Decolonial Portals: What if… and Other Speculative Fabulations about Learning for Planetary Survival

• In Event: Education for Planetary Futures (Part 1): Decolonial Portals, Marginalized Scholarship, and More-than-human Methodologies

Proposal

While universities are leading much of the research documenting the climate crisis and playing a crucial role in developing technoscientific solutions, they are also deeply implicated in the crisis itself. From training scientists for resource extraction industries (Stein, 2022) to producing research that justifies exploiting natural resources (Crow & Dabars, 2024), universities have systematically contributed to the hyper-separation of humans from nature and our failed relationship with the ecological systems. By situating academia within shifting planetary boundaries and collapsing ecosystems, we propose (re)imagining higher education otherwise. Particularly, we engage in a series of speculative thought experiments by focusing on the concept of ‘decolonial portals’ (Rodriguez-Fransen, 2023) as gateways to alternative onto-epistemologies that activate the processes of unlearning and relearning in higher education and beyond.
Drawing on decolonial, ecofeminist, post-human, and Indigenous literature, we introduce the concept of decolonial portals as gateways that enable us to see (or create) openings within the existing structures of higher education, enabling a transition toward alternative ways of knowing and being (Rodriguez-Fransen, 2023). Inspired by Escobar et al.'s (2024) proposition that humans are storytellers creating themselves through narration, we see decolonial portals as opportunities to change the narrative of humans as autonomous, isolated, and self-centered, towards relational beings who exist only with others. This approach can challenge and transform how higher education institutions currently depict and enact ways of learning, knowing, and being on a finite planet, where relationality is being systematically erased.
We use speculative thought experiments as our method to imagine higher education otherwise. Debaise and Stengers (2017) describe speculative thinking as a way to explore the multifariousness of the world. It opens the possibility of “creating relevant modes of togetherness between practices, both scientific and non-scientific; finding relevant ways of thinking together” (Stengers, 2018, p. 145). We assert that portals facilitate speculative thinking by allowing us to explore multiple realities and modes of existence. By engaging in the “what if…” inquiry, we resituate “what is given within a much vaster set of possibilities…” and evoke a far greater imaginary than normally associated with higher education futures (Stengers, 1997, p. 136). In addition to sharing our research, we will invite the audience to think with us about “what if…” scenarios through an interactive activity. By doing so, the presentation holds the potential to become a decolonial portal itself.
Our sources include the ecofeminist, decolonial, post-human, and Indigenous literature on relationality, sustainable futures, and pluriversality. We use key concepts that highlight the need for relational ways of being and learning to stimulate our speculative thinking about the future of higher education. Additionally, we draw on our experiences as academics in the Global North to identify non-relational approaches to humanity and sustainability in these settings and advocate for a critical redesign of higher education - employing “what if…” inquiry to imagine how it could be different.
Engaging with the concept of decolonial portals via “what if…” thought experiments can de-center anthropocentric worldviews, allowing higher education to radically imagine its role in integrating relational onto-epistemologies.

Authors

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Victoria Desimoni, Arizona State University

• Beatriz Rodriguez-Fransen, Arizona State University