Courageous Conversations: Decolonization, Disciplines, and Indigenous Knowledges in the University

The theme of the 2021-2022 Courageous Conversation Speaker Series is, “Decolonization, Disciplines, and Indigenous Knowledges in the University." 

In her presentation, Dr. Marie Battiste will focus on how disciplinary colonialism and Indigenous knowledges form a split that has been created and continues to be reinforced within contemporary universities and in the K-12 education system. In early education, through to high school, there’s been a piecemeal approach to building up to specialized disciplinary knowledges. Dr. Battiste will explain how this additive approach functions to maintain the coloniality of the education system through its supposed rationalized structures, and why decolonizing knowledges and curricula matter to universities. 

In her presentation, Dr. Catherine Odora Hoppers will focus on the higher education system, especially the disciplines of law, science, and economics. It will focus on education with a small “e,” the discipline and subject-based western education. It will also discuss Education with a capital “E,” as focusing on life-long learning, and life ward learning, including the ethics of our connections to the planet, and relationships as reflected in the philosophy of Ubuntu. The presentation will show how economics, science, and law can operate to produce false universalisms. Drawing on decades of research and policy work in South Africa, Uganda, and world-wide, Dr. Hoppers will explain why cognitive justice is necessary for all forms and traditions of knowledge to co-exist without duress in the public sphere.