Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses a teaching collaboration where mainstream social science and its amnesia about colonial histories and presence, was critically addressed as a potential practice against silencing positionalities, divisions, student paralysis and anxiety.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will discuss experiences from a South African – Ethiopian – Finnish research and teaching collaboration especially in terms of its impact on sociology and gender studies teaching in Finland. The paper will argue that the practice of addressing and challenging the mainstream social science tradition, and the university as an ideal, critically from the lens of colonial histories and presence, engage the students and their lived experiences, compared with the class rooms where explicit de-colonizing, Africa or development were in focus, and learning could be compartmentalized into a “here” and “there”. The European social science canon of denial and amnesia of the importance of the global context, and a more general whitewashing of sociological history and present (Bhambra & Homwood 2021), are in the paper discussed through an anxiety and alienation presented in student narratives about the university. The paper proposes that a teaching collaboration where mainstream silences are addressed is in itself a practice against silencing positionalities, divisions, paralysis and anxiety.