Decolonial Praxis in a Time of Live-Streamed Genocide: Dialogic Notes from a Global North Classroom

• In Event: Praxis and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

In this paper, a seminar instructor and graduate student participant employ the teaching/learning journal form to capture in a granular mode the experience of participating in the seminar, “Decolonization and Decoloniality: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy” at Stanford University in Spring 2024. This seminar took place during a period when students set up the university’s longest sit-in (against the genocide in Gaza), followed by an encampment, “The People’s University for Palestine,” as they occupied the Stanford president’s office before being arrested, and as university authorities dismantled the sit-in, then the encampment. Given the seminar’s emphasis on praxis and pedagogy and our own political commitments, the instructor and many graduate participants felt the urgent need to shape our seminar in response to unfolding events, both on our campus and in the world as Israel continued/s its brutal genocide in Gaza. Through a polyvocal dialogue between instructor and graduate seminar participant, we hope to capture the challenges, anxieties, and rewards of collaboratively shaping a seminar on decolonization and decoloniality during this particular historical moment in the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine (which in turn invites us to think of how all teaching on decolonial praxis engages with its contexts). We were pressed to connect our weekly readings, films, and workshops (that included indigenous basket-weaving, a movement workshop engaging with Audre Lorde, etc.) with the uprisings on campus and on the streets. As we read Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Steven Salaita and others, and as we engaged with critical university studies, we interrogated the relations and gaps between the classroom and the streets, the affordances and limits of the university, not to mention the very structures and strictures of graduate training within the colonial university (in the form of an elite private university in our case). For the majority women of color in the seminar, our central investment was to consider how education might be put to radical uses, how decolonial theories and pedagogies might foster revolution and liberation, and to resist university restrictions on our efforts towards generating emancipatory potentialities. In a mode of introspection, reflexivity, and vulnerability, we reflect on moments of tension and liberatory potential through accounts of attempted coalition-building within the seminar, conflicts around desires for more emphasis on praxis vs. a depoliticized theoretical framing of decoloniality, and an embrace of a pedagogy of uncertainty and discomfort. We also consider the varied (and not always progressive) mobilizations of discourses of decoloniality globally, inviting reflections from fellow seminar participants from Botswana, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Chile, India, Crimea, among other locations and standpoints.

Authors

• Usha Iyer, Stanford University

• Sophie D'Souza, Stanford University