The Anti-Racism Lab in collaboration with the Decolonizing Alliance is pleased to host the "Decolonizing Alliance Institute: Pluriversal Dialogues on Decolonization, Indigenization, and Antiracism in Universities" Workshop from July 26 to 29 in person (Room 3-119 Education Building, University of Alberta) and online (Zoom) from 9:00am-5:00pm (Mountain Time)
The main purpose of this workshop is to pilot and develop doctoral workshop sessions that can foster regenerative dialogues among diverse scholars and community members on decolonization, Indigenization, and Antiracism in universities. You are warmly invited to participate in this pilot and to engage generously with the scope and aims of each session.
The workshop program will include:
1. Sessions that work with embodied knowledge and knowing
2. Storytelling and narrative methods
3. Art, theatre and movement practice
4. Sessions that center BIPOC Situated Knowledges: Sex/Gender, Race/Racialization, Identity/Authenticity, and Indigeneity/Relationality
All sessions will aim to experiment with pedagogies and praxis that are interdisciplinary and embrace experiential and relational ways of un/learning. We hope to reflect critically on sessions with you and for us to collaboratively highlight methods that are transformative, liberatory, and regenerative.
Workshop Schedule:
July 26
9:00am
Welcome
Dr. Paulina Johnson, University of Alberta
9:00am-9:15am
Blessing from Elder Hilliar, Presiding Elder, Anti-Racism Lab
9:15am-12:00pm
Intoducing Our Participants
Prof-Collins Ifeonu, University of Alberta
Sarah Auger, University of Alberta
Zahro Hassan, University of Alberta
12:00pm-1:00pm
Lunch
July 27
9:00am-12:00pm
Storytelling: Who we are and where are we from?
Veronica Wairimu Kimani
Dr. Carlos Azevedo, Open University
Dr. Akanksha Mehta , Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Evgnenia Iliadou, Independent Researcher
Dr. Kamran Khan, University of Birmingham
Dr. Niharika Pandit, London School of Economics
This decolonial workshop is a pilot of practice and method. We aim to create a space to reflect on how we can break the superiority of theory by thinking through how stories affect knowing and what we can share with stories. We will have four researchers sharing their stories and the methodologies they have used in their research and praxis, which include anti-racist and decolonial approaches. The participants will be invited to contribute to co-create the workshop by sharing with the group their own stories.
Organizers: Veronica Wairimu Kimani, Dr. Carlos Azevedo, Open University
12:00pm-1:00pm
Lunch
1:00pm-5:00pm
Art, Theatre, and Movement Practice
Lucy Lu, Third Space Playback Theatre
Dr. Paul Gareau , University of Alberta
Thirdspace Playback Theatre Edmonton was founded on a vision to engage with diverse BIPOC communities on socio-political and ethno-cultural issues to promote community dialogue and inter-community engagement, social change and social justice. The company uses playback theatre—a form of improvisational theatre where community members tell stories from their lives—and actors play them back through movement, words, metaphor, and music. This workshop will focus specifically on theatre techniques and participatory movement to hold a “third space” for self-reflexivity, situatedness, and positionality, and intersectionality, collectivity, and relationality. Lucy Lu and Paul L. Gareau will make space to help create capacity within ourself and together as we work through experiences of structural racism and sexism within the settler colonial institutions, like the university.
July 28
9:00am-12:00pm
BIPOC Situated Knowledges: Sex/Gender, Race/Racialization
Dr. Paulina Johnson, University of Alberta
The way that knowledge is shared and received does not always have to give into the Western modes of delivery and engagement. Rather BIPOC situated knowledges give into the emotions, familial connections, and ceremony of place and space to challenge the very essence of the whiteness that holds onto each BIPOC individual. In this workshop, we will go in and out, weaving our realities to construct an anti-colonial future layered in hope, care, and kinship. Focusing primarily within Indigenous concepts of time and being, we will see a world where we can situate ourselves for one another, remembering the purpose of our spirit guided by ancestral knowledge that is cared for by our relatives, old and new. To live decolonial means to see our relational selves through a lens not made of this reality and one that bridges us together.
12:00pm-1:00pm
Lunch
1:00pm-5:00pm
Breaking the Colonial Mould: What does a Decolonizing University Feel Like?
Dr. Sadvi Dar, Queen Mary University of London
Drawing on the praxis of Building the Anti Racist Classroom collective and Dr Tito Mitjans Alayón, this 2-part session will use arts-based embodied methods to imagine the university otherwise. These methods will harness and mobilize our collective rage, desire, and imagination, to break the colonial mould. The university, as a structure of colonial knowledge institutionalisation, is a cultural space. It shapes and is shaped by relations of affect that split the living into racial / human-non-human hierarchies of value that make possible logics of dispossession and ethics of violence. In this session we come to understand how mobilizing embodied praxis is an important dimension of decolonial praxis that holds within it the possibility to work with the wholeness of experience. Embodied responses center the role of intuition and spiritual guidance - emotions are an important landscape to promote anti-rationality so that they dismantle a neutral perspective. Rage is a methodology for breaking open the colonial archive (Mitjans Alayon, 2020), but it is rarely, if at all, given a legitimate place in university pedagogies.
July 29
9:00am-12:00pm
Recognizing Decolonial Affections: Reflection Possibilities
Caroline Rodrigues,Fundação Getúlio Vargas- EAESP
Dr. Alexandre Faria,Fundação Getulio Vargas
Marcelo Maia,Fundação Getúlio Vargas- EAESP
In this session of closure and renewal, we aim to share anti-racism, First Nation, and decolonizing possibilities which emerged during the workshop, including the ones that eventually submerged. We encourage diverse forms of expression, such as poems, songs, bullet points, texts, silences, emotions, and rationalizations
We acknowledge the profound connection between decolonizing initiatives and the intricate dynamics of coloniality and power that have become ingrained within us. We understand that to challenge and overcome the oppressive capitalist system rooted in colonial and racial hierarchies, which devalues and dehumanizes Black and Indigenous communities, we must engage in a process of dismantling, unlearning, and shedding the ingrained biases. This endeavor necessitates the (re)development of emotional and experiential approaches, educational methodologies, and theoretical frameworks that foster alternative perspectives and facilitate ongoing organizing efforts.
During the workshop, we will encourage you to reflect on your own experiences of how anti-racism and decolonial practices have influenced your personal journey or our collective journey. We will embrace the concept of praxis-as-love, which entails transforming these emancipatory ways of being, living, knowing, and relating into knowledge that can be shared and disseminated. Through this dynamic and participatory approach, we aim to challenge and counteract the mechanisms that intentionally erase, fragment, and dispossess decolonizing possibilities within both existing and alternative systems of knowledge.
Throughout the workshop, our lived memories will serve as a guide for ourselves, enabling us to collectively explore tangible pathways of resistance, resilience, and self-organization in our pursuit of dismantling various forms of oppression. Our intention is not to impose this framework as a universal blueprint onto others, but rather to offer it as a reflective tool and source of inspiration. We recognize and celebrate the plurality of worlds and diverse struggles, understanding that a pluriversal coexistence of many worlds is what we aspire to (re)create."
12:00pm-1:00pm
Lunch