In recent decades, decolonial theory and practice have become increasingly incorporated within academic institutions as an effort to recognize the immense degree to which the academy is both constructed through colonialism and perpetuates colonial domination. This awareness is now accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the ethically urgent task of decolonizing the academy. As is always the case, however, a common strategy of power structures for preserving themselves is to co-opt the language of liberatory movements for its own purposes. This session considers whether and how the language of “decolonizing the academy” is vulnerable to such cooptation, what the ramifications are (especially for those who are already significantly disenfranchised within academia), and how the work of decolonization can continue effectively amidst this kind of obfuscation. The slate of presentations includes both conceptual critique and analysis of present decolonial practices suited for future cultivation.
In recent years, the language of “decolonizing the academy” has moved rapidly from the margins of activist scholarship into the institutional center of many anglophone universities. While this shift signals an important recognition of the colonial foundations of modern knowledge, it also raises a critical question: what happens when the language of decolonization becomes institutionalized within the very structures it seeks to dismantle? Engaging Latin American decolonial thought—particularly the work of Nicolás Panotto—this paper argues that contemporary academic uses of “decolonization” risk reproducing a second-order coloniality in which decolonial discourse itself becomes institutionalized. Bringing Panotto into conversation with dissenting Baptist and Anabaptist epistemologies rooted in forms of border thinking, the paper suggests that radical ecclesial traditions reveal both the possibilities and limits of escaping coloniality. Decolonization does not begin on a blank slate but amid the shards of inherited colonial histories, requiring rhizomatic and communal forms of theological knowledge beyond the academy.
Drawing upon Andreotti et al.’s work mapping interpretations of decolonization in higher education and de Sousa Santos’ concept of abyssal thinking, I offer an autoethnographic account of my experiences as a female-identifying, queer Latina teaching religiously diverse white students in a progressive, historically and currently eurodominant, mainline Protestant theological school. From this account, I argue that progressive theological institutions rhetorically perform decolonization by asserting that they exist within/execute from a radical-reform or even beyond-reform space. In turn, students mirror these rhetorical performances of decolonization within and beyond the classroom in ways that perpetuate interpersonal and institutional colonial dynamics and processes through a reliance on abyssal thinking. Ultimately, I conclude that colonial epistemologies are too tethered within the arena of theological education to truly decolonize, especially when those who say that the institution, individual, or community is decolonizing still operate from fixations on the abyssal line.
A new course, "The Lives of Holy Objects: Himalayan Buddhist Images as Art and Presence", first invites students to compare objects from museum and art historical perspectives, with field trips to a museum installation, with the living Buddhist community temple's sacred space, and then to launch a cataloguing project and docent training program, producing educational and spiritual materials for the general public and in service to the practitioner community, holding and honoring multiple histories and ways of knowing, sometimes in tension, but enlivening relationships to these beings/objects.