Centering Sovereignty: Exploring Sikhi through Interfaith-Community Advised Pedagogy

Decolonizing pedagogy is a crucial endeavor for the discipline of religious studies to undertake to better understand and explore religious traditions that have long been understood through a colonial lens, such as Sikhi. Fortunately, Sikh scholars continue to  provide indigenous perspectives on the dynamic development of Sikhi as a religious, cultural, and politically sovereign empire; yet a successful course focused on decolonizing pedagogy must do more than emphasize scholarship within a tradition.  This paper focuses on the successful implementation of a recently developed decolonizing teaching method, Interfaith Community-Advised Pedagogy (ICAP), in which courses are co-taught between religious studies faculty and members of minority religious traditions to gain first-hand knowledge about how religions are lived.  After we (a religious studies professor and Sikh activist) collaborated on the ICAP framework, our class was able to engage with indigenous scholarship, build rapport with a Sikh community, and effectively center Sikh sovereignty with students.