Our Bodies Are in the Room: Lessons from A Decolonial Embodied Approach to Leadership Pedagogy for Social Justice Leaders

Pedagogical processes tend to reproduce hierarchical colonial practices of mind over body; rationality over unconscious processes and hierarchical models of “experts” who teach and learners who ‘learn’ (Joseph & Kerr, 2021). Access to knowledge derived from the body, from unconscious processes and with more shared efforts in the learning experience are devalued and often lost in the learning adventure within traditional colonial frameworks. Coloniality, a concept coined by Anibal Quijano (2000), is a form of domination, involving mechanisms, conditions, and modes of control and exploitation that remain in place, even after colonizers leave (Quijano, 2007, p. 170), or if they never do – as is the case on Turtle Island, colonially known as North America. Coloniality refers to the processes, beyond land dispossession, through which the cultural, social, and knowledge systems of the dominant group take hold. Decoloniality is a praxis of disruption that allows for exposing, making sense of, and countering the sociocultural, historical, and political influences of coloniality, the legacies of these systems in shaping societies in the West and the Global South, and the many modes of renewal, resistance, and resurgence within settler colonial contexts (Mignolo, 2009; 2011; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). When applied to leadership learning, decoloniality means challenging understandings of learners as passive recipients required to reproduce or take in what is known rather than as agents for creating what is known and mobilizing how it comes to be known.

For several years Insight for Community Impact https://www.ici-ici.ca
has been integrating decolonial praxis into group relations methods (Joseph et al, 2021) to explore questions of difference, leadership, self authorization among social justice leaders and ourselves. Using the 2024 Exploring Difference three-day residential conference in Toronto as an example, this presentation will outline the work we undertook to deepen decolonial praxis and what was learned in our efforts to transform our pedagogies. We engaged in conference discussion, movement, games, planning and reflective activity sessions that prioritized (1) attending and tending to the body, that is, attuning to information shared by and through the body and learning through movement, (2) bringing awareness to individual and collective unconscious processes, and (3) utilizing transparent lateral leadership structures in conference planning and delivery. This learning by social justice leaders created openings for different ways of knowing, being, and working.

We learned that when leaders pay attention to body-knowledge, unconscious processes, and shared leadership, we can begin to counter colonial hegemonies and the intractable systems in which we live and work. We can grapple with what we think we know about difference, social justice leading and following, power and self-authorization, about ourselves and others, and about the construction of social power within which we live and work. Through our experimental decolonizing practices, we began to understand more about how our idealisms fuel our efforts, obstruct our best intentions, and in some cases repeat the very forms of coloniality with which we grappled. Decolonial praxis is never a linear process.

References

Ashcroft, G., Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (1995). (Eds.), The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Routledge.

Joseph, J. & Kerr, E.* (2021). Assemblages and Co-emergent Corpomaterialities in Postsecondary Education: Pedagogical Lessons from Somatic Psychology and Physical Cultures, Somatechnics, 11(3), 413–431. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0368

Joseph, J., Williams, B., & Lewis, T. (2021). The Exploring Difference Workshop: Adapting group relations to explore questions of difference and antiracism in Toronto, Canada. Organizational and Social Dynamics 21(1), 40–55. https://doi.org/10.33212/osd.v21n1.2021.40

Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275 

Mignolo, W. D. (2011). Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto. TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.5070/T412011807 

Mignolo & C. E. Walsh, (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press.

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005 

Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178.

Session schedule

5 MINS

Introduction

30 MINS

Paper presentation

20 MINS

Small group discussion; impressions of the paper and developing questions for the presenter

20 MINS

Discussion forum with the presenter; moderated for the speaker to elaborate their ideas

10 MINS

Discussion forum with the presenter; themes from the discussions

5 MINS

Break

30 MINS

Whole symposium open reflection discussion

Share this presentation!

Parallel Paper Presentations

The following are presenting at this time