Trans*ing Diversity, Becoming Pedagogies

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

Recent critiques voiced by students in both the Global South and North have turned attention to the ways in which higher education practices have been informed by, and continue to perpetuate, a series of assumptions that favour particular epistemological perspectives. Across the world, students have criticised universities for the content of their curricula, institutional cultures, and pedagogic practices that perpetuate the attainment gap and exclusion. In response, curricula and pedagogic change is being debated and promoted on campuses. This introductory article lays the theoretical groundwork for a volume that brings decolonial theory into concrete engagement with the structural, cultural, institutional, relational, and personal logics of curricula and pedagogic practice. The article examines the relationship between decolonisation as a theoretical concept, and the practices of decoloniality unfolding in pedagogical practice.

This paper was submitted as part for the doctoral course entitled 'Education Futures' at the University of Glasgow. This, I feel, was an extremely difficult course due to the lack of clarity in its design, execution and extreme bias towards liberalism and liberal education. --- Neoliberalism enacts a globalization that ‘economizes’ all human and non-human activities (Brown, 2015; Mbembe, 2016). This represents a particular form of (neo)colonialism (Mbembe, 2016) and, therefore, an extension of modernity that continues to atomize humanity while separating it from nature (Alexander, 2005; Stein et al., 2020). Current values within higher education are influenced by neoliberal logics manifesting through specific curricular practices including (but not exclusively) assessment practices. Through my professional viewpoint within the social sciences, where I have studied, taught students and staff, collaborated on teaching and designing courses, I have witnessed the primacy of individual assessment as a manifestation of neoliberal logics. A high focus on individualizing responsibility and accountability characterizes such assessments while managerialism controls their design and delivery. These together reflect a neoliberal ideology. The values above represent a few that underpin contemporary curricular practices in the social sciences. I draw attention to these practices as I believe educators should resist them as they dehumanize students and educators by reducing learning and teaching to acts that measure, rank and categorize individuals according to so-called universalized standards of quality. I argue that neoliberalism values the efficiency of knowledge production, and a preferable alternative can draw upon decolonial thinking to achieve recognition beyond the mere value of what is produced. Such characteristics would rehumanize students and educators alike through taking a holistic view pluralistic in nature, that teaches the whole human through dialogue rather than solely focusing upon individual intellectual objectivity as it is framed within contemporary Western epistemology. To this end, I first theorize how contemporary neoliberal values influence curricular practices before moving on to imagine one future informed by decolonial thinking.

Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2022

In this article we examine our own doctoral supervisory dialogue as it has been institutionally interrupted due to Ahmad’s application for asylum in the UK. As we find ourselves lacking the conditions of recognisability required for our actions to be institutionally understood (or made intelligible) as part of a doctoral supervisory relationship, we are left with a sense of futility of how scholarly work preoccupied with social justice may confront, let alone transform, the larger socio-political realities that we aim to engage with. In light of calls to turn precarity into a productive pedagogical space for ethical action – often regarded as a “pedagogy for precarity” – we draw from Blommaert’s sociolinguistic theory of voice to account for how we attempted to become recognisable to each other throughout the course of one of our supervisory meetings. In so doing, we reflect on the implications of our analysis for politically-engaged academic research while linking with wider language scholarship on the possibility and imaginability of social transformation in higher education spaces. Keywords: Voice; pedagogy for precarity; critique; social transformation; higher education

JUNCTION, 2021

Let us start with an overarching question. What does Decolonizing the University in the Dutch context mean to you? ROLANDO VASQUEZ: Well, it is a long question. 13 years ago, we started the Decolonial Summer School 1 in Middelburg with Professor Walter Mignolo. That has been an important place for enacting the decolonization of the university, because we put into practice different pedagogies, a different curriculum, and brought together different people that were both teaching and learning at the university. We focused in particular on the connection to the local history of Middelburg and the interconnected colonial history of the Netherlands, such as the forgotten history of Dutch colonialism and slavery. That is one of the important sources for me, personally. But as the Decolonial Summer School was developing, so were the decolonial student movements at the University of Amsterdam. Some of these students came to the conference organized in Middleburg on the topic. At the time of the occupation of the Maagdenhuis, the movements in Amsterdam, particularly the University of Colour 2 , began advocating for more concrete changes. They proposed a diversity commission to substantiate the need to decolonize the university. This enabled the formation of the Diversity Committee with prof. dr. Gloria Wekker as its chair, and dr. Marieke Slootman, dr. Rosalba Icaza, prof. dr. Hans Jansen, and myself. Together we wrote the Let's Do Diversity report 3 , which combined the intersectional approach of Black feminism that prof. dr. Wekker works with, with decoloniality as a methodology to produce a new framework of research. This combination to study diversity at a Western university was very effective. The report is a unique document that has given a more nuanced and complex understanding of the different levels of action needed to decolonize the university. The first level is the 'what': what is the university teaching and researching? This pertains to the question of changing the curriculum. It examines the activist question: why is our curriculum white? It is a question that confronts us with the monoculture and the erasures that the university

Subjectivity, 2020

Academic work and teaching in academia are undergoing major changes in the present neoliberal era. Our purpose in this article is to explore theoretically and in practice how to bring criticality and resistance to life through teaching in the academy and to demonstrate it is not necessarily always a narrative of success. The article is based on our experiences as critical scholars struggling to find ways to contribute to questions of education and social justice, both individually and jointly, over the past 20 years. In this article, we particularly want to examine some of the possibilities and challenges of bringing homo politicus back into the agenda of education.

During the last three decades, neoliberal capitalism has consolidated its hegemony worldwide by increasing its social, political and economic influence and by expanding a market centered rationality throughout the world. Nocella and Juergensmeyer in their book Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing and Black Lives Matter in Education remind us that the reforms implemented to higher education institutions around the world correspond to the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism spreading out and taking over education. Neoliberal reforms are designed to adjust education systems to the needs and requirements of highly marketized economies. As a result of the implementation of neoliberal reforms, universities have been forced to mirror practices and behaviors usually employed by private corporations under the logic of a ruthless capitalist competition where there is a continual need for profit in an imbalanced, unjust and unscrupulous market. However, as policy makers continue to saturate higher education with neoliberal reforms, countless resistance movements have emerged globally to fight against the expansion of neoliberal capitalism. Likewise, inside academic communities, students, faculty and staff constantly organize themselves to fight back, defend their jobs, their rights and their institutions against the neoliberal assault to education (Mathison & Ross, 2008; Petrina & Ross, 2014). Higher education is a compound and multifarious field; it includes various conditions and settings in which students, faculty and staff could engage in resistance: teaching, studying, researching, conducting applied work, among many others. Neoliberal capitalism has transformed most of these settings and has deeply influenced the relationships and dynamics between social agents, collective action and academic life. Nocella and Juergensmeyer's book portrays some of these complexities in the activist work engage in academia. Their book helps us to understand that resistance in academia emerges and is upheld in interaction with a complex, diverse and conflicting range of political, economic, and social interests that come together and form an integral part of the field of higher education.

American Anthropologist, 2017

Anthropologists have paid increasing attention to neoliberalism in our research, yet we have been less willing to apply this lens to our own academic positioning and the ways these roles are shaped by privatization and market models. Lives and livelihoods in the American academy are increasingly determined by neoliberalism, and it is vital that we be both reflexive about and engaged around our positions within this project. This article explores the divides that separate various forms of academic labor (secure versus nonsecure, contract, etc.) as well as the raced and gendered implications of these tracks-in particular, the stark ways in which neoliberal transformations negatively affect women of color in the academy. [neoliberalism, academy, race, gender, contingent labor] RESUMEN Los antropólogos han prestado cada vez mayor atención al neoliberalismo en nuestra investigación, sin embargo, hemos estado menos dispuestos a aplicar este lente a nuestro propio posicionamiento académico, y a las maneras en que estos roles están moldeados por la privatización y los modelos del mercado. Las vidas y formas de subsistencia en la academia americana están cada vez más determinadas por el neoliberalismo, y es vital que seamos tanto reflexivos acerca de como comprometidos alrededor de nuestras posiciones dentro de este proyecto. Este artículo explora las divisiones que separan varias formas de trabajo académico (seguro versus no seguro, contrato, etc.) así como las implicaciones racializadas y de género de estas trayectorias-en particular, las formas severas en que las transformaciones neoliberales afectan negativamente a las mujeres de color en la academia. [neoliberalismo, academia, raza, género, labor contingente]

Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2020

This paper discusses a "pragmatic toolkit" for decolonizing a course by intersectionality combining key notions in literature in decolonial education with four components extracted from the works of Orlando Fals-Borda and Paulo Freire by Joao Mota Neto (2018). As a kind of toolkit for decolonial change, the article first combines the role of being a subversive scholar to address "injuries of coloniality" that places the discipline as part of a landscape of power in the context of a gender studies BA-course. Repairing these injuries of coloniality demanded curriculum changes, to restore the disobedient epistemology inherent in the concept of intersectionality. Second, in so doing, the pragmatic toolkit provided a participatory frame for exchanges of knowledge in a classroom composed of multiple identities, which then aimed to promote diversity and difference. Third, this orientation made a frame suitable for searching for other epistemic coordinates, exploring for example politics of emotion to erase barriers toward potential others, and including literature on coalitional politics. And fourth, revisiting the "telluric origins" of feminist research helped the students reinvent power through writing critical reflections that awaked their "interest in social action" to contest racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, transphobia, and speciesism.

ELiSS-Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, 2008

This paper, based on the reflections of two academic social scientists, offers a starting point for dialogue about the importance of critical pedagogy within the university today, and about the potentially transformative possibilities of higher education more generally. We first explain how the current context of HE, framed through neoliberal restructuring, is reshaping opportunities for alternative forms of education and knowledge production to emerge. We then consider how insights from both critical pedagogy and popular education inform our work in this climate.

Gender and Education, 2016

The neoliberal conceptualisation of institutions of higher education positions them as transnational corporations of knowledge production that sell services internationally. In this context, realities are experienced differently based on attributes such as class, gender, race, region, and increasingly religion. As a result, women in academia, but particularly Brown Women Teaching Assistants (TAs), encounter restrictions in exercising their agency. This systematic othering of minority women through unfair assessment of their work and the silencing of their voices leaves them in a de-powered and vulnerable position. As women of colour in higher education, we draw upon comparable and unique life stories as a data source for a collaborative autoethnography. Furthermore, we adopt an arts-based lens through which we make sense of our narratives. Our aggregated stories reflect a constant negotiation for status as TAs in businessdriven institutions of higher education.