北田農園
冬が来る時
いちご狩り
Kitada Farms
When winter comes
Strawberry picking
This semester I’ve taught some of my gaming friends. When I told them about the Mushroom at the End of the World, one of them wrote this haiku:
Autumn has brown leaves
I must go outside to rake
It is such a chore
-Willie shi
For this week, please read excerpts from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s, Mushroom at the End of the World (ch1, “Arts of Noticing”). An optional reading is “The Spark Bird” by CUNY professor Emily Raboteau.
Follow up on the reading(s) with the *real* assignment for the week: Do something that brings you life (take a walk, read poetry, have a new experience). Our first question for you is:
The second prompt for this week is an open-ended pedagogy round-up question:
The podcast was so amazing.
With this week’s theme of reconstructing educational spaces I wanted to presence the ways in which I have made some shifts in educational spaces. About 2 years ago I started a student led podcast at an alternative high school I worked at. Below is a podcast we created. Students were able to receive class credit for this as a “Graded Assignment”. Students picked the topic and questions.
truth be told it’s been hard completing assignments this weekIf Goes like I’ve been holding my breath. Just a few minutes ago the verdict was right on the George Floyd case and I can’t help but to feel sad and happy at the same time. Justice has been served, but at the cost of another Black life, another life, another personhood.
“I do not know if decolonization is possible and it feels like the term has become a catchphrase. I see decolonization stickers on people’s computers and there’s an irony in that—a sign that our movement has been branded.” (Wilson and Laing, 136)
It’s hard to think about decolonization within CUNY or academia, Part of me wants this work to stay outside of this realm in order to dismantle the systems and structures because, like many, systems it becomes co-opted. Decolonization will become the “it” term for the year. Some funds will be moved from here to there.
But the system will remain.
But so will the work
And that is where you can find me.
I agree with Wilson’s and Laing’s sentiment that decolonization is impossible. The current iteration of America was intentionally established using colonial principles and practices. The same principles and practices now permeate and reverberate through all aspects of society – including education. The roots that were planted when America was founded have now grown and expanded to be culturally all-encompassing. I cannot envision the colonizing web that was created and that has caught so many domains can be untangled without significant collateral and residual damage to the interconnected infrastructures. Then again, maybe that is the point – to rebuild from the ground up.
The commitment to decolonizing…
Rodríguez’s piece underscores a central theme in neoliberal conversations of colonization. Decolonizing means that we rid ourselves of the notion and responsibility of race. We are no longer different, we’re all one, but in being one we all adhere to the same standards: those set in place by the colonizer before race got eradicated.
In reality, decolonization is a challenge to create new systems in light of historical oppression. It’s an opportunity to live devoid of societal conceptions that have ignored the nuanced reality of oppression, disenfranchisement, and the insidious nature of privilege, i.e. rewarding professors for attending conferences of publishing without establishing mechanisms and providing resources that make publishing and conference attendance a likelihood for all academics and faculty members regardless of background or university-type (i.e. waving fees, providing transport, having a readily-available resource board of journals looking for papers).
This week’s reading reminded me of a tweet I stumbled upon at the height of protests last summer. The tweet suggests an alternate reality where we give up on key components of our modern corporate scheme, i.e.: Linkedin, competition, nepotism. The tweet’s writer doesn’t challenge the system to let up on these things, but to give them up entirely, thus making them obsolete and contextless.
“Where is the humanity in the humanities? Why are the humanities failing humans? Are the humanities killing the human spirit? Am I considered a human in the humanities?”
by Clelia O. Rodríguez
Why might Rodríguez make the structural/style choices that we see in the reading?
Rodriguez’s structural and style choices directly opposes normative ways of knowing, writing, and research within academia. She goes onto explain as to how future academics are given the “writing norms” and “behaviours” to ensure assimilation into the institution at-large. Thus, disseminating the same colonial paradigms onto the next generation of scholars. Deconstructing common high-ed practices that add to this process such as grading, syllabi, research work and conferences allows for both faculty and students to begin pushing past decolonizing theory, and into the field of praxis.
Her writing feels like a poem at times, that uses personal anecdotes regarding sexuality, class, and ethnicity to establish a readers positionality to her own struggles of oppression and pain within academia. She goes onto state, “Living in the margins of vocabulary explicitly smells like disobedience” which is why I connect her writings as a form of intellectual activism as well.
Rodriguez has provided us with various forms to express de-colonialism. Below is my own completed fill in the blanks for politics of assessment:
A is for Advantages
B is for Benefactors
C is for Contained
D is for Defenseless
F is for Fcuked
