Bu Cheryl Jacob

Introduction What do concepts of ‘de/coloniality’ and ‘postcolonial’ mean for current critical scholarship? During this two-day workshop, organized by the KITLV and Leiden University, we will explore why and how this question matters to scholars today. Together with two internationally renowned keynote speakers; Dr Priyamvada Gopal and Professor Dr Walter Mignolo, and several early career and senior scholars, we aim to reflect upon and deepen critical awareness of our past and present academic positions and practices in relation to the call to decolonize academia that has recently intensified inside and outside of academic institutes worldwide.

Humanities across Borders: An Experiment in Decolonial Pedagogy HaB Academic Director Aarti Kawlra will be participating in a panel on Education and Decoloniality on the first day of the workshop (8 October), discussing the Humanities across Borders programme.

‘Humanities across Borders’: Some experiments in decolonial curricula and pedagogies Humanities across Borders: Asia and Africa in the World (HaB) is a network of universities in parts of Asia, West Africa, Europe and North America, committed to re-imagining humanities education. The program uses the model of the workshop as a collaborative space of critical inquiry to reflect upon knowledge production and classroom pedagogies in the academy. The idea is to counterpoise global higher education practices that are often unequal and western-centric. For example, when theory and method come from the North and field data from the South; or when syllabi and textbooks written by scholars from Northern universities are used to teach students in the South. The program provides spaces for open dialogue between academia and society along the Asia-Africa axis of knowledge. We are experimenting with several collaborative formats for the co-production of syllabi and pedagogies beyond the classroom, including local wisdom fellowships, practitioner led pop-up courses, neighbourhood museums, learning- by-doing schools and in situ community-based roundtables. These formats render curricula more responsive to lived forms of knowledge and modes of transmission. Adaptive to the everyday realities of the student-teacher-practitioner ecology, these border-crossing spaces of exchange provide the first glimpses of what decolonial humanities education and pedagogic practice might look like.

More details about the workshop and information on the events and speakers is available at the following link: Workshop: Academic Research in a Decolonizing World