Paper short abstract:

Bringing together personal accounts on teaching decolonial approaches from within German academia with an overview on recent decolonial movements in other settings this paper invites to discuss possibilities and complicities for a decolonial anthropology and classroom in the German context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will give an overview of some of the existing critical pedagogies that have been already formed within theories and methods of decolonial scholarship and movements. It will take a closer look at the demands and the inherent identity politics as the challenges that arise from a decolonial agenda of Anthropology in regard to teaching and doing research. While decolonising has to be understood as a process that has to be communal and enacted one of the main problems in realizing this process is the institutional backlash that many of the decolonial scholars and movements experience.

In German academia decolonial perspectives are slowly increasing and the discussion on colonial epistemologies, in the development of the sciences as well as the colonial heritage of museums and restitution is increasingly discussed. The implications of identity politics, racism in the academy and what decolonizing actually means in regard to the responsibility of the researchers and students are on the other hand in the beginning stages.

Bringing together personal accounts on teaching decolonial approaches from within German academia with an overview on recent decolonial movements and approaches in other settings this paper invites to discuss possibilities and complicities for a decolonial anthropology and classroom in the German context.