Decolonial Praxis Research Articles

Examining climate change and sustainable/fast fashion in the 21st century: ‘Trash the Runway’

Abstract We interrogate fast fashion in the 21st century in the context of a changing climate, assessing emergent trends in sustainable fashion as an alternative consumption pathway through the annual ‘Trash the Runway’ event in Boulder, Colorado. In this research, we interviewed and surveyed designers and analyzed workshop activities that led up to their annual fashion show. We also interviewed and surveyed students at the University of Colorado who worked with designers to produce short films about them and their work. The project centers on decolonial practice by providing —who are often marginalized in decision-making processes—a stage to articulate policy and behavior changes to address climate change and sustainability. We found designers expressed reticence before the workshops and events to speak about climate change in everyday life, yet their design work creatively spoke powerfully for them, and they expressed less discomfort after the experience, while they advanced their skillset as climate communicators. Moreover, we found both designers and student partners reported that they think climate change will impact people greatly in the future. Also, while comparatively fewer respondents reported that climate change impacts them personally, our findings showed those noting personal impacts nearly doubled after participation in the sustainable fashion project. Although engagement with sustainable fashion helps to defetishize production processes and link consumption habits with awareness of climate and environmental change, more creative work should be done through fast- and sustainable-fashion endeavors to draw out spatial and temporal considerations of climate change threats here and now.

A Host of Possibilities

In 2012, Okwui Enwezor was appointed artistic director of the third iteration of La Triennale, which he titled Intense Proximité (IP). While Enwezor had the credentials to legitimize the French art scene, he was also keenly aware of his own revolving roles as guest and host. This article considers his exhibition-making practice within the context of hospitality. Conventionally, hospitality entails warmly welcoming guests to make themselves at home. This interaction between guest and host involves not only implicit codes of etiquette and manners but also an economy of exchange that revolves around constant transaction and negotiation. In general, a curator’s duties are similar to those of a host in setting up the conditions to welcome a diverse array of artists, ideas, and viewers into a designated space. Keeping in mind how curating, in the words of Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton, is also “a kind of intimate, intersubjective, interrelational obligation,” Enwezor never presumed his role as positionality to be sovereign. The first half of the article introduces the concept of hospitality and sets up Enwezor’s curatorial premise of IP. The second half mobilizes his curatorial practice as a means to open up ways to reconceive hospitality as a site of interruption, absolution, and abolition, and it reaffirms scholarship that conceives Enwezor’s exhibition making as a decolonial practice.

“Method and meaning”: Storytelling as decolonial praxis in the psychology of racialized peoples

In psychology, there is a growing recognition of how racialized groups are often dehumanized and pathologized, and how racist and colonial legacies still inform our research and practices today. In order to dismantle racism within academic institutions we must decolonize and indigenize psychological science. One promising strategy is the use of storytelling methodology wherein participants from racialized groups share their lived experiences. However, the process of how storytelling contributes to decolonization is rarely explained, and decolonization is rarely defined. The present paper systematically reviewed studies that examined racialized individuals’ lived experience using storytelling methodology in order to synthesize conceptualizations of decolonization and of how storytelling contributes to decolonizing psychological research. Findings suggest storytelling meaningfully contributes to decolonial praxis in psychology. Researchers must work consciously and collaboratively, center research around liberating racialized communities, and explicitly define how their study decolonizes in order to be accountable to their community of study and to the colonial history of the lands on which they're situated.

Radical sovereignty, rhetorical borders, and the everyday decolonial praxis of Indigenous peoplehood and Two-Spirit reclamation

ABSTRACT As settler colonialism has forcibly constricted vast expanses of Indigenous lands, criss-crossing them with superimposed borders, it has sought to redraw the boundaries of Indigenous identity by imposing definitions and categories that invariably lead to Indigenous diminishment. Strategic and eliminatory categorization is essential to the settler-colonial imperative. This essay explores settler-colonial exercises of rhetorical imperialism that deploy language, connotation, and categorization to dismantle Indigenous cultural systems. The author discusses the political stake in who is designated Indigenous, the drive to remake Indigenous nations in the image of the settler-state, the enforcement of cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist norms, and assimilationist strategies aiming to disrupt Indigenous formations of gender and kinship. The author argues that Indigenous assertions of peoplehood as a definitional and unifying framework and Two-Spirit as a self-identifier are acts of resistance that they term “oppositional identification” and “contrast mechanisms.” They are exercises of rhetorical and radical sovereignty, tantamount to everyday decolonization.

Towards a Decolonizing Kinesiology Ethics Model

ABSTRACT Kinesiology is a discipline that relies on colonial, scientific understandings of health and the moving body. In addition, ethics courses in Kinesiology predominantly draw from Eurocentric philosophies and legal paradigms. In this article, however, the authors propose a new model of ethics that adds a greater emphasis on decolonial praxis. This process of decolonizing Kinesiology ethics requires accounting for colonial legacies in curricula and acknowledging the power relations sustained by White, patriarchal, ableist, capitalist systems. Therefore, the proposed Decolonizing Kinesiology Ethics Model (DKEM) offers six heuristics to improve ethical work in a wide range of health and sport-related careers. They are: (a) social justice; (b) practitioner vulnerability; and (c) relationships in a social-political-historical context, alongside traditional ethical principles of (d) autonomy; (e) beneficence; and (f) non-maleficence.

Whispers of the Soul; Autohistoria-Teoría as Decolonial Knowledge Production

The imperative for decolonial research methodology has been long discoursed in academia. However, there remains a rift between dominant colonial research practices in the academy and the needs of researchers of color. In this article, I explore autohistoria-teoría as a decolonial research methodology by weaving between personal narrative, magical thinking, and contemporary academic discourse on autoethnographical research methods. I will exemplify both the uniqueness and importance of spirit in Anzaldúa’s iteration of autohistoria-teoría. Finally, I will challenge the academy’s perception of autoethnographical research methods as navel gazing and reframe autohistoria-teoría as decolonial praxis, and as such does not need adhere to the validity paradigm of western hegemonic knowledge production.

What would it mean to decolonize Detroit?

With Detroit as its principal site, this essay examines the possibility and the hope for developing a decolonial practice as part of the research in and of a “Black” city. What can we learn from De...

The messy work of decolonial praxis: insights from a creative collaboration among queer African youth

On the African continent, coloniality/modernity and the (un)freedom of queer peoples intersect in particular historically embedded and newly oppressive ways, making queerness a significant area for transformative struggles. This article draws from the learnings of a collaborative project, called the Qintu Collab, wherein queer African youth created an anthology of graphic stories and a set of podcasts based on their life experiences. The project aimed to link academic scholarship with art and activism through a specifically queer feminist perspective in an effort towards decolonising methodology; and to explore queer collaboration as an antidote to the coloniality of power of dominant western perspectives on queerness and the marginalisation of queer Africans, particularly in countries where same-sex sexuality is criminalised. Taking a feminist queer perspective, we explore the potential of participatory creative research as decolonial practice, to reveal the complex messy work of working together. Specifically, we address the question of when collaborations begin and how methodological decision-making takes place; assumptions about shared ideology and how ideological differences, in our case around notions of queer politics and personhood, are addressed within collaborative settings, as well as how the imagined audience shapes collaborative processes. Our learnings are pertinent for anyone undertaking participatory research collaboration as a transformative endeavour. We want to trouble the idea that participatory collaboration and creative methods are sufficient as decolonial practice. We found that early shared decision-making, (queer) insider research and creative methods were significant for raising and holding contestation and ideological difference, as well as enabling critical thinking and conscientisation. However, maintaining an open, collaborative process conducive to decolonial thinking and doing was hard, ongoing and imperfect work, as we constantly negotiated personal and structural conditions of coloniality.

Body and Gesture in Derek Walcott’s Theatre

Reflecting on Derek Walcott’s early relationship with movement, dance and ritual, this article sheds light on the centrality of embodied memory in Walcott’s work for the stage and reflects on the relationship between memory and materiality in his epistemology of performance. Walcott’s ideas shaped his approach to dramaturgy in the late 1950s and position his work in relation to global debates around materialism (Brecht) and ritualism (Grotowski) in the theatre. A discussion of two plays, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Pantomime, examines the use of gestural language in specific performances of each. Such an approach demonstrates that the importance of embodied memory, as reflected in the staging of these plays, relates to certain Afro-Caribbean belief systems, which have exerted much influence on Walcott’s work. The article also emphasizes how Walcott’s theatre functions as a decolonial praxis that fosters the emergence of empowered subjectivities and Africanist modes of humanness that challenge the cultural order of colonialism. Jason Allen-Paisant is a lecturer in Caribbean Poetics and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds, and Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He is currently at work on the monograph Staging Black Futures in the Twenty-First Century.

Binding Trauma

Binding Trauma

Cultural humility and decolonial practice: narratives of therapists’ lives

ABSTRACT Objective: Cultural competence has been critiqued as a flawed principle, focussed on mastery of cultural knowledge rather than critical reflection on race and privilege. Cultural humility is proposed as an alternative, emphasising accountability over mastery, involving critical self-reflection of personal biases and culture. This study aims to explore the development of cultural humility in psychological practice amongst nine clinicians, each of whom identify with journeys towards decolonial practice. Method: Interpretative narrative inquiries were conducted with nine therapists and personal/professional storylines were interpreted with the support of Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Cresswell, Karimova & Brock’s Pedagogy of the Privileged (2013). Results: Narrative inquiry revealed a spectrum of storylines which differed depending on the experience of dominant or non-dominant identities or an intersection between both. Five major processes contributing to cultural humility: (1) early childhood influences, (2) critical reflection, (3) contact, (4) cultural consultation, and (5) culturally responsive practices were found. Conclusions: Further research is required on the personal/professional development of therapists’ decolonial identities, including the exploration of how these processes can be taught in clinical psychology training curriculum. KEY POINTS Cultural humility differs from cultural competence in that it can involve a process of critical reflexivity concerning issues related to privilege, race and colonisation. Cultural humility can also be developed through practices of consultation with members of non-dominant cultures, focussed on accountability rather than a focus on competence or mastery Culturally responsive practices must be culturally safe and involve the adaptation of Western models or the practice of alternatives

Blending Feminist, Indigenous, and Participatory Action Research Methodologies: Critical Reflections from the Northeastern Ontario Research Alliance on Human Trafficking

This article critically reflects on the multiyear collaborative research project of the Northeastern Ontario Research Alliance on Human Trafficking. Drawing on the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, we present a methodological model that builds on the strengths and commonalities of feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and participatory action research (PAR). We analyze our research and decolonial praxis as a form of collaborative allyship with, by, and for Indigenous peoples, especially women and persons with lived experience in human trafficking and sex work. We highlight the gaps between theory and practice that have occurred in terms of control over the research, the actions that ensued from such gaps, and whose voice is represented. We also call attention to the power differentials operating not only between researchers and participants but also between the stakeholders whom we sought to engage. The article offers a set of lessons learned for others seeking to do social justice research in Indigenous-settler contexts, while also highlighting and theorizing the relatively successful aspects of our research.

Introduction: Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality, and "I"

Introduction:Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality, and "I" Alex Brostoff (bio) and Lauren Fournier (bio) This special issue convenes artistic practitioners with early-career and established scholars to engage the burgeoning field of autotheory. As a point of departure, we begin first and foremost with a conception of autotheory as an art of the present. By hailing autotheory as an "art," we bring together practicing autotheorists as well as scholars of autotheory—where the two are often one and the same. Intricately complicated, deliciously slippery: where to draw the line between the life and the work, between theory and practice? Does the attempt to draw a line in fact draw attention to the very impossibility of doing so? The line, it would appear, lies. Second, this issue spotlights the ways in which autotheory's distinctive deconstruction of theory and practice unsettles Eurocentric ways of knowing, proffering a method of responding to contemporary calls to decolonize. Contributors animate decolonial approaches to knowledge production and subject formation in visual, literary, and performance arts, while attending to the ways in which autotheory may participate in broader projects of decolonial praxis. Third and finally, in keeping with the politics and polyvocality of autotheory itself, this special issue sutures self to social to structural, underscoring their emergence as mutually constitutive and interdependent. If there is an autotheoretical turn, then it is a turning outward, traversing what autotheory does in translation and in citation, in postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous epistemologies, in transfeminisms and queer pedagogies, in the archive and beyond the academic industrial complex. [End Page 489] Fusing self-representation with philosophy and critical theory, autotheory moves between "theory" and "practice," between "living," "thinking," and "making."1 It is critical and it is creative; it is experiential and experimental; it is scholarly and it is popular. It brings theory to life and life to theory. It plays with personal polemic, positing a speaking self in the act of writing "I," and then, self-reflectively and self-reflexively, it deconstructs itself. Autotheory's genealogies spring from the institutions it seeks to critique. It privileges thinking with over thinking against; its politics of citation unveil its relations. From social media technologies to the publishing industry, from live performance to visual art, autotheory's escalating ubiquity in cultural production serves as a critical provocation: why autotheory and why now? What motivates the methodological melding of an autobiographical "I" with academic scholarship? And what implications does theorizing the self have for the politics of knowledge production, broadly conceived? Autotheory, this issue collectively contends, does not merely crop up on literary or theoretical grounds, nor do its roots grow solely in Euro-American soils. Considering the rapid rise of popular and scholarly interest in works like Paul B. Preciado's Testo Yonqui (Testo Junkie) (2008), Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014), Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2006), and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015), and renewed interest in works such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick (1997), among others, autotheory's recent popularization suggests a pressing need for analogous critical discourse. In the U.S., the term has garnered popular acclaim from Nelson's The Argonauts. And although Nelson credits Preciado with coining the neologism, the term has also emerged in other contexts, at other times. Stacey Young's Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (1997) introduces the [End Page 490] English-language adjective "autotheoretical" to describe queer women of color anthologies published by American indie presses in the early 1980s.2 Young's approach to the autotheoretical texts is linked to activism, illustrating how self-theorizing is bound not only to structural critique but to social change writ large. In this issue, we echo Young's insistence on the centrality of the work of queer women of color to the emergence of autotheory. In the past year alone, autotheory has been read both as "theory" and as "practice," although current definitions of the term remain limited by the particular genealogies they trace. In the introduction to "Autotheory Theory," a special issue...

An Immanent Critique of Decolonization Discourse

This piece argues that contemporary neoliberal UK universities are necessarily unable to enact decolonization owing to a contradiction between their business needs and a genuine commitment to the decolonial, which involves the complete dismantling of existing colonial discourse. Using the process of immanent critique modelled by Adorno, it is argued that the neoliberal university presents inherent contradictions that demand measurable knowledge, preordained by existing colonial epistemological boundaries. A scholar engaged in immanent critique may facilitate the potential for decolonial practices within, and against, the university apparatus.

“Love and Prayer Sustain Our Work” Building Collective Power, Health, and Healing as the Community Health Board Coalition

Over the course of the last few months, we have seen how structural racism has compounded the impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the United States, resulting in disparate rates of infection and death. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how the consequences of deeply entrenched inequities are fatal to BIPOC communities, whether death is a result of the novel coronavirus or the everyday violence of structural racism that manifests as poor health outcomes. We examine the formation of the Community Health Board Coalition (CHBC), a BIPOC-led organization in Washington state, to show how 15 communities have organized for health and healing amidst the collective trauma associated with COVID-19. We note that biopower—literally power over life, the unspeakable—and slow violence have been normalized and escalated in our communities. The use of an antiracist lens and decolonial practices have assisted us in our survivance (survival and resistance). We use autoethnography and testimonio as decolonial theory and method to give voice to individual and collective experiences that brought us to our roles as CHBC founding members and inaugural cochairs.

Think Piece: Learning, Living and Leading into Transgression – A reflection on decolonial praxis in a neoliberal world

Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a neoliberal world and its crisis times, particularly considering transgressions in the service of a decolonial future. The authors explore three questions: i) What kind of learning can help us transgress the status quo? ii) How do we extend this learning into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways? iii) What does it mean to lead in ways that re-generate a transgressive ethic in a neoliberal world? In a dialogical conversation format, the authors outline nine different but interconnected perspectives on learning, living and leading into transgression, with the aim of concurrently revealing the multiple layers of work that a decolonial future depends on, while demonstrating the ambitions of a pluriversal decolonial future through their writing. The intertwined narrative is not conclusive, as the processes marked out in brief are experiences that still need to be fully practised in new relations in times to come within academia-in-society-and-the-world with human and more-than-human actors. However, they do offer a generative set of questions, concepts and metaphors to give courage to boundary-dwelling scholar activists attempting transgressive research. These reflections seek to regenerate the transgressive ‘decolonial gestures’ (decolonialfutures.net) that we can undertake in a neo-liberal world, as an important part of environment and sustainability education practices. It draws out what an embodied practice of transgressive learning can entail when we become discerning of hegemonic discourses that reproduce the status quo. We pay homage to those decolonial scholars in the field of environment and sustainability education as we traverse this terrain, recognising their imagination and the transgressive movement that has come before us, but importantly we seek to also open pathways for those yet to come.

Movement from the margins to global recognition: climate change activism by young people and in particular indigenous youth

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on the recent global youth climate change movement in relation to theoretical considerations of Indigeneity, post-Anthropocentricism and decolonial practices. It then highlights the perspectives of several young climate activists, before considering a range of factors (‘elephants in the room’) that lurk behind the incapacity of our current practices to create spaces that provide opportunities for full expression of young people, particularly Indigenous young people, to articulate their political analyses and collectively advocate for ways of being in the world that will honour their values and aspirations.

Articulating worlds otherwise: decolonial geolinguistic praxis, multi-epistemic co-existence, and intercultural education and development programing in the Peruvian Andes

Focusing on key mediators of knowledge-exchange in the Andes – known as kamayoq – we explore a recursive politics of translation (historicized, power-laden processes of hierarchically ordering language and meaning). Focusing on intercultural and bilingual education and development programs in the Peruvian Andes, and connecting cultural geographical, anthropological, and critical socio-linguistic scholarship, we uncover how equivocations of Indigenous concepts reproduce a coloniality of knowledge and being. We explore how kamayoq re-purpose equivocations by reworking translations through Andean concepts and praxis, such as iskay yachay – a reciprocal dialogue among knowledges, which stresses epistemic multiplicity and diversity. We explore kamayoq praxis and iskay yachay as a decolonial geolinguistic praxis of articulating worlds (or ontologies) otherwise, in pursuit of multi-epistemic co-existence. Our findings raise questions about geographies of decolonial knowledges and praxis, particularly where potential decolonial praxis intersects with the formalized institutions of adult bilingual education and intercultural development programing.

BDS as the baseline of solidarity: toward a model of co-struggling with Palestinians in their movement for justice and liberation

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has made enormous gains for the Palestine solidarity movement by raising political consciousness about Palestine, shifting the public discourse and debate, as well as making inroads into municipal and federal advocacy. BDS has popularized solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and self-determination by offering a means of taking action through a coherent set of tactics and demands and by articulating the movement in universally understood framework of human rights and international law. Whereas BDS has been the dominant strategy for supporting the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation, it is one method of solidarity among others aimed at growing the abilities of Palestinians to be their own protagonists in the fight for their rights, national aspirations, and return to their homeland. This article argues that to address the conditions subduing Palestinian self-organizing, BDS efforts must be paralleled by additional strategies to bolster Palestinian movement-building and restore broad, participatory Palestinian leadership. Drawing from these experiences and the multiple spaces grappling with this question, the author offers four key ways that Palestine solidarity efforts can further shift from a model of solidarity to a model of co-struggling with Palestinians globally. In doing so, advocates for Palestinian freedoms can more effectively link anti-colonial modes of resistance—those intended to apply pressure to and weaken the colonial regime—with a decolonial praxis that enables Palestinians to cultivate their own methods toward rebuilding their society. Building on BDS as the baseline for solidarity, the author argues that solidarity activists can further strengthen the Palestinian liberation movement by working to reverse the conditions imposed by the Oslo Accords through understanding and confronting Zionism; centering Palestinian political prisoners and refugees in our work; endorsing alternative and independent funding models; and supporting Palestinian community organizing.

Bound by Sovereignty

Abstract Recently scholars have called for an Indigenous turn in medieval studies that challenges the historical assumptions of the field by actively engaging in a decolonial and anticolonial praxis. This essay argues that this turn must confront the problem of reciprocity that arises from distinct Indigenous and medieval articulations of sovereignty, which reveal the potential of this tenuous intersection despite the possibility of irreconcilable antagonisms. Tracing sovereignty—specifically through a “politics of recognition” as proposed by the Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard—in Dante’s Monarchia (and Paradiso) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony provides an analytic example of this comparative framework, since both authors challenge readers to question the imposition of authority and the logics that legitimate and justify dominant forms of governance. Yet Dante and Silko also draw on distinct articulations of sovereignty that suggest the limitations of decolonial and anticolonial praxis within a field bound to a Western episteme that underwrites colonial and imperial authority.