Description
Premised upon the urgency of mitigating coloniality in the classroom, this paper advocates for arts-based methods as a decolonial practice for teaching and learning IR. It draws from the authors' experiences as educator and learner in a collage-making workshop organised as part of a 'Securitisation of Migration' module. We argue that turning the classroom into a site of image production, through collage-making, elicited reflexivity upon seemingly abstract concepts and empirical realities and enriched the potential to challenge hegemonic knowledge. Thus, the classroom became a site of possible contestation against the institutionalisation of Security repertoires. Through autoethnography, the paper presents three stops in the journeys of both educator and learner: i. the preparatory stage of the workshop, ii. the collage-making activity, and iii. the collage as an output. This work contributes to the ongoing debates of decolonising higher education and scholarly efforts to address (de)securitisation theory’s colonial, gendered and racialised dimensions.
