Presentation short abstract:

This presentation considers possibilities for decoloniality and inclusion in academic spaces drawing on experience in the Pacific as a non-Indigenous researcher engaging with Māori Studies and a Global North academic coordinating Gender Studies at the University of the South Pacific.

Presentation long abstract:

Over ten years ago, as a non-Indigenous European early anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Māori contexts, I started to familiarise with their academic settings and engage with Māori scholars and students. In a social space marked by Māori practices and revolving around the marae (gathering place), I was introduced to Indigenous research methodologies and larger aspirations and processes to decolonize knowledge and academic institutions. Later, as an academic coordinating a gender studies programme in the South Pacific, I have strived for pedagogical practices that value students’ cultures, languages, relations, lived experiences, and their pre-existent knowledge of the region’s realities, to produce ownership of gender, which is often perceived or experienced as ‘foreign’, while encouraging the recognition of colonial gendered racism and the inclusion of all women, men, and gender and sexual minorities, and supporting young researchers. Cultivating empathy and creating safe spaces where to share knowledge and experiences, including discomfort and hostility, have been key to both experiences, enabling opportunities to address power differentials and support context-responsive imaginations within academia. Both of these academic spaces are particularly wary of and critical towards anthropology. As a result, these experiences have equally generated a reflection on the specific role of anthropology in the university of tomorrow. Based on experiences in two distinct Pacific academic and cultural contexts with different colonial (hi)stories and their own set of aspirations, this presentation aims to share reflections, practices and possibilities for a more equal university.

Presentation short abstract:

Collaboration between Indigenous rights holders and researchers through co-creative research approaches crucially address colonial legacies and power and, respect Indigenous rights. Funding agencies play a key role in enabling (or disabling) meaningful collaboration within projects.

Presentation long abstract:

Truly transdisciplinary approaches are needed to tackle the complex problems that the Arctic is facing at the moment. Collaboration between Indigenous rights holders and researchers through co-creative research approaches can result in high-quality research outcomes, but crucially also address colonial legacies and power imbalances, enhance mutual trust, and respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, to be successful, collaborative research projects have specific requirements regarding research designs, timeframes, and dissemination of results, which often do not fit into the frameworks of academic calendars and funding guidelines. Funding agencies in particular play an important role in enabling (or disabling) meaningful collaboration between Indigenous rights holders and researchers. There is an urgent need to re-think existing funding-structures. This article will propose a new paradigm for the financing of Arctic research, which centres around the inclusion of Indigenous partners, researchers, and institutions from the initial planning stages of funding programmes to the final stages of research projects. These findings and recommendations have been contextualized based on critical reflections of the co-authors, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners, who have practiced their own collaborative work process, the challenges encountered, and lessons learned.

Presentation short abstract:

Building on 5 months of ethnographic field work at UC Berkeley, and document analysis, I argue that local negotiations over curricula in higher education offer insights into how student engagement can cultivate a reflecting space and develop anti-racist teaching and learning spaces.

Presentation long abstract:

Current debates about critical race theory (CRT) in the United States present a bleak picture for anti-racism, academic freedom and civil rights. Several states have banned CRT in elementary schools, books have been burned or removed from library shelves, and in the mainstream media commentators would have us believe that CRT is harmful even for students in higher education (Morgan 2022).

Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, a student group has been fighting for the creation of a critical race theory (CRT) course within their department for more than 10 years. After succeeding at offering the course as student-led, students finally swayed the administration to hire lecturers to teach the course after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 created a national call to reckon with the colonial (past).

In this presentation I unpack the term of CRT and discuss how the meaning has changed as it has travelled from legal studies within higher education to a wider debate on a national level in the US (Crenshaw 1989, Collins 2000, 2004, Mowatt & French 2013). I argue that the local negotiations at UC Berkeley offers important insights into how anti-racist student engagement and teaching can shape the university of tomorrow and that it might cultivate a room for questioning existing power imbalances.

Presentation short abstract:

I analyze the disputes on decolonial feminist anthropological perspectives in a Brazilian leading university considering their productive aspects in a knowledge production from the "South" and their limits in a global academic system that insists in the superiority of certain lines of thought.

Presentation long abstract:

Inclusive policies in university education have successively targeted discriminated communities in Brazil. In a brief period of time, entirely white universities began to be inhabited by black, indigenous and transgender students, mostly engaged in activist work outside the academy and by a few professors of those communities. Yet, incorporating those policies has been less conflictive than altering knowledge production. In this context local readings and interpretations of decolonial feminist anthropological perspectives have turned into a “weapon” activated by students to challenge established knowledge and academic cultures. Taking into account my experience of teaching feminist and anthropological theory during two decades in a leading Brazilian university, my aim is to reflect on these disputes considering: a) the productive aspects of these conflicts in terms of knowledge production and b) the limits of these possibilities when training young researchers of the “South” in a global academic system that still insists in the superiority of certain lines of thought.

Presentation short abstract:

When designing classes as teachers, we normally tend to plan every session, fix the literature and assign specific tasks ahead of time. This presentation talks about leaving space for collaborative class design, thus contributing to enable mutual learning.

Presentation long abstract:

Designing classes in Social and Cultural Anthropology usually means for the teacher to set a clear teaching goal, and to design each session including the relevant literature to ensure a smooth trajectory over the course of the semester. Leaving spaces open for students to find their own "take" on the issue, to specify themes of particular interest and to think with the examples they want to elaborate on, might therefore feel like failing to fulfill the teacher's obligation.

In this lightning presentation I will speak about the experience of including students into the design of a class, by being collaborators in decisions about content, format and class proceedings. In line with Tim Ingold's contribution, I argue that students are part of the production of knowledge through the "inspiration and ideas that flow from our dialogue with them" (2008: 89).

Designing classes to provide a basic understanding of the theme, possibilities for readings/films/other media, but leaving space for the students' creative research, design of sessions, group work and suggestions for inviting "experts" to the class might make teachers feel less "in charge", but can result not only in taking in current issues, concerns and personal involvements, but eventually also leading to a deeper and less hierarchical learning curve.

To successfully implement this design in future university courses might also require rethinking the grading system. How can grading become more of an evaluation of personal commitment to the class, contributions to knowledge production and collective learning?

Presentation short abstract:

Contemporary scientific practices and policies are marked by a complex and often subtle coloniality of knowledge/power and the decolonial debate is not immune to that. In this paper, I address the limits of the appropriations of decoloniality by Northern universities.

Presentation long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research on academic circulations between India and Europe in the present, I discuss the contemporary appropriations of decoloniality by Northern universities. To that end, my contribution to this debate will be structured in two parts:

(a) A reflection on the idea of coloniality and its most recent avatar, decoloniality. I propose a brief review of the concept's history, which is eminently Latin American, in order to demonstrate that the contemporary use of this concept, especially in Europe, reiterates extractivist, and therefore neo-colonial, intellectual practices - albeit through other names, ideologies and mechanisms of legitimation. This, I argue, is achieved, in part, through the obliteration of the intellectual history and political critique of the concept.

(b) Based as much on my research as on my own experiences between Brazil, Europe and India, but also the US. Rather than falling into some well-known trap, namely navel-gazing, I seek to render some 'ethnographic elements' of these complex dynamics to which I refer above. These examples explore: a mapping of epistemic legitimacy that conforms the possibilities of intellectual work according to the global origin of the researcher; scientific policies associated with a knowledge economy that have a local effect on the possibilities of intellectual work and recognition; editorial practices that function as gatekeepers of careers in a scientific world increasingly monopolised by a few large publishers in the North, etc.

Finally, I propose some possible horizons for a more symmetrical global academia interested in challenging its constitutive coloniality of knowledge/power.

Presentation short abstract:

Increased interest in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity has heightened calls for institutionalizing structures and strategies that cross boundaries of expertise within and beyond the academy. This paper draws lessons from new case studies across the world.

Presentation long abstract:

During 2020 and 2021 universities worldwide implemented rapid changes to adapt lectures and research projects to lockdown conditions and confinement. Different communities and governments underwent transformations that continue to be useful in the long term for institutionalizing interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Two overarching questions arise: How, then, should institutionalizing proceed in light of this and other challenges? And what do we expect from universities and research centers that aim to foster interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in current times? Across contexts, neoliberal and endemic pressures on the scientific system still act as hindrances to achieving the full potential of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research and teaching in higher education. Neoliberal policies have long limited and discouraged them by legitimizing individualism and shortening timelines for research and learning. This paper elaborates on fifteen case studies that depict successful and unsuccessful implementation in both universities and research centers in five different continents. Our aim is to take a step beyond to provide a common framework for tackling continuing and future challenges posed by different relations at the intersections of cultures, institutions, and communities in institutionalizing interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.

Toward that end, we present a comparative framework for thinking and transforming institutional and cultural conditions for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and teaching in higher education. The framework is based on empirical evidence, pertinent literature, and insights from case studies. The theoretical background that emerges from the framework supports innovative practices which present future alternatives to dominant disciplinary academic culture and individual professional commitments.