What: A conference convened by Bucknell’s Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures on Decolonial Education and Liberatory Learning has been organized to bring together a group of scholars, artists, and practitioners at all stages of career and life who are interested in the intersections of these particular subjects in Africa and its Diasporas historically over the longue durée or in the contemporary world. One important aim is to facilitate a dialogue across the various academic and professional disciplines through a collection of panels, roundtables and performances that discuss participants’ scholarship, essays, artistic creations, lesson plans, activist work, or other experimental genres on decoloniality, education, liberation, and/or learning.
Who: Scholars, Artists, Activists in all fields are invited to submit proposals. We encourage early career scholars and students to join the conference.
When: Proposals by February 15, 2025
Conference March 28-30, 2025
Where: Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania USA
Keynote Speakers: Justin Hosbey, J.T. Roane, Michael Sawyer, and Teona Williams
The Griot Institute 2025 conference theme, Decolonial Education and Liberatory Learning, centers the yearning for and active creation of decoloniality in African and Diasporan intellectual, artistic, activist, professional and educational traditions. The conference theme raises critical questions about decoloniality, education, liberation, and learning. What does a decolonial education look and feel like? What is a liberatory learning experience? Do these vary across time and space? How do the contingencies of context make education and learning colonial, decolonial, oppressive, and/or liberatory? We will critically analyze the legacies of colonialism, the erasures of non-European ways of thinking and doing, the persistent practices of anti-blackness, and how we might apply decolonial approaches in reclaiming alternative strategies in our lives. A decolonial approach offers alternative conceptualizations and examples of how to exist in the world, including how to interact with knowledge. What do we imagine as possible outcomes of decolonial education and liberatory learning?
Building on Toni Morrison’s vision of a clearing, the conference is designed to create a clearing for participants to share ideas and discuss projects and visions. We will grapple with what it means and how to create decolonial education and liberatory learning. The aim is to foster conversations to share feedback on current work and build intellectual and artistic community for future projects.
Submit your work
Deep historical work, theoretical work, artistic and creative work, teaching modules, performance, as well as experimental approaches are all welcome. Presentation format can be creative, interactive, roundtables, or formal papers. All methodological approaches are welcome. The deadline for submission of proposals is February, 15 2025.
Proposal abstracts should be in Word or PDF format, address some aspect of the theme, be 250-300 words and include details on title, methodological approaches, creative elements, presentation format and presenter(s) names, affiliations, and short bio (25-100 words).
Please submit abstracts, preferably in Word or PDF format, with the subject Decolonial Education and Liberatory Learning to conference conveners at griot@bucknell.edu. Queries may be addressed to symposium convener Dr. Cymone Fourshey at griot@bucknell.edu.
A decision on all proposals will be made by February, 20 2025. Accepted proposals will be presented at the conference March 28-30, 2025.
Themes to consider:
- Africa and/or its Diasporas through a Decolonial Lens
- Art as a Decolonial Praxis
- Art that calls for new possibilities
- Black Ecologies
- Building and Eroding: Authority, Power, and Privilege
- Building Communities and Visions
- Colonial Pathologies: Genders, Families, and Generations
- Decolonial Histories (Globally)
- Decolonial Philosophy
- Decolonial Ways of Learning
- Decolonizing Biology, Sex and Gender
- Decolonizing Indigenous Histories
- Educating Generations Despite Enslavement (1525–1888)
- Education and Settler Colonialism (1492–present)
- Education in the Atlantic Expansion (1440–1600)
- Family History and Generation: Storytelling
- Food Sovereignty
- Health and Well Being
- Hegemonic Knowledge Systems
- Histories of Education and Learning
- Language as a Decolonial Tool
- Prison Education ReVisioned
- Sonic Narratives and Geography
- University Histories told by Black Students – 150 Years at PWIs
Approaches to Consider:
Kihana Miraya Ross and Jarvis R. Givens echo Morrison’s theory of the clearing as a space of creativity and security when they commit to “carving out space — a clearing, if you will — for Black folks to sit with the weight of antiblackness in education while also engaging in the political act of freedom dreaming, to imagine strategies for wrestling with our educational realities while building toward more just educational futures.”
Decolonial theory and strategies envision, draw upon and deploy thinking, institutions and language that existed before and beyond colonial theory and praxis.
A decolonial approach does not confine itself to critiques of colonial epistemes and world order; it demands employing heterarchical approaches to knowledge.
Pushing against post-colonial theorists, Claire Gallien (جالیان كلیر) contends that “the decolonial turn is not about augmenting and elevating Western episteme with new content. Rather, … it clears a space for other epistemologies and cosmovisions to circulate in Western academia.”
If decoloniality is a gesture that de-normalizes and problematizes normative epistemologies while bolstering formations that were repressed or erased under coloniality, how might we apply decoloniality in our practices of education and learning?