Description
In recent years, calls to decolonize the academy have become increasingly salient. Scholars have, for instance, generatively critiqued the persistent erasure of non-Western, Black, and Indigenous knowledge in university curricula and in research. Nevertheless, the decolonization agenda is laden with contradictions. Scholars have posited, for example, that decolonization requires material commitments, such as the return of Indigenous lands and historical reparations, as well as the wider transformation of not just of the political economy of academic knowledge production but also of the colonial local and global societies in which higher education institutions are embedded. This paper builds on these critical assessments of the decolonization agenda to push at its boundaries. Based on Maré from the Inside, a 10-year collaborative arts-based project co-organized by researchers, artists, and community organizers in Brazil, the US, and the UK, the co-authored paper will discuss the material, epistemological, and structural demands and contradictions of collaborative work that aims to further the decolonization agenda in higher education. In so going, it will investigate the role of arts-based, collaborative methodologies in the call to decolonize academia.
