Papers, Chapters, Journal Articles by Sharon Stein
About Campus, 2024
Extreme weather and wildfires around the globe, and increasingly sobering assessments about proje... more Extreme weather and wildfires around the globe, and increasingly sobering assessments about projected futures by researchers, activists, and global leaders have led to a growing consensus that we are at a turning point when it comes to the social and ecological impacts of climate change. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (2022a) has observed that, when it comes to climate change, humanity has a stark choice to make: “collective action or collective suicide.” He also warned we are facing a “biodiversity apocalypse” (Guterres, 2022b). This sense of alarm is shared by many students. According to a recent survey, 39% of US students said climate change is “the biggest issue facing the world today” (Cambridge International, 2020). Another survey of young people across 10 countries found that 59% of respondents felt “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change, and over 45% said it negatively affected their daily lives (Hickman et al., 2021). These findings are echoed in my own experience as a faculty member, as many students have expressed to me that they feel highly distressed by the state of the world they are inheriting. They also say they feel betrayed; they believe that previous generations have not done enough to prevent climate catastrophe, and that their university education is not preparing them to confront proliferating ecological crises.
Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, 2024
Critical and de-/post-/anti-colonial scholars of education have long pointed out that silence wit... more Critical and de-/post-/anti-colonial scholars of education have long pointed out that silence within a field of inquiry is rarely a naturally occurring absence; it is rather a product of socially sanctioned discourses and practices that actively create and reproduce this silence. When she published 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' over 35 years ago, Gayatri Spivak (1988) compellingly argued that colonialism's material, epistemic, and relational violences are not reproduced because the subaltern cannot or does not speak against these violences. Instead, these violences are reproduced because those of us who hold systemic power - including critical education scholars like myself located in the global North - refuse to actually hear and be moved by what the subaltern is saying. Even when we claim to be listening, we often unconsciously edit out what is unfamiliar or inconvenient, most of all that which implicates us in the violence that produces the divide between the powerful and the subaltern in the first place. This issue (39) of Policy and Practice offers a rich contribution to ongoing dialogues about how silences are reproduced and naturalised in global and development education, and how we might not only make this silencing visible but also expand our collective response-ability-that is, our ability to respond to what is being silenced-in more accountable ways. The level of interest in these matters is evident in the significant number of article submissions received. Yet, as I read through each of this issue's thoughtful contributions on silences in education, I was reminded that, paradoxically, we also find ourselves in a moment of increasing cacophony, where polarised perspectives compete for platform and audience. In one sense, 'difficult knowledges' continue to be ignored; in another sense, we are inhabiting an era of significant noise.
Facets, 2024
There is growing interest among Western-trained scientists in engaging with Indigenous sciences. ... more There is growing interest among Western-trained scientists in engaging with Indigenous sciences. This interest has arisen in response to social pressures to reckon with the colonial foundations of Western science and decentre Western ways of knowing, as well as recognition of the need to draw upon the gifts of multiple knowledge systems to address today's many complex social and ecological challenges. However, colonial patterns and power relations are often reproduced at the interface between Western and Indigenous sciences, including the reproduction of epistemic Eurocentrism and extractive modes of relationship between settlers and Indigenous Peoples. This paper seeks to support Westerntrained scientists to recognize and interrupt these patterns in order to create the conditions for more ethical, respectful, and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous sciences. We also offer a map of the different ways that Western sciences have thus far engaged Indigenous sciences. We particularly highlight the emergent possibilities offered by a reparative approach to engagement that emphasizes the responsibility of Western science to enact material and relational repair for historical and ongoing harm, including by supporting Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty in science and beyond.
Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2024
Despite the continued popularity of education for sustainable development (ESD) and expanded call... more Despite the continued popularity of education for sustainable development (ESD) and expanded calls for educators to inspire hope in the face of the climate and nature emergency, scholars from varied disciplines and knowledge systems have pointed to the disavowed social and ecological costs of the promise that we can continue pursuing infinite economic growth on a finite planet. In this article, we offer an alternative
approach to education grounded in a regenerative inquiry methodology. Regenerative inquiry can prepare people to honestly confront the limits and harms of “green growth” and support them to “grow up” by expanding their capacity to navigate complexity and uncertainty and activating a sense of intergenerational responsibility. We also offer an example of how this methodology was mobilized in the context of a year-long transdisciplinary program focused on the climate and nature emergency.
For nearly five centuries, universities around the globe have contributed to colonial social rela... more For nearly five centuries, universities around the globe have contributed to colonial social relations and unsustainable ecological practices (Andreotti et al., 2015; Boggs & Mitchell, 2018; Boidin, Cohen, & Grosfoguel, 2012; Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Grande, 2018; Hunt, 2022; La Paperson, 2017; Minthorn & Nelson, 2018; Patel, 2021; Stein, 2022; Stewart-Ambo & Yang, 2021; Tachine, 2022; Wilder, 2013). Many higher education institutions have been funded (directly or via donors) through the profits made through the slave trade and the expropriation and exploitation of dispossessed lands. University educators have played a central role in preparing graduates to serve as professionals who operationalize structures of domination and extraction in various sectors of society (Pidgeon, 2022). University researchers have also produced knowledge that has rationalized and operationalized the advancement of racial and colonial violence (genocide) (Wilder, 2013), ecological degradation (ecocide) (La Paperson, 2017), and the destruction as well as the appropriation of non-Western knowledge systems (epistemicide) (Dennis & Robin, 2020; Simpson, 2004; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999).
Over the past ten years, in response to social movements calling for racial and de-/anti-colonial justice, a growing number of colleges and universities around the world have made public commitments to address their legacies of colonialism and slavery. Such commitments take the form of public apologies, name changes, land acknowledgements, and various pledges to support students, faculty, and students of colour. However, critical scholars and activists point out that apologies, aspirational statements, and symbolic gestures of inclusion will ring hollow if they are not accompanied by more substantive commitments to enact restitution and interrupt ongoing colonial relations (Ahenakew, 2016; Daigle, 2019; Pidgeon, 2016; Jimmy & Andreotti, 2021). Critics observe these commitments tend to be calibrated by a perceived imperative to transcend complicity in harm in order to ensure the seamless futurity of the institution, rather than by a commitment to substantively repair that harm (Stein, 2022).
In this contribution, we offer a social cartography of different possible approaches to addressing universities’ roles in racial and colonial violence. In doing so, we invite critical and self-reflexive engagements with the assumptions and goals that orient these different approaches, rather than collapsing all conversations about racism and colonialism into matters of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). While we remain uncertain whether it is possible for universities to “right the wrongs that brought them into being” (Belcourt, 2018), we emphasize our collective responsibility to do the work of confronting the historical and ongoing role of universities in genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide, and mobilizing possibilities to enact material, relational, and epistemic repair alongside affected communities. Rather than assume we must know how to undertake this work at the outset, we suggest treating it as an ongoing, self-implicating inquiry through which we learn from the inevitable mistakes and failures alongside the successes of different, inherently limited, contextually relevant interventions in practice.
Harvard Educational Review, 2023
In this article, we ask how higher education institutions might begin to confront the connections... more In this article, we ask how higher education institutions might begin to confront the connections between climate change and colonization. To grapple with this question, we examine the dynamics through which climate action can reproduce colonial relations and reflect on the challenges, complexities, and possibilities that emerged in the context of one university’s Indigenous engagement efforts around a climate emergency declaration. We suggest that if universities seek to interrupt climate colonialism, they will need to commit to upholding Indigenous rights, knowledges, and self-determination and to accepting responsibility for repairing colonial harm and developing respectful, reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities and lands. To fulfill these commitments, universities will need to avoid the common tendency to seek quick solutions and instead support the development of institutional conditions and individual capacities that would make it possible to have difficult conversations about the historical and ongoing ways that they have been complicit in social and ecological harm.
InsideHigherEd, 2023
Over the past decade and a half, students and activists have called upon U.S. universities to rec... more Over the past decade and a half, students and activists have called upon U.S. universities to reckon with their role in slavery and colonization. In response, some institutions have issued apologies and committed to redress. However, these efforts will remain limited if they are not accompanied by deeper commitments to material restitution and relational repair. In this op/ed, I offer five basic premises that universities and those of us who work and study within them would need to accept if these efforts are to move beyond apologies.
Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2020
In this article, I offer a decolonial critique of the ethical and ecological limits of mainstream... more In this article, I offer a decolonial critique of the ethical and ecological limits of mainstream sustainability efforts in higher education. In doing so, I identify colonialism as the primary cause of climate change, and the primary condition of possibility for modern higher education. I further suggest that the abiding failure to address the centrality of colonialism in both climate change and higher education is not a problem of ignorance that can be solved with more information, but rather a problem of denial that is rooted in enduring investments in the continuity of existing institutions and a modern/colonial “habit-of-being” (Shotwell, 2016). I argue that in order to face the ethical and ecological impossibilities of making higher education institutions sustainable, we will need to set our horizons of hope beyond the promises that they offer.
Critical Studies in Education
This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of U... more This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government’s accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant legislation, and although conquest of the frontier was eventually metaphorized in higher education discourse, public institutions remain both dependent on and vulnerable to the imperatives of accumulation that were established during colonization, as is evident in contemporary privatization efforts. I argue that if efforts to resist privatization fail to address how colonialism has historically shaped US public goods, then these efforts risk re-naturalizing the imperative of capital accumulation and relations of conquest.
Teaching in Higher Education, 2023
Many pedagogies that seek to address the climate and nature emergency (CNE) promise hope and solu... more Many pedagogies that seek to address the climate and nature emergency (CNE) promise hope and solutions for an idealized future. In this article, we suggest these pedagogies are rooted in the same modern/colonial system that created the CNE and other ‘wicked’ socio-ecological challenges in the first place, and thus they are not well-suited for preparing students to navigate these challenges. We also ask what kind of climate education could invite students to interrupt the reproduction of colonial futures, and deepen their sense of social and ecological responsibility in the present. As one possible response to this question, we offer an outline for climate education otherwise, which seeks to prepare students with the stamina and the intellectual, affective, and relational capacities that could enable more justice-oriented coordinated responses to current and coming challenges.
Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2021
In this article, I propose the need to reimagine global citizenship education for a VUCA world: v... more In this article, I propose the need to reimagine global citizenship education for a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In this context, it remains unclear what kind of GCE could adequately prepare young people for numerous overlapping global challenges. Most responses to this conjuncture suggest that we revise our descriptions of the problems we face, and cohere around a single prescription for how to proceed in order to either reform or replace our existing system. Drawing on a diagnosis of the present offered by Zygmunt Bauman, and a decolonial analysis of how we arrived here, I ask how we might reimagine GCE in ways that are strategically responsive to current systemic crises, and ethically responsive to the ongoing colonial conditions that are at the root of these crises. I propose an approach to GCE that moves beyond the transmission of static competencies or content, and instead fosters learners' capacities for ongoing self-reflexivity, accountability, and discernment. Toward this end, I suggest balancing concrete policy and open-ended pedagogy, critical and affective literacy, and intellectual and relational rigour. I also suggest the need to identify and interrupt harmful circularities that commonly emerge in efforts to imagine GCE otherwise.
This mini-zine (foldable media + text) was published at http://decolonialfutures.net. It is a ped... more This mini-zine (foldable media + text) was published at http://decolonialfutures.net. It is a pedagogical experiment that invites conversations about our collective existence in a planet facing unprecedented crises. Each side presents a social cartography that makes up a theory-of-change. Every theory of change is made up of a diagnosis of the present, and a proposition about a horizon for change. On one side, the social cartography “The House Modernity Built” offers a diagnosis of the present focusing on a modern/colonial global imaginary in which being is reduced to knowing, profits take precedent over people, the earth is treated as a resource rather than a living relation, and the shiny promises of states, markets, and Western reason are subsidized by the disavowed harms of impoverishment, genocide, and environmental destruction. On the other side of the zine, the social cartography “In Earth’s CARE” invites conversations about the possibility of setting horizons of hope beyond the house that modernity built. Through an earth centered metaphor, it proposes that ecological and economic justice (mushrooms) are not viable without cognitive, affective and relational justice (healthy mycelium). Together the social cartographies point to the need for a different kind of education where we see ourselves as part of a wider metabolism and where we learn to hospice modernity, learning from its recurrent mistakes, in order to open our imaginaries and make only new mistakes as we assist with the birth of something new, undefined, and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser.
Canada's recently revamped international education brand, EduCanada, offers a rich example of dev... more Canada's recently revamped international education brand, EduCanada, offers a rich example of developments at the intersections of higher education internationalization and marketization. In this paper, I examine the EduCanada website to consider how national exceptionalist and 'othering' narratives are reproduced in the recruitment of international students. From these findings I ask how internationalization relates to the overlapping and ongoing legacies of Indigenous colonization, and racialized regimes of personhood, citizenship, and immigration in Canada. Finally, I argue that the international marketization of higher education risks foreclosing critical examinations of the entanglements of empire within which we are all unevenly embedded.
Internationalisation of higher education has within the three decades become a strategic focus of... more Internationalisation of higher education has within the three decades become a strategic focus of universities worldwide. In this chapter, we take a Critical Discourse Analysis approach towards contemporary internationalisation strategies in Finland and Canada to examine how they frame the role of higher education, and consider the ethical implications of these framings. We find that both documents largely naturalise the role of higher education and international- isation in the service of a knowledge economy, and uncritically reproduce global power inequities and Western supremacy in ways that narrow possibilities for ethical engagement. We also find that the Canadian strategy is less ambiguous in its commercialised aims, while the Finnish document contains a mixture of social and economic rationales for internationalisation. We suggest that these spaces of discursive ambiguity point to distinct models of internationalisation, and argue for the importance of scholarly spaces that support open and critical inquiry about the implications and ethical commitments of these different models.
Efforts to emphasize higher education's role in development have grown in recent years, but impor... more Efforts to emphasize higher education's role in development have grown in recent years, but important questions remain about the motivations and effects of these initiatives. In this paper, we employ the concept of a 'modern/colonial global imaginary' to consider the impact of the enduring power relations and uneven politics of knowledge in the relationship between higher education and development. Specifically, we consider the Association of Commonwealth Universities' (ACU) " Beyond 2015 " campaign, which was launched in anticipation of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that despite the ACU's intention to provide " a platform for diverse voices, particularly from the global South, " the campaign was structured in a way that discouraged dissenting perspectives. More broadly, we consider available possibilities and limitations for challenging mainstream development agendas.
In this article, we review social cartography as a methodological
approach to map and collectivel... more In this article, we review social cartography as a methodological
approach to map and collectively engage diverse perspectives
within the study of higher education. We illustrate the uses of this
approach by drawing on our own experiences engaging it as part
of an international research project about the effects of the
convergence of globalization and economic crises in higher
education. We offer several examples of how social cartography
can enable agonistic collaboration amongst existing positions, as
well as open up new spaces and possibilities for alternative
futures in higher education.
page proof of chapter from The Palgrave International Handbook of Education for Citizenship and S... more page proof of chapter from The Palgrave International Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Social Justice.
In this chapter, we argued that how one conceptualises race, racism, and colonialism affects what... more In this chapter, we argued that how one conceptualises race, racism, and colonialism affects what one imagines as the means for addressing them. It is neither necessary nor possible to choose just one approach and apply it in all research and practice. Rather, we suggest that different contexts demand different approaches and therefore create and foreclose certain possibilities. Specifically, returning once more to Leonardo’s fire metaphor, there is an ethical demand to respond and intervene strategically and with urgency to fires in our immediate vicinity – for instance, resisting school closures in local Black- or Latino-majority neighborhoods, and transforming the racial dynamics of student recruitment and hiring and promotion practices in our departments. At the same time, there is a demand to consider the larger terrain of innumerable distinct but interrelated racial/colonial fires, to ask how they are connected to each other within a single grammar of violence, and to address the role of education in reproducing or interrupting our satisfaction with the world as we know it.
Anticipating the announcement of a new UN development agenda following the upcoming expiration of... more Anticipating the announcement of a new UN development agenda following the upcoming expiration of the Millennium Development Goals, the ACU’s “Beyond 2015” campaign seeks to generate conversation about the role of higher education in responding to “global challenges.” The campaign is structured around six questions:
1. Why does the Post-2015 agenda matter for higher education?
2. How are universities already addressing local, national, and international issues?
3. How can universities prepare to respond to the Post-2015 agenda?
4. What partnerships should universities establish to achieve their objectives?
5. How can universities champion their contributions to wider society?
6. How relevant and realistic are the Post-2015 goals likely to be?
Rather than respond directly to one or more of these important questions, we have taken the ACU’s invitation for conversation as an opportunity to critically examine the dominant global imaginary within which the questions themselves are framed.
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Papers, Chapters, Journal Articles by Sharon Stein
approach to education grounded in a regenerative inquiry methodology. Regenerative inquiry can prepare people to honestly confront the limits and harms of “green growth” and support them to “grow up” by expanding their capacity to navigate complexity and uncertainty and activating a sense of intergenerational responsibility. We also offer an example of how this methodology was mobilized in the context of a year-long transdisciplinary program focused on the climate and nature emergency.
Over the past ten years, in response to social movements calling for racial and de-/anti-colonial justice, a growing number of colleges and universities around the world have made public commitments to address their legacies of colonialism and slavery. Such commitments take the form of public apologies, name changes, land acknowledgements, and various pledges to support students, faculty, and students of colour. However, critical scholars and activists point out that apologies, aspirational statements, and symbolic gestures of inclusion will ring hollow if they are not accompanied by more substantive commitments to enact restitution and interrupt ongoing colonial relations (Ahenakew, 2016; Daigle, 2019; Pidgeon, 2016; Jimmy & Andreotti, 2021). Critics observe these commitments tend to be calibrated by a perceived imperative to transcend complicity in harm in order to ensure the seamless futurity of the institution, rather than by a commitment to substantively repair that harm (Stein, 2022).
In this contribution, we offer a social cartography of different possible approaches to addressing universities’ roles in racial and colonial violence. In doing so, we invite critical and self-reflexive engagements with the assumptions and goals that orient these different approaches, rather than collapsing all conversations about racism and colonialism into matters of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). While we remain uncertain whether it is possible for universities to “right the wrongs that brought them into being” (Belcourt, 2018), we emphasize our collective responsibility to do the work of confronting the historical and ongoing role of universities in genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide, and mobilizing possibilities to enact material, relational, and epistemic repair alongside affected communities. Rather than assume we must know how to undertake this work at the outset, we suggest treating it as an ongoing, self-implicating inquiry through which we learn from the inevitable mistakes and failures alongside the successes of different, inherently limited, contextually relevant interventions in practice.
approach to map and collectively engage diverse perspectives
within the study of higher education. We illustrate the uses of this
approach by drawing on our own experiences engaging it as part
of an international research project about the effects of the
convergence of globalization and economic crises in higher
education. We offer several examples of how social cartography
can enable agonistic collaboration amongst existing positions, as
well as open up new spaces and possibilities for alternative
futures in higher education.
1. Why does the Post-2015 agenda matter for higher education?
2. How are universities already addressing local, national, and international issues?
3. How can universities prepare to respond to the Post-2015 agenda?
4. What partnerships should universities establish to achieve their objectives?
5. How can universities champion their contributions to wider society?
6. How relevant and realistic are the Post-2015 goals likely to be?
Rather than respond directly to one or more of these important questions, we have taken the ACU’s invitation for conversation as an opportunity to critically examine the dominant global imaginary within which the questions themselves are framed.
approach to education grounded in a regenerative inquiry methodology. Regenerative inquiry can prepare people to honestly confront the limits and harms of “green growth” and support them to “grow up” by expanding their capacity to navigate complexity and uncertainty and activating a sense of intergenerational responsibility. We also offer an example of how this methodology was mobilized in the context of a year-long transdisciplinary program focused on the climate and nature emergency.
Over the past ten years, in response to social movements calling for racial and de-/anti-colonial justice, a growing number of colleges and universities around the world have made public commitments to address their legacies of colonialism and slavery. Such commitments take the form of public apologies, name changes, land acknowledgements, and various pledges to support students, faculty, and students of colour. However, critical scholars and activists point out that apologies, aspirational statements, and symbolic gestures of inclusion will ring hollow if they are not accompanied by more substantive commitments to enact restitution and interrupt ongoing colonial relations (Ahenakew, 2016; Daigle, 2019; Pidgeon, 2016; Jimmy & Andreotti, 2021). Critics observe these commitments tend to be calibrated by a perceived imperative to transcend complicity in harm in order to ensure the seamless futurity of the institution, rather than by a commitment to substantively repair that harm (Stein, 2022).
In this contribution, we offer a social cartography of different possible approaches to addressing universities’ roles in racial and colonial violence. In doing so, we invite critical and self-reflexive engagements with the assumptions and goals that orient these different approaches, rather than collapsing all conversations about racism and colonialism into matters of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). While we remain uncertain whether it is possible for universities to “right the wrongs that brought them into being” (Belcourt, 2018), we emphasize our collective responsibility to do the work of confronting the historical and ongoing role of universities in genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide, and mobilizing possibilities to enact material, relational, and epistemic repair alongside affected communities. Rather than assume we must know how to undertake this work at the outset, we suggest treating it as an ongoing, self-implicating inquiry through which we learn from the inevitable mistakes and failures alongside the successes of different, inherently limited, contextually relevant interventions in practice.
approach to map and collectively engage diverse perspectives
within the study of higher education. We illustrate the uses of this
approach by drawing on our own experiences engaging it as part
of an international research project about the effects of the
convergence of globalization and economic crises in higher
education. We offer several examples of how social cartography
can enable agonistic collaboration amongst existing positions, as
well as open up new spaces and possibilities for alternative
futures in higher education.
1. Why does the Post-2015 agenda matter for higher education?
2. How are universities already addressing local, national, and international issues?
3. How can universities prepare to respond to the Post-2015 agenda?
4. What partnerships should universities establish to achieve their objectives?
5. How can universities champion their contributions to wider society?
6. How relevant and realistic are the Post-2015 goals likely to be?
Rather than respond directly to one or more of these important questions, we have taken the ACU’s invitation for conversation as an opportunity to critically examine the dominant global imaginary within which the questions themselves are framed.
Decolonization does not simply involve intellectual work, although in higher education contexts this is often the dimension that is most emphasized. It also involves affective work (which entails acknowledging, analyzing, and taking responsibility for processing our often uncomfortable, embodied and emotional responses to the tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties that arise in decolonization efforts); and relational work (which entails mending broken relationships in ways that honour the integrity of this difficult process by focus on the development of deep respect, reciprocity, trust, and consent rather than prioritizing the end or outcome in transactional ways).
For this reason, this workbook does not focus on describing the many ways that colonialism and related systems, including white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and ableism, operate in higher education. There are many important texts that do this work, including many of those listed in the “Additional Resources” at the end of this text. While having a deep understanding of colonialism and its complexities is an essential element of any decolonization effort, in our experience having an intellectual grasp of the harmful effects of colonization does not translate necessarily into a decolonial disposition or orientation. Thus, this text seeks to offer something different.
This book, written by Elwood Jimmy and myself, with the support of Sharon Stein, will be officially launched at the "with/out modernity" reception on 2 June 2019 at 7 pm at the Fort Camp Lounge room at the Gage Tower, University of British Columbia (copies of the book will be available). With/out modernity is a week-long event that is part of the Humanities and Social Sciences Congress 2019: http://edst.educ.ubc.ca/withoutmodernityposter/
Please come and join us if you are around!
Towards Braiding describes the lessons learned from the first year of an on-going collaborative R&D project between Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti about settler-Indigenous relationships in the Arts sector. This collaboration is hosted and funded by the Musagetes Arts Foundation and involves several modes of relational engagement with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, and communities, including visits, gatherings and consultations, addressing 5 "compass" questions:
1. What are the conditions that make possible ethical and rigorous engagement across communities in historical dissonance that can help us move together towards improved relationships and yet-unimaginable wiser futures, as we face unprecedented global challenges?
2. What are the guidelines and practices for ethical and respectful engagement with Indigenous senses and sensibilities (being, knowing, relationships, trauma, place, space and time) that can help us to work together in holding space for the possibility of “braiding” work?
3. How do we learn together to enliven these guidelines with (self-) compassion, generosity, humility, flexibility, depth and rigour, and without turning our back to (or burning out with) the complexities, paradoxes, difficulties and pain of this work?
4. What kind of socially engaged and community anchored Indigenous-led arts-based program can support this process in the long term?
5. What are the expectations in terms of responsibilities of the organization to the place/land and her traditional ancestral custodians from the perspectives of the local Indigenous communities?
ISBN: 978-0-9877238-9-5
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/beyond-doomism-and-solutionism-in-response-to-climate-change/
If you find yourself in a position to “include” Indigenous peoples and perspectives in your organization, then there are many practical, ethical, and educational dimensions and implications to consider before and while doing so. In particular, it is important to consider how your invitation might end up reproducing harmful patterns of relationship and representation, even if your intention is to do just the opposite. The following questions may help you think through your expectations, your intentions, and the impact of your choices, and to think systemically how these are rooted in a larger social and historical context. We offer both general guiding questions for reflection and discussion, as well as point to some “red flags” that commonly emerge in the context of these engagements and which warrant pause and further consideration before pursuing efforts to include Indigenous peoples and perspectives.