses to the Pandemic edited by Inny Accioly and Donaldo Macedo
In her review of Education, Equality and Justice in the New Normal: Global Responses to the Pandemic, Deepa Srikantaiah highlights Inny Accioly and Donaldo Macedo’s effort to describe the COVID-19 pandemic as potentially transformative. The volume’s contributing authors lay out how the pandemic exposed the fragility of education systems worldwide and the inhumanity of capitalism and neoliberalism, which set the public welfare against productivity and profit. Srikantaiah points out the fact that coloniality, xenophobia, racism, and structural inequality comprise some corporate, state, and nonstate actors’ responses to educating and working during the pandemic, and she compels readers approaching the volume from the education in emergencies field to understand that political and financial power will dictate who gets to set the postpandemic “new normal” in the absence of popular, grassroots resistance.