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Contribution short abstract:

We recount our process of curriculum design grounded in decolonial pedagogies and classroom liberation for an Ethnographic Reading and Writing course. We explore our experience and interrogate the conditions of possibility, within the neoliberal university, for transformative pedagogies.

Contribution long abstract:

Through the account of a co-taught module in Ethnographic Reading and Writing undertaken by the

authors in 2023, we underline the tensions and possibilities of anti-racist and decolonial pedagogies

centered on care, as they developed precariously within the neoliberal academy and from within a

discipline born in the colonial encounter: anthropology. We reflect holistically on our experience as

co-teachers, from our own relationship to each other and to the students, as well as our relationship to

the subject of ethnographic reading and writing that determined our curriculum design, reading and

assignment choices, to our precarity and tense embeddedness in the department of anthropology of a

neoliberal university in Western Europe, where we were both precariously employed as knowledge

migrants.

In a multimodal presentation combining slides with video and sound bites, we recount our process of

curriculum design with decolonial pedagogies in mind and our approach of classroom liberation

inspired by bell hooks and Paulo Freire. We use retrospective collaborative ethnography to explore

our experience of the course in a holistic and reflexive way, and to link it to the wider question of the

conditions of possibility, within the neoliberal university, for transformative pedagogies grounded in

non-hierarchical, anti-racist, anti-classist, decolonial, and liberating practices. We examine moments

of unlearning the robotic, formalistic, superficial, and hierarchy-bounded student practices of

obedience within the classroom, and reflect on what made them possible, and on whether anything

can make such moments possible at a larger scale within the neoliberal logic of today’s university.