‘HUNTING’ FOR A BLACK FEMINIST DECOLONIAL ‘ARCHIVE’ AT A PREDOMINANTLY WHITE UNIVERSITY

• In Event: What Challenges and Possibilities Lie Ahead for Educational Research on Decolonizing the Curriculum in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom Amidst a Political Climate of Right-Wing Populism?

Abstract

Based on classroom learnings from a course lesson on de/coloniality of African and Black diasporas in higher education at a small, private historically and predominantly white university in the rural United States, this paper is an invitation to critically and meaningfully engage with our own higher education institutions (HEIs) as ideal laboratories for individual, community, and institutional transformation. Engaging in a university scavenger hunt, co-designed by faculty and students, various meanings, and implications of ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonisation’ within contexts of higher education are interrogated and reimagined through individual and collective counternarratives in the form of a nuanced Black feminist decolonial ‘archive’. This archive challenges and reimagines narratives in/visibilised in the university’s current archival records, which are characterised by neoliberalism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, colonial innocence, and white supremacy. This paper focuses on un/learning varying (de)colonial and ‘decolonising’ worldviews of HEIs and academia through collaborative restorying and archival (re)production.

Author

• Sahar D. Sattarzadeh, Nelson Mandela University/The University of Texas at Arlington