Papers, Chapters, Journal Articles by Dallas Hunt
Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education., 2020
In this article, we reflect on learnings from our collaborative efforts to engage with the comple... more In this article, we reflect on learnings from our collaborative efforts to engage with the complexities and challenges of decolonization across varied educational contexts within the Americas. To do so, we consider multiple interpretations of decolonization, and multiple dimensions of decolonial theory and practice. Rather than offer normative definitions or prescriptions for what decolonization entails or how it should be enacted, we seek to foster greater sensitivity to the potential circularities in this work, and identify opportunities and openings for responsible, context-specific collective experiments with otherwise possibilities for (co)existence. Thus, we emphasize a pedagogical approach to decolonization that works with and through complexity, uncertainty, and complicity in order to "stay with the trouble."
Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada
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This paper addresses the decolonizing potential of Indigenous counter-mapping in the context of (... more This paper addresses the decolonizing potential of Indigenous counter-mapping in the context of (what is now called) Canada. After historicizing cartography as a technique of colonial power, and situating Indigenous counter-mapping as an assertion of political and intellectual sovereignty, we examine the digital map of Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Plains Cree for Edmonton, Alberta) produced by the Pipelines Collective, which overlays Treaty 6 Indigenous maps onto ‘conventional’ maps to denaturalize and challenge colonial renderings of city space. We then discuss the expanding trend of guerrilla mapping techniques engaged in by Indigenous groups, emphasizing the Ogimaa Mikana project in Toronto, wherein Anishinaabemowin names were stickered over settler street names. Expanding the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau and Gilles Deleuze, and drawing on the research and insights of Indigenous scholars Jodi Byrd and Mishuana Goeman, our paper considers how emerging digital counter-mapping efforts offer ambivalent possibilities for Indigenous peoples to assert their presence in material ways.
This article presents a social cartography of responses to the violences of modernity and uses th... more This article presents a social cartography of responses to the violences of modernity and uses this cartography to analyse different meanings and practices of decolonization in the context of higher education. As a pedagogical rather than normative exercise, we have tried to map tensions, paradoxes and contradictions we have observed in different responses to the violences of modernity. We start with a brief synthesis of selected literature that outlines the challenges of engaging pedagogically with critiques of modernity. We then present our tentative cartography of responses to modernity’s violence. Next, we apply the cartography to the literature on higher education focusing on interpretations and practices of decolonization. We conclude with some reflections on the challenges of developing a different relationship to modernity’s grammar in the task of being taught by a violent system in crisis.
Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 2017
In this article we address the current context of intensified racialized state securitization by ... more In this article we address the current context of intensified racialized state securitization by tracing its roots to the naturalized colonial architectures of everyday modern life—which we present through the metaphor of "the house modernity built." While contemporary crises are often perceived to derive from external threats to the house, we argue that in fact these crises are a product of the violent and unsustainable practices that are required in order to build and sustain the house itself. As the structural integrity of the house increasingly comes under strain, there are different possible responses, three of which we review here. We conclude by asking what kind of education might enable us to imagine and practice alternative formations of existence in a context where the house appears to be crumbling, and, indeed, has always been a fantasy.
Book Reviews by Dallas Hunt
Available to read here: https://canlit.ca/article/resurgent-indigenous-identities-in-urban-spaces/
Drafts by Dallas Hunt
New and resurgent movements to decolonise higher education are increasingly found throughout the ... more New and resurgent movements to decolonise higher education are increasingly found throughout the globe in the context of settler colonies, former colonies, and former colonial metropoles alike. As Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars located in what is currently known as Canada, in this chapter, we reflect on what we have learned from mainstream efforts to address the country’s history of harm toward Indigenous peoples, and specifically, to address the ongoing role of higher education in colonialism. These efforts have created precarious openings for not only reflecting on but also transforming universities within a still-colonial society. Without dismissing the possibilities enabled by these openings, we find that in practice many circular patterns emerge that reproduce underlying colonial ways of knowing, doing, desiring, and being that make up the primary infrastructures of modern modes of existence. While the mainstream academic imperative would require that we follow-up this diagnosis with prescriptive solutions for how to interrupt these colonial patterns in order to arrive at a predetermined decolonised future (decolonisation as a singular event), we suggest instead that decolonisation requires a long-term commitment to sit with and work through our individual and collective investments in harmful patterns so that we might disinvest from them and learn to be otherwise (decolonisation as an ongoing process). Particularly in the context of contemporary crises that are themselves a product of harmful and unsustainable modes of life – climate change, political instability, economic insecurity – only the latter approach to decolonisation offers the potential to open up new possibilities for current and future generations to learn to live together differently on a finite planet. Our conception of decolonisation takes on a holistic view, one that transcends or rather challenges an anthropocentric worldview and begins to take seriously our collective commons as the starting point for conversation around justice, in its substantive form. Further, in this context, the need for alternative horizons of possibility takes on a renewed urgency.
We begin the chapter by briefly reviewing the primary dimensions of colonialism and current efforts to address colonialism in the Canadian higher education context, so as to situate our contribution. Then, we review critical commentaries on the limits of approaches to decolonisation that are premised on the inclusion of (Indigenous) difference and do little to address the underlying colonial conditions of possibility for the institution. Rather than diagnose the problem of inclusion as one of tokenism that can be addressed through more radicalised inclusion (e.g. centring marginalised knowledges), we suggest that inclusion itself is a flawed proposition as it presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities. In order to gesture toward what might be possible if we did not presume that the modern/colonial university can or should be salvaged, we propose two pedagogical invitations that gesture toward the decolonisation of higher education as a complex, multi-layered process of learning to be otherwise: 1) Starting and staying with the complexities and difficulties involved in making change, including the structural complicity of those making change, so as to develop the necessary stamina for long-term transformation; 2) Drawing on Santos’s notion of an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, while developing the ability to discern the contextually-relevant gifts and limitations of all ways of knowing, so as to ultimately cultivate socially, historically, and ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking.
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Papers, Chapters, Journal Articles by Dallas Hunt
Book Reviews by Dallas Hunt
Drafts by Dallas Hunt
We begin the chapter by briefly reviewing the primary dimensions of colonialism and current efforts to address colonialism in the Canadian higher education context, so as to situate our contribution. Then, we review critical commentaries on the limits of approaches to decolonisation that are premised on the inclusion of (Indigenous) difference and do little to address the underlying colonial conditions of possibility for the institution. Rather than diagnose the problem of inclusion as one of tokenism that can be addressed through more radicalised inclusion (e.g. centring marginalised knowledges), we suggest that inclusion itself is a flawed proposition as it presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities. In order to gesture toward what might be possible if we did not presume that the modern/colonial university can or should be salvaged, we propose two pedagogical invitations that gesture toward the decolonisation of higher education as a complex, multi-layered process of learning to be otherwise: 1) Starting and staying with the complexities and difficulties involved in making change, including the structural complicity of those making change, so as to develop the necessary stamina for long-term transformation; 2) Drawing on Santos’s notion of an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, while developing the ability to discern the contextually-relevant gifts and limitations of all ways of knowing, so as to ultimately cultivate socially, historically, and ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking.
We begin the chapter by briefly reviewing the primary dimensions of colonialism and current efforts to address colonialism in the Canadian higher education context, so as to situate our contribution. Then, we review critical commentaries on the limits of approaches to decolonisation that are premised on the inclusion of (Indigenous) difference and do little to address the underlying colonial conditions of possibility for the institution. Rather than diagnose the problem of inclusion as one of tokenism that can be addressed through more radicalised inclusion (e.g. centring marginalised knowledges), we suggest that inclusion itself is a flawed proposition as it presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities. In order to gesture toward what might be possible if we did not presume that the modern/colonial university can or should be salvaged, we propose two pedagogical invitations that gesture toward the decolonisation of higher education as a complex, multi-layered process of learning to be otherwise: 1) Starting and staying with the complexities and difficulties involved in making change, including the structural complicity of those making change, so as to develop the necessary stamina for long-term transformation; 2) Drawing on Santos’s notion of an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, while developing the ability to discern the contextually-relevant gifts and limitations of all ways of knowing, so as to ultimately cultivate socially, historically, and ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking.