Decolonizing Together?
Awareness, Theory, Practice
Symposium
Friday / May 21, 2021 / 9-4pm
The 1-day virtual symposium in May 2021 brings together scholars, teachers, faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from within and beyond UConn to explore and examine theories and discussions started during the first year. We then seek to share ideas and begin building practices on awareness-raising and de-centering whiteness in curricula and classrooms. Former presenters, José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, Nicole Coleman, Dwight Lewis, Ervin Malakaj and Terry Osborn will help facilitate the two workshops, following the Special Talk and the Roundtable.
Talk + Roundtable + Workshops
TALK
“Refusing Settler Memory”
Settler memory is a problem endemic and fundamental to settler colonial societies such as the United States. Settler memory refers to the way in which a settler society habitually reproduces memories of Indigenous people’s history and of settler colonial violence as part of the past and in the same moment undercuts the contemporary political relevance of this memory by disavowing the presence of Indigenous people as contemporary agents and of settler colonialism as a persistent shaping force. What I call the work of settler memory thus refers to a process of remembering and disavowing Indigenous political agency, colonialist dispossession, and violence toward Indigenous peoples. It is an urgent political matter, especially for those of us who are white settlers, of settler ancestry, to refuse settler memory so as to center Indigenous people’s politics and anti-colonial pedagogies, logics, and activism. This talk will walk through my own history of working in the fields of Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, of realizing the role of settler memory, and how the concept shapes my approach to teaching and political activism. I will also offer thoughts for how refusing settler memory can help expand and rethink one’s pedagogical and research approaches across many fields.
ROUNDTABLE
Ximena Buendía, Florian Kastner, Angela Pitassi, Anna Reynders, and Isabell Sluka (University of Connecticut)
“Building bridges” - Towards a more interdisciplinary and collaborative future in anti-racist education
Decolonial theory and practice are playing an increasingly important role in disciplines like language education and teacher training. At the same time, a lot of this work still happens within disciplinary boundaries. There is very little dialogue or exchange of experiences and ideas.
In this discussion, we want to think about ways of how we, as future educators, can build bridges across disciplines and engage in this work together. What do our disciplines have in common? In which ways can we contribute to enhance social justice, in our classrooms and beyond? And what are some of the challenges? By addressing these and other questions, we hope to set the stage for a fruitful exchange between educators and, most importantly, students whose experiences are at the center of our work. Our aim is that these different perspectives add to a more comprehensive understanding of what it takes to create language and culture classrooms that serve and attract a diverse student population.
Special Guest
"Palabreando" with Manuel Antonio Ussa Tunubalá
From the sacred mountains of the great Misak Nation, who are children of the water and the rainbow, we walk along the path that our ancestral authorities have traced, our wise Misak men and women who today are ancestral witnesses of our existence in the great Kauka. I extend a fraternal greeting to all people, spiritual beings and ancestral authorities who will surely be accompanying us in our sacred circle of word and medicine.
During this talk I will share with you the importance of assuming our historical, political and spiritual duty. We depart from the empowerment of our energy of divinity, appropriating our capacity for spiritual overcoming, to the point of creating new universes that can allow us significant changes and transformations in our personal and collective life. Mayanken unkua unkua pay...
Bio:
Manuel Antonio Ussa Tunubalá is a Student of Political Studies and Conflict Resolution at University of Valle. He was born in Silvia Cauca on November 28, 1990, and is the third son of Agustin Ussa Trochez and Elena Tunubala Morales. He studied elementary and high school at the Guambiana Agricultural and Livestock Educational Institution, was a leader of the youth movement peace managers sponsored by the NGO World Vision in 2011, elected governor of the Indigenous University Council of the Misak University in 2013, and was part of the board of the Indigenous University Council of University of Valle in the periods 2016 and 2017.
Currently, he is a student representative to the Council of the Institute of Education and Pedagogy IEP, 2019-2021, and a member of the Council of Taitas and Mamas representing the Misak youth in the great confederation of Misak Cabildos "NU NACHAK" for the period 2020-2023. He is a walker (caminante) of ancestral medicine by family inheritance through which he has been positioning political action as a healing and restorative experience.
Schedule
9:00am: Welcome and introduction of the initiative - with Katharine Capshaw, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Dr. Saran Stewart, Associate Professor and Director of Global Education, NEAG School
9:30 - 10:30am: Kevin Bruyneel - "Refusing Settler Memory"
10:30- 10:45am: Coffee Break
10:45am to 12pm: Workshop 1: Setting the Scene
In this workshop we will discuss questions and issues brought forth during the Special Talk, with particular emphasis on applications in the participants' contexts.
12 - 12:30pm: Lunch Break
12:30 - 1: 45pm: "Palabreando" with Manuel Antonio Ussa Tunubalá & “Building bridges - Towards a more interdisciplinary and collaborative future in anti-racist education" with translations by José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia
2:00 - 3:15 pm: Workshop 2: Listening to all Voices
In this workshop we will discuss questions and issues brought forth during the Roundtable, with particular emphasis on learning to listen and planning next-steps for sustainable collaboration.
3:15 - 3:30 pm: Coffee Break
3:30-4 pm: Discussion and Next-Steps