Abstracts

This presentation will take you on a journey to explore scent as an element of design, urbanism, and placemaking from my perspective as a female and Arab design practitioner and educator.

What does it mean to "see" the world through the nose? What access does the nose grant us to material affairs?

Why is olfaction not considered a system of knowledge collection? How did we get to this anosmic place? How did olfaction become worthless to "sophisticated" and "civilized" people? How did smelling like nothing become the desired outcome for most of society, to have scent-free cities?

What are the indicators of our sensorial experiences in urban areas? How do we create sensory control in urban areas? How do urban odors play a role in shaping social geography? Who designs? Who decides? Who has the power? 

The talk will showcase practical coursework by NYU Abu Dhabi students from the "Scent & the City" course that explores Abu Dhabi and London through the nose to rediscover the olfactory heritage of places that "are" and places that "used to be" and imagine possible scent futures and design of places that "will be". This talk invites a discussion of practical methodologies to create local and student-centric pedagogies for design and critiquing the socio-political systems that govern design practice, research, and education today.

Decolonising the curriculum has its inherent challenges and "eureka" moments. The fields of history and literature have led the way in decolonising curricula by being inclusive of indigenous records and cultural storytelling, authors and spokespeople, as well as highlighting texts and promoting people to augment acknowledgement and indigenous voices within educational institutions and beyond.

Sustainability and sustainable development are white, western world constructions that emerged with the Brundtland Report about four decades ago. At the time, the concepts were alien to the western model of progress. Additionally, these records were oblivious to long-standing indigenous knowledge, which usually focuses on a balanced familial dynamic of human/nature co-existence as opposed to the relationship between developer and material source.

However, western science constructed the sustainability narrative, in full awareness that about 25% of the world's countries were the major polluting contributors worldwide. We are now in a race to translate and transfer messages of sustainability and climate change to governments, public groups, businesses, and industries, in order to effect climate action. These are usually contentious discussions, as lifestyles depend on polluting practices, economic growth relies on polluting industries, and discussions are viewed as attempts at indoctrination one way or another. So how can such discussions be had in the university classroom? In this auto-ethnographic approach, applicable critical thinking practices and active listening are used to relate the so-called First World's privileged environmental history to present-day realities in the Global South.

Broadening the perspectives, representations, and approaches presented in science classes to more meaningfully engage with and learn from diverse global, minority, and indigenous voices is an important part of decolonizing the liberal arts curriculum. This proposed project aims to make substantial progress in decolonizing the curriculum by focusing on developing and refining ways to accomplish this in two Liberal Studies courses: Approaches; and Living in the Anthropocene. Two specific questions that will be addressed through a short presentation, roundtable discussion with faculty from multiple global sites, and follow-up curriculum revision are: “How can we broaden the perspective through which we teach about the Anthropocene to emphasize indigenous and global viewpoints?” and “How can we empower students to ask their own questions, and provide opportunities to build the skills needed to answer these questions and propose solutions?” Areas of discussion will include assigned readings, videos, pedagogical techniques, and student engagement activities used in these courses. A preliminary plan for revising these course components will be presented at the roundtable, and then revised-based feedback gathered from roundtable participants. Efforts will also be made to collaborate with colleagues from multiple global sites to write and publish a scholarship of teaching and learning essay that highlights what was learned from this experience and how that can be applied to a wide range of other courses.

In recent years, terms such as ‘economic immigrant’, ‘failed asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’ have amassed excessive baggage, building on negative connotations people seeking to move across international borders accumulated throughout the turbulence of the 20th century. The Conservative Party has had a notable role in creating a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants both in practical terms (requiring identity papers for GP and hospital appointments; to rent accommodation; to enroll children in school, etc.) and in terms of rhetoric around migrant identities. Notably, senior figures within the Conservative Party have ramped up rhetoric around the identities of new arrivals and long-established ethnic minority community members in the UK, attempting to associate both those moving for work and those seeking refuge from war, turmoil and blight, with criminality and vice. 

This toxic language around identities and mobilities has found echoes across the political spectrum and in media outlets. Much of the hostile discourse throughout the UK and its diverse population ignores the reality of the UK’s colonial and postcolonial links, and within primary, secondary, and tertiary education there is a widespread refusal to engage with the relationship between Empire, the slave trade, and contemporary mobility to and from the UK. The aim of this paper is to outline the colonial links underlying migration to and from the UK and unpack the language negating identity and belonging of migrants and ethnic minority communities, particularly as it relates to the teaching of the politics and history of Empire and its relationship to contemporary migration patterns.

This course, “Food, Culture and Globalization: London”, underpinned by an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, is designed to explore current transformations in the food systems and cultures of London under conditions of globalization. Specifically, through lectures, readings, creative activities, and assignments, the course asks how produce, people, and animals have interacted to make life possible in modern London and in cities more broadly. However, from my activist-scholar experiences of food praxis, the notion of 'food system' itself is problematic. Colonialities of being, power, and knowledge extract and exploit globally both people and places as legacies of colonialism and perpetuate an abyssal divide between worlds. How can we unsettle and reconfigure both geopolitical contemporary and historic accounts of food-related narratives? What can we do to help reveal that the ‘food system’ can be seen as a Euro-American-centred narrative of dispossession, presented as universal? How can we make good use of decolonial tools that are pluriversal, ecological, and embodied as a means of interrogating the present system design, including its academic and field practice? To what extent can the embrace of decolonial tools in the curriculum lead us beyond mere emancipation, and instead towards a relational pluriverse as an expression of freedom and full nourishment for all humans and for the Earth, which is, in itself, a necessary healing? 

The classroom is a dynamic and social space where relations of power can both “enable or constrain the range of identities” students possess (Norton, 1997, p. 412). The goal of the proposed paper/talk is to demonstrate how Liberal Arts instructors can respectfully and productively create space for and celebrate diverse identities in the classroom by incorporating global practices. The paper/talk builds on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ (ACTFL) National Standards’ 3Ps (products, practices, and perspectives)–a cultural framework in which “culture is presented as the philosophical perspectives, the behavioral practices, and the products of a society” (Cutshall, 2012, p.32). Global products (e.g., books, films, art pieces) are an important first step for inclusivity of diverse identities, but they are not enough on their own. It is critical to move beyond products to include global practices (e.g., diverse forms of participation, multimodalities, writing styles, language use). Global practices can help to empower students to “challenge notions of deficiency” connected to their identities (Lee & Canagarajah, 2019, p.17) by utilizing the languages, cultures, abilities, experiences, and ideologies students possess. At the same time, global practices can elicit global perspectives that allow students to gain a kaleidoscopic and critical view on complex topics. The pedagogical examples come from a first-year writing course and can be applicable to other college-level courses. 

References

Cutshall, S. (2012, April). "More Than a Decade of Standards: Integrating 'Cultures' in Your Language Instruction." The Language Educator, 32 – 37.

Lee, E., & Canagarajah, S. (2019). "The Connection between Transcultural Dispositions and Translingual Practices in Academic Writing." Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 14 (1), 14–28. 

Norton, B. (1997). "Language, Identity, and the Ownership of English." TESOL Quarterly, 31 (3), 409 – 429.

This paper reflects on the demand for and practice of decolonising from a historical perspective. It specifically refers to the situation in Britain from which it hopes that wider implications may be drawn. Starting from the contention that the history we write is often shaped by the questions we seek to answer about the present, it looks back to the contributions of defining anti-imperialist historians such as C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and Raphael Samuel, exploring their connections to anti-imperialist struggles. It explores the ways that these struggles and the academics connected to them also challenged the elitism in higher education.

The paper goes on to chart the generalised attack on the gains made since the 1960s: the marketisation of higher education and the rise of ‘revisionist’ celebrations of empire in university History departments. This accompanied an intensified liberal interventionism epitomised by the so-called war on terror and, in education, the institutionalisation of Islamophobia with the Prevent programme. Academia’s role in promoting cheerleaders for even the most notorious of past conflicts undergirded, for example, the Conservative government’s weaponizing of the centenary of Britain’s entrance into the First World War and its attack on history teachers in schools. It also served to undermine anti-war campaigning in the present.

Utilising this historical framework to understanding the current decolonisation movement in part as a response to decades of attack on anti-imperialist history, the paper considers what it means to be an anti-imperialist historian today and what our practical demands might be.

As an oceanographer and instructor, I engage with students in ocean policy and conservation through the fish on their dinner plate. Globally, more than three billion people depend on seafood as their primary protein source, and our survival directly depends on the health of the ocean ecosystem. 

With the UN Ocean Decade occurring until 2030, now is the time to re-orient my curriculum to encapsulate a more global perspective and reflect the diversity of indigenous stakeholders. I look forward to bringing my experience to the table to discuss productive ways to elevate Traditional Ecological Knowledge in marine resource management into my syllabi and pedagogies.

Western bias is a persistent issue in journalism studies and “US scholarship still reigns supreme when it comes to defining key areas of inquiry […] and to directing the field in theoretical, epistemological, and methodological terms” (Hanitzsch, 2019, p. 215). In order to contribute to chipping away at western hegemony which still, as Hanitzsch highlights, determines understanding of and approaches to journalism globally, this project offers a new theoretical and methodological approach – postcolonial journalistic field theory (Douglas, 2019). 

An interdisciplinary framework, postcolonial journalistic field theory builds on Bourdieu’s field theory, which is influential in western journalism studies, where it is utilized as a conceptual interpretation of how power works in newsrooms and the fields that journalism mediates. Although the dynamics between journalists’ identity and the institutional structures in which they work are key to Bourdieu’s field theory toolkit, consideration of significant aspects of identity, such as ‘race’, ethnicity, and the colonial histories that constructed and continue to shape these identities, is largely absent from academic work which draws on field theory. These identities and histories, which are under-researched in journalism studies, contribute to the negotiation and production of cultural and economic capital that structure the journalistic field globally. 

Postcolonial journalistic field theory will develop a theoretical approach to account for how journalists’ identities, specifically those who are marginalized in dominant western journalism due to markers of their identity, and/or who work in Southern contexts where local knowledge may be eclipsed by western norms, contribute to shape their work.

This paper critically engages with the undertheorized colonized (semi)peripheries. It looks at Romania, and particularly Transylvania, as one region within the modernity project that has been overlooked. While within Europe, the region has been (understood as) excluded from the modernity project, whereas within decolonizing literature it has been both overlooked and lumped with the European center.

This work further reckons with lack of epistemological embarrassment of not knowing anything about the history of a part of the world. It reflects on how often scholars display a lack of embarrassment of not knowing anything about the history, literature, art, and/or identity formation of Eastern Europe. There are no mechanisms, academic awareness or public engagement that sanction scholars in the global north and western world about their colonizing approach towards Eastern Europe, signaling “asymmetric ignorance” (Boatca, 2022). 

Moreover, when the region becomes the subject of study, it is again lumped within the empires that dominated it:  Russian/USSR, Austro-Habsburgic, etc.  This perspective denies the autonomy and legitimacy of the region, overlooking the places of development, and resistance “inter-imperilia” (Doyle) where the region developed its different identity.  

This paper follows the work of Manuela Boatca and Anca Parvulescu (Creolizing the Modern, 2022) and studies of decolonializing Eastern Europe (Fowkes and Hailbronner, 2019) to interrogate what are the implications of  this colonization in theories of knowledge. Specifically, it reflects on how we teach when regions of the world are both marginalized and colonized by the (European) center, and excluded from the decolonial critique. 

The Global Media Lab (GML) at Liberal Studies is a new student- and faculty-led initiative that draws upon the power of film and other digital media to decenter hierarchical structures and foster diasporic conversation.

The presentation will showcase work produced through GML’s first major initiative: The Citizen Journalism Project (CJP), which supports LS/GLS students and others as they develop experimental documentary films focused on underrepresented groups, with particular attention on stories of the displaced.

The project fosters collaboration between LS/GLS students and others across the GNU and Colombian-born Emmy-winning NBC journalist, Ricardo Montero, along with youth in Uzbekistan and the UK, indigenous participants from Bolivia and the US, and the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Bangladesh. Focusing on the benefits of multilingual and multimodal communication, participants will be encouraged to include direct testimony in languages other than English and to explore the potential within logographic writing systems to capture character-based pictorial irony and visual entendre. 

With ChatGPT and other generative AI challenging educators to rethink how to manage writing in their classrooms, this project feels timely in terms of its de-centering of the essay, and builds on the multi-modal communicative explorations that have been a hallmark of CCP projects in GLS.  

Jason working in NY, and Sean working with internationally dispersed students through JIRS, will each present on the CJP process, and share materials produced by their distinct student groups, along with non-NYU participants, and students participating in London, who come from many different NYU schools and campuses. 

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter announced a surge of online activism following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. During the following summer, protesters took to the streets across the US, bringing an online conversation to the attention of non-Twitter-users and into the political mainstream. The #BlackLivesMatter mission statement enumerates four affirmations, one of which stands out to me as crucial to the accomplishment of its overall mission: “We affirm our humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” 

This aspect of #BlackLivesMatter’s anti-racism is the springboard for my discussion in this paper. Following the theories of Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Walter Mignolo and others, I argue that what is usually referred to as ‘racism’ or ‘white supremacy’ can more specifically be conceptualized as an accumulation of governing sociogenic principles, rules and codes, reified by genomic theory and communicated via discourse. These principles, which continue to structure our world, evolved  as justification for Europe’s colonial violences to situate non-European colonized ‘Others’ in categories of lack and insuperable difference, separate and apart from a Eurocentric and theoretically biocentric model described by Wynter as “a particular genre of being Human.” I argue that dismantling racism requires decolonizing and redefining the Human. As academics in the Humanities, this requires decolonizing our pedagogy. We have a vital role to play in exposing racism / white supremacy as we teach the texts, historical periods, and cultures that generated these constitutive principles. 

This paper discusses how my courses ‘Writing as Exploration’ and ‘Writing as Critical Inquiry’ manifest non-colonial methodologies. Student inner questioning drives these courses, not instructor lectures or objective debates.  Students respond to texts that challenge them to grapple with their own identities and self-definitions. These courses embrace subjective perspectives and revel in student diversity. The texts rouse students to draw on the sensitive, raw, and rich material from their own lives. Writers such as James Baldwin (who explores African American identity through the lens of his fraught relationship with his father), and Adrienne Rich (who addresses repressed homosexuality and Jewishness), and poetry by Native American poet Joy Harjo (who challenges assumptions about American identities), inspire students to analyse their religious, sexual, racial, and cultural identities. In the second semester, students broaden questions about self-definition when they use secondary sources, developing a rigorous intellectual practice to grapple with debates about British culture. Reading essays by Dickens and Woolf and scholarly work on these texts, including Orwell’s socialist critique of Dickens, students develop opinions on how these authors write about the marginalized members of society. Moving on to Black dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, whose work is heavily influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica, and scholarly writings on his work, challenges students further, as do readings from British Jamaican writer Colin Grant’s I’m Black so You Don’t Have to Be, a memoir about Grant’s own shifting sense of identity. Students learn about and bring their own experiences to a discussion about The Windrush generation through Grant’s work and from the poetry of Hannah Lowe, who is a guest visitor to the classroom. Finally, we read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a text which provokes discussion about outsider insider status – Ishiguro’s Japanese background allows him to write with a special perspective on British culture. Students are introduced to feminist, Marxist, post-colonial and psychoanalytic theory and apply these schemes to Ishiguro’s work—this process, together with an ongoing student grappling with self-identity, empowers students and decolonizes the texts we analyse as well as the classroom experience.  

Cultural understanding is essential to effective pedagogy. In this paper I propose a multicultural praxis framework in which pedagogy considers both the multicultural context of the class within which it occurs as well as the wider social-cultural context. I develop a case from the ‘foreign relations’ week of my course on European politics, in which there was a full-on Western relations (Europe, US) process with two nations: China and Russia. Taking place within an increasingly fragmented geopolitical environment, the class facilitated a discussion about ideological identities and difference of perspective across cultures, as well as the importance of considering the cultural understanding we bring to the class within the discussions of the course content. This ‘meta-cognition’ approach to multicultural praxis recognises the importance of seeing the class context itself as a multicultural environment. It therefore develops a related concept to positionality, integrating this within pedagogical praxis. 

This visual presentation examines how contemporary visual arts, documentary film, music, experiential learning, and archival work produced by artists and practitioners of color decolonize the liberal arts curriculum. Decentering the Eurocentric gaze, traditions, and values fosters a more inclusive learning environment. In concert with hybrid and creative written texts, the visual, audio, and multimedia arts deepen student engagement, exploration, and knowledge construction. How can we as instructors invigorate our syllabi with non-Eurocentric materials, methods, and creative production? How can we scaffold student learning, model creative research methods that innovate and motivate creative production, and mentor beyond the classroom in ways beyond Eurocentric traditions and values? Examining as case study, NYU London writing seminars taught during the AY 2022-2023 by a New York-based Liberal Studies faculty teaching abroad, this presentation will share methods of instruction, syllabi, non-Eurocentric text selections, assignments, and samples of student work that embed creative arts inquiry, methods, and production in the undergraduate global liberal arts classroom. Conclusions will offer effective practices for how to innovate when approaches or assignments fall flat and how to engage and encourage distracted students. This presentation invites participants to build connections with these methods and texts to deepen student engagement, learning, critical thinking, and creativity, and to commit to equitable and inclusive practices.

The world seems to be just a reach away on our phone, but is our media truly as global as we believe it to be? What are the underlying structures that govern borders and restrictions and yet create this illusion of a globally-connected world?

In the late 1960s, Solanas and Getino wrote, “In our times it is hard to find a film within the field of commercial cinema…in both the capitalist and socialist countries, that manages to avoid the models of Hollywood pictures.” Today, 50 plus years after their observation, film form is still largely influenced by Euro-US conventions. Apart from avant-garde movements, we find the same structures in almost all global mainstream cinemas. While Netflix is now replacing the Hollywood model, it nevertheless maintains US-born formal cinematic conventions.

In this paper I discuss the examples of Third Cinema and Nollywood as teaching modules that showcase how to subvert existing filmmaking practices and encourage students to think about methods that resist neo-colonial structures in mainstream media that we consume on an everyday basis, often without knowing. In foregrounding the importance of teaching formal analysis side-by-side with content interpretation, I propose to have students think through ways that one could resist the structures of media today. Is it possible to think of an entirely different system or do we stay confined within the neo-colonial system at all times? Whether as users or creators: what are the stakes and considerations globally we need to pay attention to if we want to approach media from an ethical, respectful, inclusionary and diverse mindset?

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement reignited a momentum in Global Health Policy and the wider medical field to tackle and address systemic racism against a backdrop of colonial issues. Some medical disciplines have made positive headway into tackling these issues, for example, dermatology as a discipline has made strides in ensuring equitable and diverse representation of skin of colour in dermatology teaching being taught to medical students. Yet most Global Health Policy curricula need to be updated to more explicitly delve into the ongoing impact of colonial processes and issues on health policy development and delivery. 

NYU London Global Health Policy students are a ripe demographic, comprising diverse lived experiences, with a passion for activism and making positive change in BAME health inequalities. This paper presents the analysis and discussion of findings from qualitative analysis of an administered survey across two cohorts of Global Health Policy students at NYU in London in Fall 2022 and Spring 2023. The survey explores several domains, including how we as faculty can better help students to comprehend and analyze diverse colonial and decolonial processes on an intellectual level so they are empowered to act as 'agents of change' in the classroom, and how we as faculty can authentically cover such topics in the curriculum. The findings are important, as they offer the pedagogical opportunity to place the student voice at the centre of curriculum delivery on decolonisation in health policy, by way of application of individual student lived experiences from diverse BAME groups. By involving students in such peer-learning, they develop agency to discuss the complexity of colonial legacy in the safe space of a carefully moderated classroom, whilst considering practical solutions to implement as future global health policy professionals.

Forthcoming.

To truly decolonize the liberal arts curriculum we need to consider not just what we teach but the way Eurocentric traditions shape our students’ learning experience.  Though GLS instructors successfully promote experiential learning and diverse methods of inquiry, students often remain passive consumers who sit behind screens and take in knowledge.  In recognition of the concept of learning as fundamentally an act of creation, let us encourage students to make and not just consume, to step out from behind devices, leave the privileged, removed stance of observer and instead enter the world of the worker and/or artisan.  Doing so can induce a seismic shift in their appreciation of the thought, skill, and labor enabling and supporting objects and ideas—a bigger picture than objects and ideas themselves.  A new familiarity with local materials and natural resources facilitates global connections; the development of new skills opens unexpected lines of inquiry.  This presentation will introduce several tried-and-true classroom workshops—crafting cuneiform tablets, writing on papyrus with reed pens, and developing cyanotypes—that have challenged my students (and myself) to rethink how and what they learn.  To demonstrate this point, participants will engage in a bookmaking workshop and discuss how this process amplifies our understanding of diverse forms of communication.  Although as educators we often assume our role is to help students find their true voice and talents, I hope to demonstrate that acts of creation in the classroom remind us that learning is less about finding than creating ourselves.

The imperative to decolonize the premodern Core curriculum is not just a matter of inclusion but a responsibility demanding critical attention to forms of domination and exploitation globally, and this includes precolonial source traditions. To name one salient case, there is Islamicate slavery and anti-Black racism, which glaringly confront teachers and students of the Arabian Nights and researchers of premodern Arabic literature as a matter of course. How to address them with students who may be getting their first academic exposure to Islam, without exculpating (neo-)colonial violence, racism, and Islamophobia of the modern period, are questions dealt with in my proposed contribution to the roundtable on "Decolonizing Visions for the Arts." I propose a non-avoidant strategy of centering dialectics that are immanent to source traditions, and highlighting representations of the margins of dominant cultures (imperial and otherwise). These recommendations are conceived with our "Crossroads" period (7th-17th centuries CE) in mind, but are eminently applicable to Antiquity, which must set the stage for Modernity in ways that meet the pedagogical needs of 2023 and after. Through informed approaches to select curricular material, I maintain that engagement with premodern tradition can and should be facilitated in ways that neither shrink from historical injustices nor subtract from student appreciation of the arts and texts it is our job to teach.

Diversifying medieval studies is important because the subject has a white supremacy problem (Kaufman and Sturtevant, 2020). I begin by reflecting on how I embed these concepts and issues into my Liberal Studies course with sessions on feminism, medievalism, and antiracism. I find that many of my students are not aware of how medieval tropes such as Vikings have been misappropriated by the far-right. These classes are a key way of raising the issues to be considered throughout the course as well as contextualising it beyond the classroom. 

The course is presented as global, and yet only requires a single extra-European text, and one Islamic text. I explain how I go beyond this requirement to include sessions from around the world, using the work of scholars of colour, connected through my thematically structured syllabus. Another important element of this practice for me is to thank scholars for their work. After each session, I write to the authors of the sources to let them know I had used their work. This can be a key factor for these scholars’ career progression, for example as an “indicator of impact”, which is particularly important for marginalised scholars. 

Ultimately, I suggest it is important to be comfortable being uncomfortable: it is necessary to expose students to difficult topics, and also to teach beyond our immediate comfort zones in order to give students the most diverse experience we possibly can, while uplifting the voices of those traditionally marginalised in the academy. 

Philosopher Lorraine Code sees epistemic responsibility as the ongoing responsibility “to know, or at least to know better” than we currently do. I believe Code’s idea that “knowing well is a matter of considerable moral significance” (Code, 2020, p. 2), captures a specific core value of our LEHR concentration. This epistemic stance shapes my approach to decolonizing the curriculum. My target is the dominant Eurocentric narrative about the origins of science generally, and specifically chemistry.  An orientalist turn persists despite ~80 years of scholarship. Recent studies trace the origins of several mathematical and scientific products and methods to non-European sources.  A major impediment to evidence-based responses to this narrative is that the vast majority of non-European textual sources remain untranslated. Given the labor-intensive quality of translation work, changing this one stubborn fact requires generations of devoted scholars. Students’ appreciation of the global past remains skewed as long as the work of many civilizations remains unknown. However, following the flow of chemical substances across space and time reveals much about the lives of our ancestors. Tracing geographies and genealogies of basic chemical substances reveals intense cross-cultural interaction in connection with salt, sulfur, copper, alcohol, etc. Substances such as hair dyes, perfumes, skin lotions, love potions, bespoke talismanic tinctures, and life-extending elixirs, hold universally enduring human interest. A chemically infused digital humanities curriculum directs attention to the measurable movement of materials within and between human cultures. Enabling students to pose cogent questions answerable by data would be a great pedagogical accomplishment.

The project of decolonizing the curriculum is more commonly associated with courses influenced by colonial and Eurocentric ideas about “Great Books” and “Western Civ.” One might question whether science fiction needs to be decolonized, given that it has never been accepted in the literary canon. However, all cultural production is enmeshed in the same history of domination and exclusion, and science fiction is no exception. This paper will present an approach to decolonizing the study of science fiction, using my senior seminar as a case study. 

Science fiction is often viewed as the domain of white, male, adolescent Americans. While there is some truth to this historically, the stereotype ignores the contributions of French pioneers of the genre like Jules Verne, women writers who published under masculine or ambiguous pen names, and early contributions by writers of color, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, whose short story “The Comet” was published in 1920—not to mention a worldwide fan culture of popular media.

To decolonize science fiction is therefore partly to recognize a more diverse and more global history of the genre, while also acknowledging how much it has been situated within a colonial paradigm. It also means questioning the way science fiction has been defined, which often works to exclude narrative traditions from outside the Anglo-American technocratic sphere. Many in the science fiction community prefer the term “speculative fiction” as a more inclusive category that embraces related genres of the fantastic, such surrealism, magical realism, and tales of the supernatural.

Since its inception as a Gentile movement two millennia ago, Christianity has ideologically served Imperial and colonial regimes. Theologians willingly embraced the construction of the other in crusades against Muslims, inquisitions against Jewish conversos, witch hunts against women, and forcible conversions of people of color and indigenous peoples. That legacy lived on in the modern era in Francoist Spain and in post-colonial contexts, such as the “dirty war” in Argentina, and the persecution of LGBTQ persons in African countries.

This paper reads Biblical texts against the grain to resurrect what has been buried for 2,000 years: John the Baptizer and Jesus of Nazareth as leaders of anti-imperialist movements. The paper reveals John as one who rejected his upper-class, priestly inheritance, seeing the Roman occupation of Judea and Galilee and the rule of the Herods (appointed by Rome) as divine punishment for disobedience of Torah.  Imperial taxation forced peasants to sell their small holdings and work on their former properties as day-laborers or even sell themselves into slavery.  Initially a follower of John, Jesus founded his ministry on the return to the Law, particularly the observance of the Sabbatical and Jubilee Years, which freed Jewish slaves, cancelled debt, and restored the hereditary property of peasants, expropriated by Jewish collaborators and the Romans themselves.  The paper disrupts the traditional view of Christianity as the servant of the powerful, and provides a very different image of the John and Jesus sects, not one of a depoliticized, transcendent “kingdom,” but of anti-Roman, anti-imperial movements.

In Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, she researched eight interlocking circuits of trade that connected the Eurasian continent in the pre-modern period. Her work was a corrective study aimed at showing that globalization was not a phenomenon of the modern world, but was an important part of pre-modern trade and culture. Research of pre-modern globalization and the global conversations it engendered expands to the ancient world as well, as with Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, by Sarah F. Derbew. In this presentation, I want to investigate an important circuit was not covered in Abu-Lughod’s wide-ranging study – a circuit linking East Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean – through a piloted teaching module on the figure of the Queen of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba, an ancient world figure, appears in Hebrew, Geez, and Arabic texts. Most famously in the West, she is the visitor and coerced convert of King Solomon. Narratives and images of the Ethiopian ruler were circulated from antiquity to the modern period. I hope to show how, in the classroom, colonial narratives can be disrupted and subverted by using the methods of shifting perspectives on a single ancient global figure who has come into the West as a subjected African woman. I offer this as a pedagogical template or strategy for “reconstituting western works through trans-regional realignments.” 

In ornithology, the use of language-specific established common names for species of birds provides a more accessible way to communicate about species to a broader range of people outside of professional scientists. Yet recognized English common names of many species of birds in regional and global avian checklists reflect legacies of colonialism. Recent movements within ornithology have shed light on the use of honorifics in species’ common names, but a comprehensive assessment of the properties of English descriptors and their frequency of use in global checklists of birds does not currently exist. Addressing this issue presented a unique opportunity to develop an outreach research project involving remote data collection by 85 participants from within and outside of the ornithology community, including 50 undergraduate students in a non-majors biology course. Over the span of two weeks, participants classified, in duplicate, unique descriptors in the English names of the 10,906 species in the 2022 eBird checklist into one of ten general categories. Participants who began without any ornithology knowledge had a chance to learn about avian biology, discuss the meanings behind terminology with experts in the field, and become eligible for co-authorship on a research publication. Incorporating the project into the classroom further developed students’ observation and research skills, and provided the students an opportunity to participate in professional research. The success of the project demonstrates an approach to developing accessible outreach research that can involve participants with a wide range of expertise and who are located all over the world.

In this research I explore how discrimination of the marginalized Indigenous of Botswana impacts AIDS mortality among the Basarwa living with HIV. Botswana suffers the third highest rate of HIV infection globally (~25%), with no true estimates recorded for the Basarwa. Low socioeconomic status and a lack of education among the Basarwa results in high rates of illiteracy, particularly for oral and written English and Setswana, the official languages of Botswana. I argue that while educational materials for HIV and AIDS in Botswana are communicated in these languages, this precludes the Basarwa from accessing pertinent information about HIV and AIDS. I discuss that the majority of Basarwa cannot perceive their HIV risk, and those living with HIV lack awareness of or trust in lifesaving antiretroviral therapy (ART). I further argue that the low access to ART is additionally complicated by the historical mistreatment of the Basarwa, which fuels the dissemination of misinformation surrounding what the pills contain. For example, some individuals believe that taking these pills may cause the extinction of their ethnic groups. I consider multiple approaches to contextually educate the Basarwa in HIV risk, transmission, treatment, and in ways to prevent further stigma and discrimination. I find it is crucial to communicate with tribal leaders to understand and implement their best recommendations surrounding HIV/AIDS education, considering culturally appropriate mechanisms that respect their boundaries and beliefs, with information delivered in their mother-tongue languages. 

Western colonial perspectives tend to visualize certain humans at the top of a “biodiversity ladder” with dominion over non-human beings, severely limiting understanding of current climate change and biodiversity crises. In contrast, many Indigenous, Buddhist, and other traditions envision humanity as embedded in earth systems and cycles, interconnected with other life forms. Here, higher education exercises based on ecosystem-centered, or ecocentric views, will be presented. In contrast to exclusionary science centered on western white men, or “parachute” projects in which foreigners exploit or exclude local researchers, these materials rely on participatory and inclusive active-learning techniques like discussions. Among other examples, a remote learning activity I developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which students were asked to expand upon dominant, anthropocentric or human-centered approaches to public health, will be covered. In addition to the traditional questions about pathogen effects on people, students inquire how humans affect the health of non-humans, and how people and wildlife interact to impact health. Exploring human incursions into ecosystems containing organisms they had not previously been exposed to shows how deforestation and wildlife trade can lead to COVID-19 and other disease transmission. Beyond embracing vaccines, social distancing, and masking to fight pandemics, irresponsible deforestation and wildlife trade must also be combatted to avoid pathogen contact in the first place. Technology, engineering, and math applications of this holistic approach include using biomimicry and nature restoration, such as of coral reefs, oyster beds, and wetlands, to counter increasingly powerful storms in a more effective, non-colonial, and ecocentric strategy. 

As a focal point of movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BLM, universities in the UK have become high-profile staging grounds for efforts to decolonise curricula and communities worldwide. Over the past decade, the schools, departments, and administrators in British institutions have been tasked with responding to calls for greater inclusiveness in the courses they teach, who teaches and who is taught by them, calls which have been addressed with varying degrees of success. With a number of initiatives ongoing, the current wave of IDBEA activism will not be the last—nor is it the first. After sketching some key aspects of the decolonising debate in UK higher education today, this paper considers why certain recent strategies have been better received than others, initially, by placing them within a longer transnational history of universities attempting to diversify the composition of their programmes and classrooms. It then reflects on both the possibilities and limitations encountered through the recent dismantling and remaking of two Global Works and Society syllabi developed and implemented at New York University’s London campus. In so doing, this paper provides a historically and pedagogically informed platform for critically engaging with decolonising initiatives outside of a strictly US context.

In Cultural and Social Identities’ Approaches course, an introductory theory and methods course, students examine the social construction of knowledge, bringing a critical lens to often-naturalized identity categories such as gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community as territorialy limited, sovereign, and expressing horizontal comradeship is a foundational concept in the course. However, theorists of racial capitalism have emphasized the role of whiteness, property, and territory in the formation of settler-states, which have justified the differential exploitation, exclusion and violent assimilation of Black, indigenous and migrant populations.  In this paper I consider how the experiences of indigenous and diasporic peoples create both the need and opportunity to retheorize the nation and the nation-state. Some indigenous communities claim their national sovereignty through a politics of rejection of (rather than recognition by) the settler-colonial state. From a different angle, stateless refugees challenge the assumption of a comprehensive nation-state system, and at times resist the demands made upon them by these same settler-states. Bringing together select critical and feminist perspectives from indigenous studies, migrant and refugee studies on the nation (while recognizing the broader diversity of perspectives), this paper will explore how populations cast as liminal to the settler-colonial state, when centered, may offer opportunities for retheorizing the nation, sovereignty, self-determination, and belonging. Drawing from past teaching experiences and preparing for future ones, this paper explores what conversations might emerge when teaching critical indigenous and migrant theorization of the nation together.

In 1987, a student seeking to perform with fellow GSP students asked me if NYU would welcome "her type of music"—gospel singing; I answered affirmatively.  One hopes that question is now unnecessary, but we must continuously reimagine our pedagogy and the place of music (and other arts) in it to avoid hegemonic assumptions about appropriate subjects and methods of study.   Working music into a decolonizing/decolonized curriculum presents challenges unique to music and to particular syllabi—challenges that are opportunities to interrogate how ATM faculty contextualize music and provide students opportunities to study music that break free from traditional, limiting pedagogical models. 

Music is performative, experienced through lived and shared social interactions. Inspired by my former student's question, I use the confluence of (religious) musical traditions in medieval Andalusia to demonstrate how different musics can converge, cross-fertilize, and inflect one another, folding discrete traditions into new forms. Performing musicians routinely practice communicative listening, absorbing, and reimagining, thereby challenging hierarchies and categories—and offering a pedagogical model for decolonizing. The musical legacy originating during the 9th century Emirate of Cordoba provides a rich aesthetic that testifies to exchange among medieval Christians, Jews, and Muslims during a period of cultural flux; more broadly, it encourages appreciation of diverse musical languages relative to different cultural interactions, interstices, and cycles of shifts in political and cultural dominance. While the immediate ATM context for this reflection is my "Aesthetics of the Sacred" GLS senior seminar, its applicability extends to any GLS course that includes music.

Teaching the law focuses on  authoritative legal texts that create, modify, and end the rights of individuals or institutions.  Authoritative texts include contracts, judgments, and statutes.  The law structures and regulates the world through its textual power. Mabo v Queensland (No 2) was a decision of the High Court of Australia. It is significant for recognising the land interests of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia within the common law. Mabo recognised that traditional customs and laws that gave Indigenous rights to land had never been wholly lost upon colonisation. But such a decision also further entrenched the legal system of Australia and its sovereignty claimed at the expense of Indigenous peoples. The inherent power of common law to assert itself over the traditional systems of Aboriginal Australians was further demonstrated. The perception of the need for traditional knowledge to be protected from the colonising power perpetuated. A more affective response to the ongoing colonial force of the law is needed, which acknowledges its historical violence and the hegemony of its present day values. Indigenous epistemologies are living systems that are sustained over generations, and often form part of its cultural or spiritual identity. In teaching law, we both seek to disrupt the way in which extensive focus on text can obscure the ability to see the impact of the ongoing assertion of colonial power through the perpetuation of the common law. We will illustrate how engaging with visual materials in the classroom enables a space to critically engage with the text of the law and law of the text.

This semester, along with participating in a contract grading system, my students were each given a pocket journal for them to respond to creative prompts during classtime, on museum visits, or at their own will as they observe their daily lives. While journals are often gendered as feminine, and therefore not historically seen as literary, this exercise seeks to repurpose journaling as essential to creative development. The journal is graded on completion and not read by me, the professor, or any peers, creating a singular private space for first year writers to risk and play, which is likely to lessen the boundaries they feel around what's "appropriate" for intellectual inquiry. By demonstrating a resistance to mastery and the process of turning all creative production into capital (or an evaluated material based on labor), incorporating a private journal for student use in the classroom creates an opportunity for students to practice self-expression and self-inquiry offered by a writing practice. They could, if they so choose, also not complete this task without it impacting their grade, which may make the practice more internally motivated rather than forced from external pressures. Additionally, holding an evaluation-free space inside of a writing classroom may lessen the stress on international students or those who feel less comfortable with more formal academic writing exercises, ideally making the practice of writing less hierarchical. In this presentation I will report on student feedback to the process and creative exercises used in implementing private journaling into an otherwise public classroom.

The idea of race has long distorted our understanding of world literature, and in many ways it still does. When Europe’s colonial empires expanded to other parts of the world, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, a new idea expanded with them—that human beings consisted of two fundamentally different sorts of people, Europeans and non-Europeans. And the defenders of these imperial regimes added the further proposition that Europeans were superior. This further proposition, about alleged superiority, has tended to fade with time, but the division of the world into two sorts of people has persisted in academia in another way. Academics today often divide world literature, across the ages, into two broad categories of books: European ones and non-European ones. And many believe that books coming from locations that fall within what we now call Europe all have a common quality, a certain Europeanness. This Europeanness is said to represent a certain point of view, or an attitude, or a set of philosophical presuppositions, and seeing this common quality is thought to be essential to understanding what such books are all about. Yet there is, in fact, no such quality. And the belief that there is, I argue, is a superstition, a decidedly European superstition—invented by Europeans, propagated by Europeans, and until recently, avidly defended by Europeans. It springs from colonialism. But it is false. And I shall seek to show how this superstition still impedes a proper understanding of the forces shaping literature around the globe.

By pushing the temporal frame of decolonization backwards we inevitably end up in the future. The central thesis of this paper takes its beginning with a logical question of where the ancient world and in particular the study of ancient Greece and Rome, known as Classics in the Western world, stands in relation to decolonial efforts in academia. Let me be clear, the discipline of Classics is in dire need of decolonizing, as many of the early efforts to understand the ancient world emerge from the same structures and institutions that birthed colonialism. 

Since European colonialism laid claim to the ancient Greeks and Romans as their Classics, one effort at decolonizing will be to unearth the various histories of and different claims upon Classics. Indeed, the shift from Classics to classics is perhaps already a decolonial move, as it decenters the study of one portion of antiquity and recognizes many centers of civilization and culture in the ancient world. 

Importantly, retellings and receptions of the ancient world point the way to the future. The case study we will explore in this paper is of a modern Korean animation that retells classic Greek and Roman myths for children through a framework of neo-Confucian values, thereby establishing an encounter of converging classics. 

The importance of decolonizing pedagogy within higher education has been the subject of scholarly attention over the last 30 years. Action to do so by higher education institutions has taken place within the last decade, with several issuing manifestos highlighting their commitment to decolonizing their curriculum and teaching methods. However, while this has led to plentiful theories on the strategies of decolonizing higher education, there is little evidence of any practical reflexive accounts on this matter. This article addresses this gap by providing a reflexive account of how higher education educators can apply decolonial practices within their classrooms. More precisely, based on my work experience as an educator within higher education both in the UK and the Middle East, this research illustrates and reflects on the observations and challenges I faced and how I addressed them in my effort to decolonize my pedagogy. With the belief that we should continuously learn and expand our pedagogy the same way we expand on our research outputs, this article concludes with examples and ideas of how educators can decolonize their own classes and highlights the importance of doing so within higher education across the globe.

In his famous TED talk video, African-American artist Ted Kaphar asks and enacts the question: “Can art amend history?” On a large reproduction of a 17th century painting by Franz Hals, Kaphar applies sweeping strokes, obscuring the row of imposing Dutch figures so that a small dark-skinned boy – tucked to one side – commands the space. Art historians, Kaphar claims, had only engaged with the Dutch figures and ignored the black boy. Rendering the boy singularly visible, Kaphar explains, “shifts the lens” to “amend” and not necessarily “erase” the racial structures and biases of the colonial past. In my paper I will explore some specific ways to decolonize arts and literature curriculum by amending and altering the focus, and also retrieving past erasures. Two specific modalities will be discussed. One, to highlight and study cultural networks that displace Eurocentric models: for example, the Indo-Persianate early-modern connections that generated extraordinary artistic and literary innovations in India, such as Amir Khusrau’s Khamsa stories. Secondly, anti-colonial and postcolonial interventions by artists who incorporate western forms and techniques and reinvent them for divergent purposes. Thus the western-focused study of early 20th century Modernist art could be reconfigured through works by modernist Indian artists that often subvert western originals. The paper will conclude with ideas from the works of contemporary British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, who reimagines the uses of colonially-traded fabrics or refashions African masks previously appropriated by Picasso. Included in an arts curriculum, these works and approaches vibrantly “amend” colonial pasts, preconceptions and priorities.

The Global Media Lab (GML) at Liberal Studies is a new student- and faculty-led initiative that draws upon the power of film and other digital media to decenter hierarchical structures and foster diasporic conversation.

The presentation will showcase work produced through GML’s first major undertaking: The Citizen Journalism Project (CJP), which supports LS/GLS students and others as they develop experimental documentary films focused on underrepresented groups, with particular attention on stories of the displaced.

The project fosters collaboration between LS/GLS students and others across the GNU and Colombian-born Emmy-winning NBC journalist, Ricardo Montero, along with youth in Uzbekistan and the UK, indigenous participants from Bolivia and the US, and the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Bangladesh. Focusing on the benefits of multilingual and multimodal communication, participants will be encouraged to include direct testimony in languages other than English and to explore the potential within logographic writing systems to capture character-based pictorial irony and visual entendre. 

With ChatGPT and other generative AI challenging educators to rethink how to manage writing in their classrooms, this project feels timely in terms of decentering the essay and building on the multi-modal communicative explorations that have been a hallmark of CCP projects in GLS. 

Jason working in NY, and Sean working with internationally dispersed students through JIRS, will each present on distinct aspects of the CJP process, and share materials produced by their individual student groups, along with non-NYU participants, and students participating in London, who come from various NYU schools and campuses.

This paper presents the history of Buratto, a statue of a Moorish black figure dating back to the 16th century held in the national museum of the Bargello in Italy. The object biography is presented in two registers: First, its figural transformation from a legless target in a 16th century Saracen joust to the helmeted, Perseus-like figure we find today; and second, its five centuries of survival through five different Italian institutions to appear at NYC's Met Breuer’s Like Life exhibit in 2018  to figure into a global discourse about race, colonialism, and being human.  In the post-unification period, the Buratto was brought into the gallery of armours at the Bargello as a prop for the sake of displaying his Medusa shield. Despite being a Florentine manufacture, it was moved to the Museum of Anthropology in the 20th century, categorized among an inventory of collected objects featuring peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  Then, after the 2015 ReSignifications conference at NYU Florence, which shot the statue into a global discourse of representation of black bodies in European art, it was brought to the Met Breuer’s Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body exhibit as a participant artifact in the global discourse about sculpture and the simulation of bodies. Strikingly, the Africana readings of the ReSignifications conference has brought Buratto’s body, the figure, the Moor, out of a local reading of the Tuscan context and propelled him into a global and interdisciplinary discourse on racialized representation. It is this reading, which has given us the imperative to look for hidden archives for the possible reframing of entire archives of the human, that will be addressed in my presentation.