Decolonizing Divestment

• In Event: 30.027 - Decolonial Utopics, Voices, and Visions

Abstract

This paper examines the Fossil Fuel Divestment campaign’s claims that it fosters learning that brings student activists into anti-colonial and decolonizing practices. Analyzing 20 multi-camera videos of a divestment campaign’s meetings and actions over the course of a year, I identify ways that students shifted their discourse to incorporate climate justice and Indigenous solidarity. I argue that while the community of practice did shift to accommodate some anticolonial practice, their shallow engagement, demonstrated here through a failure to build solidarity relationships with Indigenous people and an inadequate performance of territorial acknowledgments, served as a move to innocence for settlers and a tokenizing experience for Indigenous students.

Author

• Joe Curnow, University of Toronto - OISE