decoloniality - Convivial Thinking

Journey Without An Answer – Part III: Use of language

by Jane Robb, Arinola Adefila, José Pablo Prado Córdova

In this series of essays, we use stories from the life experiences of the three international authors to air the pitfalls we come across while sharing knowledge and discuss how this can influence practice in higher education and what this might mean for life outside academia.

Use of language

José Pablo Prado Córdova, Tenured Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Rural Development, Faculty of Agronomy, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala

At the risk of committing an act of discursive funambulism, I’d say that knowing that we don’t know something, opens up a crack in the mechanical obsession with certainty. The realisation of a knowledge void triggers curiosity and sets our mind in a state of enquiry. We grasp reality, concepts and even socially sanctioned ways of being in a socialisation process starting from scratch. Ignoring falseability, for instance, brings about intellectual stiffness and, in the most extreme cases, sheer fundamentalism.

Continue reading “Journey Without An Answer – Part III: Use of language”

Journey Without An Answer – Part II: Use of Cultural Norms

by Jane Robb, Arinola Adefila, José Pablo Prado Córdova

Part II: Use of cultural norms

Arinola Adefila, Deputy Director, Staffordshire Centre for Learning and Pedagogic Practice, Staffordshire University. Now based at Buckinghamshire New University.

Knowledge is a very powerful human tool, in many cultures knowing is understood to be continuous and lifelong, associated with a sacred respect for the elderly who have accumulated a treasure trove of knowledge through experience.

Continue reading “Journey Without An Answer – Part II: Use of Cultural Norms”

Journey Without An Answer: A postcolonial look at epistemic challenges for (un)learning in higher education

by Jane Robb, Arinola Adefila, José Pablo Prado Córdova

Part I

In modern day higher education institutions, we too often arrive at an understanding of the world around us through repetition of learnt facts and exposure to the same (Meissner, 1974). There is little room for generating new knowledge until what are considered the ‘higher tiers’ of learning (McGregor, 2020), and often this is bounded within strict academic and organisational standards: ways of finding and expressing knowledge that relies on other commonly accepted knowledge (Bagga-Gupta, 2023).

Continue reading “Journey Without An Answer: A postcolonial look at epistemic challenges for (un)learning in higher education”

LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part III – Community (vs. individuality)

by Macarena Montero Lobos

This is PART III of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Stephen McCloskey.

If you haven’t read Part I and II and the introduction, start here.

Stephen McCloskey has been the Director of the Centre for Global Education in Belfast since 1995 and serves as the editor of the journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review. Educator, writer, editor, project manager, and activist, Stephen works in the international development sector in various fields, including youth, community, minority ethnic, and formal education sectors in Europe. Since 2011, he has been involved in developing educational projects in the Gaza Strip and Palestine. In 2015, he co-edited the book “From the Local to the Global: Key Issues in Development Studies”. Currently, Stephen is researching Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria. See more at Stephen McCloskey | openDemocracy.

Continue reading “LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part III – Community (vs. individuality)”

LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part II – Diversity (vs. uniformity)

by Macarena Montero Lobos

This is PART II of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Mayara Floss.

If you haven’t read Part I and the introduction, start here.

Mayara Floss is a family and community doctor who graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) in Brazil. She is an activist dedicated to rural, indigenous, and planetary health in her country. In 2014, she received a scholarship from the Brazilian Government to participate in the Science Without Borders program at the University of Galway in Ireland. Mayara has developed various health education projects and was co-author of the Lancet Countdown policy brief recommendations for Brazil in 2018 and 2019. She also spoke on women’s health at the United Nations in 2018 and has a TED Talk titled “Why Rural Health?”. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at the University of São Paulo (USP) and works as a Family Doctor in a favela in Florianópolis, Brazil.

Continue reading “LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part II – Diversity (vs. uniformity)”

LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part I – Body (vs.mind)

by Macarena Montero Lobos

This is PART I of the “Exploring Latin American contributions to education” series. All parts consist of a blog conversation and a video intervention. This part starts off with a conversation between Macarena and Aisling Walsh.

Aisling was awarded a PhD in Sociology from the University of Galway in 2023 and holds an LLM in Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from the Irish Centre for Human Rights and a BA in Sociology, Politics and Spanish in the same university. Her PhD focused on feminist practices of healing justice in Guatemala and was supported by the Andrew Grene Postgraduate Scholarship for Post-Conflict Resolution from the Irish Research Council. She has over 7 years of experience working in communications, advocacy and activism with international development organisations including the UN and INGOs in Ireland, Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia and Timor Leste. Currently, Aisling is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Limerick on a project exploring alternative pedagogies in Palestine. See her work in: https://aislingwrites.net/

Originating from Ireland, Aisling has lived in Latin America for over 14 years, including Chile, Bolivia, Mexico, and especially Guatemala, where she has been for the past 10 years. It has been interesting to share with her and learn from the perspective of someone who has voluntarily delved into the depths of Abya Yala^[1].

Continue reading “LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION SERIES: Part I – Body (vs.mind)”

On Creating Spaces of Unlearning

by Adriana Cancar

Recently I was part of a quite special Summer School and when I look back at it, I especially remember the feeling of trust – trusting each other to listen, to understand as far as possible, to comprehend, to speak, to respond, to feel with each other, to sit in silence together.

Broadly framed by concepts, theories and debates of and around ‘decolonization’ and ‘development critique’ the Summer School was attempting to confront and question hegemonic narratives and naming the most problematic aspects of growth and development imperatives and promises.

Continue reading “On Creating Spaces of Unlearning”

Ecocentric pedagogies and green scholarships: Towards green academia

by Sayan Dey

In 2006, the Ministry of Education in Bhutan launched what is officially known as the Green School System. One of the many purposes of introducing this green education system was to counter the mainstream modern/colonial knowledge systems that are anti-ecological, self-profiting and capitalistic in nature, and to build knowledge systems that are centered on the existential and functional values of the natural environment.

Continue reading “Ecocentric pedagogies and green scholarships: Towards green academia”

Diaspora Humanitarianism- A Poetic Expression

by Jeevika Vivekananthan

I have been scribbling words and calling them poems since I was a kid. It is my preferred method to communicate complicated topics and complex emotions that I cannot express or explain otherwise. These days I also create poetry on a mode of reflexivity when I get frustrated by the content I interact with as part of my academic reading and research. In the creative space of poetry, I can position myself in relation to my lived and living experience and reflect on the knowledge I come to interact with, mostly essentialised or reductive, in the form of a concept, theory or evidence. Unlike the nature of typical academic writing, poetry gives me the freedom to interact, relate, reflect, contest and imagine the phenomena of my interest.

Continue reading “Diaspora Humanitarianism- A Poetic Expression”

POLYLOGUES AT THE INTERSECTION(S) SERIES: Political genealogies (m)otherwise: on how we talk in pluridiverse decolonial ways, with threads of our own making and held in/as our own territories

by Sara C. Motta

Whiteness is the sea not the shark: it is the very onto-epistemological embodied and aesthetic grounds of (im)possibility of our becoming human as racialised and feminised peoples in the current matrix of Power and Institutions/ality. As Sara Ahmed (2007, 150) foregrounds ‘it is what coheres the [modern/colonial]world’.

Continue reading “POLYLOGUES AT THE INTERSECTION(S) SERIES: Political genealogies (m)otherwise: on how we talk in pluridiverse decolonial ways, with threads of our own making and held in/as our own territories”