Decolonizing Higher Education Internationally
- “The enduring educational challenges of setting horizons of hope beyond modern-colonial imaginaries” by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (UBC)
- “What Does it Take to Decolonize Palestinian Higher Education? ” by André Elias Mazawi
- “Youth Activism and Academia as Public Sphere” by Handel Kashope Wright.
Abstracts
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (UBC)
Title: “The Enduring Educational Challenges of Setting Horizons of Hope Beyond Modern-Colonial Imaginaries”
Abstract: As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and “wicked” in nature, the usual educational response has been to emphasize the need for more knowledge, better policies, and more compelling arguments, in order to effectively convince more people to change their convictions, and, as a consequence, their behaviour. My research collective has been experimenting with a different educational orientation that does not see the problems of the present primarily as rooted in a methodological challenge of better strategies (i.e. the call for more effective policies and communications), nor an epistemological challenge of knowing (i.e. the call for more data, information or perspectives). Rather, we propose that the problems are rooted in an ontological challenge of being (i.e. the call to address how we exist in relation to each other and the planet). From this educational orientation, the problems lie in the universalization of a modern/colonial imaginary that creates intellectual, affective and relational economies that invisibilize the violences that subsidize modern/colonial systems, thus hiding their inherent unsustainability. The modern/colonial approach to education has left us unprepared and unwilling to address our complicity in systemic social and ecological harm, and to set our horizons of hope beyond what is intelligible and desirable within it. My contribution to the panel will outline some of the social cartographies, analyses and experiments of the “Gesturing towards decolonial futures” collective and the “In Earth’s CARE” network of social-ecological innovations that focus on transformative justice
André Elias Mazawi (CCIE/UBC)
Title: “What Does it Take to Decolonize Palestinian Higher Education?”
Abstract: The presentation problematizes the stratificational, ideological, colonial, and geopolitical entanglements in which Palestinian institutions of higher education continue to operate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since their foundation during the second 5 half of the twentieth century under an ongoing Israeli occupation and colonization. The presentation considers the implications of these entanglements for viable projects of decolonization, in terms of higher education governance, research and knowledge generation, and community engagement.
Handel Kashope Wright (CCIE/UBC)
Title: “Youth Activism and Academia as Public Sphere”
Abstract: In this paper I juxtapose Canadian and South African examples to explore youth identity politics, agency and (dis)empowerment in academic contexts reconceptualized as part of the public sphere. In Canada, decolonization has mostly been limited to the discursive and it is the politics of “academic freedom” and “freedom of expression” that probably best frame the example of youths’ supposedly limited agency. In South Africa, where decolonization is not only ubiquitous and pressing but a student led movement, the task might well be to mitigate expectations of the fetishized project of decolonizing the university. The role of identity and identification in both projects underscores the difference that difference makes in the praxis of decolonization and the perennial struggle for representation and equity in the academy.
Presenters’ bios
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, at the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She has extensive experience working across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, community engagement, Indigenous knowledge systems and internationalization. Her research focuses on analyses of historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of knowledge and inequalities and how these mobilize global imaginaries that limit or enable different possibilities for (co)existence and global change. She is currently directing research projects and teaching initiatives related to social innovation oriented towards decolonial futures (decolonialfutures.net and blogs.ubc.ca/earthcare).
André Elias Mazawi is Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. A sociologist of education, he is interested in understanding how state policies, geopolitics, and popular culture contribute to the construction of imaginaries of schooling and higher education and their effects on the articulation of governance regimes, policyscapes, and teacher/faculty activism in deeply-divided societies. He has published widely on these issues, with particular reference to Mediterranean and Middle East societies. He is also Affiliate Professor with the Euro-Mediterranean Centre of Educational Research at the University of Malta, Associated Researcher with the Équipe de Recherche Dimensions Internationales de l’Éducation at the University of Geneva, and serves on the Advisory Editorial Board of Postcolonial Directions in Education.
Handel Kashope Wright is Professor of Educational Studies and Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, University of British Columbia and Senior Research Associate, Department of Communication Studies, University of Johannesburg. He is co-editor of the book series African and Diasporic Cultural Studies (University of Toronto Press) and Associate Editor of the journal Critical Arts. He serves on the editorial board of several cultural studies and education journals and book series including the European Journal of Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies in Education, the University of East London’s book series Radical Cultural Studies and Cardiff University’s book series Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics (both Rowan and Littlefield). Prof. Wright has published extensively on continental and diasporic African cultural studies, cultural studies of education, critical multiculturalism and its alternatives, qualitative research and curriculum theorizing, including recently, the coedited books Transnationalism and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2012); Precarious International Multicultural Education (Sense, 2012); The dialectics of African Education and Western Discourses (Peter Lang, 2012); The Promised Land: History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent and Beyond (University of Toronto, 2014) and edited journal issues on “The Worldliness of Stuart Hall” (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2016) and on “Contemporary African Cultural Studies” (Critical Arts, 2017). His work in progress includes two co-edited books on Black British Columbia (Fernwood) and The Nuances of Blackness and the Canadian Academy (University of Toronto Press)