Transcript Dr. George Dei Presentation

BUILDING RESILIENT
COMMUNITIES FOR THE FUTURE:
CHALLENGES AND POSSIBILITIES
George J. Sefa Dei
[Nana Sefa Atweneboah I]
Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice
Education
OISE, University of Toronto
[email protected]
I. INTRODUCTION
a) Recognitions: Our Ancestors, Elders, and this Land.
b) Thanks.
c) Mapping The Terrain.
Understanding ‘resilience’ as more than survival; learning from
our collective histories and resistance struggles to build
communities of the future.
“It is not what one is called that is most important but rather what
one responds to”.
Any community is as good as we collectively work to make it!
d) Words of Caution.
“ It is not important that everyone agrees with
Fanon. It is more important that his work gives us a
pedagogical foundation to interrogate, to
decolonize, to reconstruct ourselves, our beliefs, our
supposed normalcies.” (Bimpong, 2012).
II. SHARING AFRICAN PROVERBS
Akan Proverbs, Ghana
1. If you want to know how heavy a bag of salt is ask the one
carrying it.
Wo pese wuhu nkyene mu duro a bisa dea eso nno.
2. The arrogant goat knows the limit of its arrogance in front of
the butcher’s shop
Abirekyie a wommu adea no enye dankwasere nni aboboo ano.
3. The beard came to meet the eye lashes.
Bodwese betoo aninton nwi.
Kiembu Proverbs, Kenya
4. You will end badly if you don’t start well.
Igatura na kinatha twa ria murago.
5. A good name keeps somebody.
Njamba ndieiwe kwao.
6. Short cuts are not always the safest.
Kava ndaca ikinyia
Igbo and Ukwani Proverbs, Nigeria
7. It is only the adamant fly that follows the corpse to the grave.
Ijiji na-enweghi onye ndumodu na-esoro ozu laa n’ili.
8. Stealing a drum is very easy but where to play it is the
problem.
Izuru ịgba dị mfe ma ebee ka a ga-anọ kụọ ya.
9. Crabs legs cannot be stolen and eaten in secret.
“anaghi ata okpa nsiko n’ulu”.
III. WHERE COMING FROM?
a) The Personal, Political and Intellectual Subject
Location.
b) The Power of Neo-liberalism and the ‘Creeping
Survivalism’).
c) Connecting Identities and Social Movement
Politics (e.g., Indigenous struggles).
d) Anti-Colonial Intellectuality (i.e., scholarly activism).
e) Becoming a distinctive Voice; a voice of difference.
IV. RETHINKING THE IDEA OF
“COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITIES”.
i) We create communities [we want].
ii) Communities are about differences and sameness;
shared experiences are never singular.
iii) The unilateral fragmentation around difference;
conscripting idea of fractured communities to deny
responsibility and accountability.
iv) The community as a site and place of learning and
healing; repairing wounded souls and spirits.
v) The challenges of communities coming into a global
public sphere (e.g., transnational migration, family
reunification, community development, Land,
governance and sovereignty rights).
vi) The community as a local cultural resource knowledge
base.
vii) Tensions of splitting the ‘individual’ and ‘community’.
viii) Unity as a means to an end = POWER.
ix) Building a Local Capacity Building for
Leadership.
x) The Role of the [Racialized] Middle Class and the
‘Intelligentsia’ - investing in families/communities.
xi) Not pitting our own fears and anxieties over the
pains and sufferings of others.
xii) Connecting Global Diasporas and Communities.
V. CREATING RESILIENT COMMUNITIES:
OUR SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES
 Reclaiming knowledges about our ‘authentic
selves’.
 Developing the courage to challenge and resist
the ways our histories are taught to us.
 Asking questions about the omissions,
negations, devaluations, and absences in our
institutional settings.
 What is social justice/equity? – (i.e., engaging
questions about power, race, gender, class,
sexuality, disability, and social oppression).
 Developing multiple lenses of social inquiry
(i.e., we read our worlds differently).
 Working to create ‘learning communities’ with
a ‘community of learners’ in schools,
workplaces, etc.).
VI. ASKING NEW QUESTIONS
a) How do we frame an inclusive [anti-racist/anticolonial] global future and what is the nature of
the work required to collectively arrive at that
future?
b) What sort of education should be taking place
in our schools, workplaces, etc. today?
c) How do we ‘re-fashion’ our roles as learners to
create more relevant understandings of what it
means to be human or to claim personhood?
d) How do we challenge the de-politicization of
inclusion and the domestication of culture and
diversity?
d) No one tells the full story, so how do we tell multiple
stories in order to get the complete story?
f) How do we bring a ‘humility of knowing’ to our
work and the search for knowledge?
VII. PRINCIPLES OF BUILDING RISILIENT
COMMUNITIES
a) The Idea of a ‘Messy Utopia’.
b) The Future is being Contested (i.e., designing own futures) .
c) Acknowledging and Addressing Our Collective Implications and
Complicities.
d) Addressing Our Sense of Entitlement Without Matching
Responsibilities.
e) Rethinking the Liberal Notion of ‘Inclusion’.
f) Rethinking Conventional Understandings of
Social Justice and the ‘Universal Subject’.
g) The Question of Representation and Meritocracy.
h) Redefining ‘Success’ Broadly.
i) The Limits of the ‘Culture of Survivalism’.
j) The power of naming oppressions – (e.g.,
race/racism, sexism, homophobia, etc).
k) The Creation of a “Trialectic Space” (see Dei,
2012) – connecting body, mind, spirit & soul.
l) Towards a “Philosophy and a Pedagogy of
Hope” (Dei 2010) ‘something else is possible’
VIII. LESSONS OF SUCCESS:
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS
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Communities of resistance - connecting struggles and
aspirations.
Working with communities of differences.
Understanding challenges of coalition politics [how
power/privilege work].
Power sharing.
Networking and information sharing.
Needs assessment of communities.
Goals and agenda setting (e.g., education, employment,
immigration and family reunification, health, etc.).
Public advocacy role.
Influencing public discourse and social policy.
IX. CONCLUSION
a) We must ask ourselves: How do we speak from
our race, class, gender and sexual embodiments in
social justice work? How is our integrative antiracist work contributing to shape social policy?
b) In anti-racist and anti-oppression work we must
always be aware of the “sensation of moving while
standing still”!
b) Don’t Just be Here!.