Reconnections: remembering land when the university wants us to forget

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, we describe how activist and creative impulses led to the establishment of the Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE Lab) at the University of New Mexico. The mission of the lab is rooted in a Pluriversal vision of environmental pedagogy, pulling from Indigenous ways of knowing to inform a creative practice that challenges the mechanisms of purposeful forgetting at the center of the modern public university. We offer critique of today’s “land grab” university that inspired our campus activism, specifically the ways the MUVE Lab seeks to rebuild and reconnect to the lands on which our academic institutions stand.