Movements for Justice at the End of the One-World-World: Decolonial Approaches for Creating Emergent Realities

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The mythology of democracy belies what Mbembe (2019) calls the “brutality of the pro-slave democracy.” Outwardly, American history and culture favors a resplendent image of hard won freedom, meritocratic excesses, and moral fairness for all, disguising and distracting us from the thriving plantation that underpins American livelihood.

Fry (2010) has named the inevitable trajectory of the plantation as defuturing, “the negation of world futures” through the incessant and relentless beast of the extractive colonial project. Climate science has marked this moment as collapse, and vanguards like the IPCC report have given projections of our imminent demise- a mass extinction event.

These concerns alone are some of the violent eruptions of late-American empire. But there are more. How do we confront these legacies and their afterlives? This panel brings together the perspectives of psychologists, historians, educators, and activists to collectively brainstorm answers to this vexing question. Social justice movements, captured by neoliberalism, have largely failed to create new realities outside of the ones forged by colonialism such as pervasive carcerality, limitless growth, and extractivism. Ontology, our sense of reality and being, determines the extent of possibility in the world we create in community and as interdisciplinary scholars. Resistance mMovements of the late-American empire and activism have been created from within the colonial ontology. As such, their imagination is bound by the limits of the colonial imagination, their methods by the methods of modernity. Akomolafe (2020) describes post-activism as a new paradigm where movement is not outside of the world, seeking to save it, but instead locates itself inside the world, or a part of the world. What might emerge when movements for social and racial justice change their maps, stories, and practices? And what stories allow the greatest potential for the realities we prefer? To what extent can storytelling become a mechanism for decolonizing our historical narratives as well as a prospective tool for new knowledge production?

We have been asked to change our stories before. We are invited to consider “new subjectivities” (Sandoval, 2000) and “new metaphysics of political struggle”(Alexander, 2005). What might understanding their assignment actually mean for movements today? What happens when we allow new stories for reality to emerge? How might we work in our communities with the intent of offering alternative concepts than the ones we have been using to approach status quo activism? In this workshop we explore decolonial strategies to engage new stories driving our political struggle, activism and our roles as scholar-practitioners. Panelists will invite attendees to offer their own perspectives, strategies, and experiences in an effort to generate new ideas and their practical applications.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Julia Brown-Bernstein, Yale

• Leah Garza, Pacifica Graduate Institute

• katie robinson, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Biographical Information

Julia Brown-Bernstein, Ph.D., currently serves as the Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate at YaleUniversity. Her research focuses on the effects of late-stage global capitalism on migrant and working-class communities throughout urban settings of the U.S. West and U.S.-Mexican
Borderlands. Julia’s current book project examines how residents of California’s San Fernando Valley adapted to regional deindustrialization and the privatization of social services from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, including original oral history interviews,archival research, and ethnography, Julia presents the San Fernando Valley as a microcosm of the broader transformation of late-twentieth century America, particularly within the understudiedSouthwest. Her work offers insights into the complex negotiations of race, labor, and citizenship in an era marked by the inequalities of neoliberalism. Julia has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Fellowship, The Haynes Lindley Fellowship, and the J. William Fulbright Research Fellowship. Her work has been published in the Journal of American Ethnic History and Modern American History, from which her article was awarded the inaugural Brooke L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips award. Julia received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California in 2024. Before pursuing her doctorate Julia taught 8th-grade U.S. history in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. She also holds an M.Ed. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

Leah Garza (she/her) is a Los Angeles based scholar and mystic. She is the facilitator of Living Systems, a year long online course for the public that explores decolonial strategies toward emergent ecologies that sustain life. The course is closing its 3rd cohort, and has asked almost 300 students, if extinction is inevitable, what else is possible? She is currently writing a dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco Psychologies program, where she is wondering how decolonial pedagogies can build public spaces of intellectual intimacy toward relational ways of being for those of us above the Abyssal line. She holds an MA in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, an M.Ed. from UCLA and a B.A. in linguistics from Northeastern University.


Katie Robinson (any pronouns) is a writer, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their essay, “Here’s How I Let Them Come Close,” a meditation on encounters, extraterrestrials, and the creative process, was featured in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars from Milkweed in 2023. They are currently a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where they are writing a dissertation at the intersections of depth psychology, decoloniality, and police and prison abolition.

Brooke D Lavelle, Ph.D. (she/her), is the Co-Founder of Courage of Care, a non profit-dedicated to nurturing a network of relational facilitators skilled in supporting compassionate, counter-oppressive, healing-centered, and visionary cultures of practice. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Arrow Journal, which explores the intersection of politics, contemplative practice, and activism. Brooke holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and Cognitive Science from Emory University, an M.A. in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University and a B.A. in Religion and Psychology from Barnard College. Her academic work focused on the various models of liberation in the Buddhist tradition, as well as the cultural contexts that shaped the transmission and reception of Buddhism in the West. Brooke has consulted to various human rights, educational and spiritual organizations, and has experience leading national and international political, educational, and climate justice projects. She consults to the International Solidarity Matters Project, is a fellow at the Mind and Life Institute and the Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, and has led courses on compassion-based approaches to anti-oppressive education at the University of Virginia and San Francisco State University. Through her work at Courage and in her role as a community house director in Brooklyn, Brooke remains steadfastly committed to building alternatives to the status quo.