Addressing Colonial Violence Within Place: Closeness and Decolonial Possibilities

• In Event: 79.034 - Eco-Critical Education Research Toward a Different Global Order: Social Justice and Sustainability in Teacher Education

Abstract

In her essay, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, womanist, activist, and poet Alice Walker (1983) illuminates closeness as part of an intimate process to understand her mother's and grandmother's everyday labor under conditions of enslavement and its legacies. Drawing from Walker and other decolonial feminist genealogies (Cruz, 2001; Lorde, 2007; Lugones, 2010; McClintock, 1995; Smith, 1999; Tuana, 2008) this essay reflects on my own ethnographic experiences within family, community and school gardens to illuminate closeness as a notion that can deepen our complex, messy and entangled relationships between body, land, and place. This reflection arouses from the need to critically address different conceptualizations of place within place-based educational theorizations and implementations. The different ethnographic processes I present permit a better understanding of the ways women of color take care and cure their bodies through garden practices taught to them as children. I also learned the ways young adults in a Latinx school community turn gardens into sanctuaries from the everyday violence of place. Thus, this essay presents the limitations and possibilities of place-based education (Smith & Sobel, 2010; Sobel, 2005) when we account for the dimensionality of the body in relation to land and when we address colonial violence within place.  

Author

• Silvia Patricia Solis, University of Utah