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Lab short abstract

The Lab offers hands-on examples of decolonial pedagogy from around the world applied to anthropological education, including creative and performative tasks, deep listening, sound recording, wondering walks with and for autistic students, and sign language pedagogy in mixed Deaf–hearing classrooms

Lab long abstract

It is possibly a truism to point out the connection between the polarization of debates in many contemporary societies, especially in the ‘West’ and the dualism that characterizes their dominant ontologies. In addition to the well-trodden debates about binaries such as mind-body, body-world, nature-culture, able-disabled, certain universalizing dualisms are also deeply entwined in epistemic coloniality.

Coloniality is at heart also a universalizing epistemic project operationalized around sets of binaries. On one side of the divide is rational, androcentric, ocularcentric, logo/scriptocentric thought, on the other side everything else including subjectivity, body sensorium and any epistemologies that do not align with colonial narratives.

Decolonial approaches include exploring pluriversal possibilities. In pedagogical terms, pluriversality entails not simply diversifying content, but rethinking the epistemic conditions through which knowledge is produced, authorized, and learned. Pluriversal educational practices offer a way towards dislodging polarized views of contemporary social issues, thus they have the potential to counter the entrenchment of antagonistic and adversarial framings.

In this Lab, the convenors will offer exercises and hands-on practices of decolonial pedagogies applied to anthropological education. These will include creative and performative approaches, sonic methods like deep listening, sound recording and playlist exercises, wondering walks as ways of teaching with and for autistic students, and sign language pedagogy in mixed Deaf–hearing classrooms. The seven examples, from different parts of the world (Brazil, Italy, Germany, Malta, Mexico, the USA) give evidence of the plurality of decolonial anthropological pedagogies already in practice today.