Learning how to be a scyborg: how prefigurative organisations can promote capacity to decolonialise organisations

Abstract

How can people acquire the capacity and community to potentially move institutions, such that they are change-promoting organisations? La paperson’s (2017) scyborg describes how within organisations, members can repurpose colonial practices for decolonised, transformative goals. My research suggests that prefigurative organisations can offer spill-over effects by strengthening the experiential organising repertoire and ties of scyborgs across organisations. Using my own experiences, I examine how my participant observations at a democratic independent school and its growing global network have informed my efforts to infuse conventional organisations, including my public university, with liberatory practices. Conventional organisations blur boundaries and thereby promote overwork, obscure work often performed by minoritised members and encourage networking for transactional purposes. In contrast, scyborgs’ transformative practices: (a) make invisible and usually devalued and extracted work visible; (b) encourage and support voice and member-led efforts; and (c) cultivate relations as avenues for mutual growth.