Week 1—What comes after liberation?

Week 1—What comes after liberation?

Main reading: Tuck and Yang (2012)

Other reading: Curley et al. (2022); Garba and Sorentino (2020)

Welcome to class! As you know, this class is different than previous incarnations of DVST 6901: Civil society and wellbeing.

For one, we are not studying “wellbeing” in a strict sense, and we are not restricting ourselves to a narrow sense of “civil society” that has gained influence in the contemporary study of development. Rather we are concerned with bigger questions, particularly questions and challenges that, I think, Western liberal democracy has failed to answer for itself, and arguably doesn’t even bother to ask itself. These questions force us to question what we mean progress, development, and reform.

For another, we are a seminar, a group of peers who each contribute toward and all work together to develop each other’s understanding of ideas.

For that reason, I thought it would be good to consider the argument of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang about “decolonization” (Tuck and Yang 2012) and the responses to it. This debate in some ways captures several themes that will run through this course. What counts as positive change? Whose idea of change should matter in political questions of how to response to social suffering? How much can and should a society, and the contemporary global order, change?

Our discussion in Week 1 does not need to answer all of these questions. Rather this is a way for us to get to know each other. We will learn that we are all different and we all will have different reactions to this debate. These differences in our perspectives are the main resource we can tap into to understand the questions this class will raise.

References

Curley, Andrew, Pallavi Gupta, Lara Lookabaugh, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith. 2022. “Decolonisation Is a Political Project: Overcoming Impasses Between Indigenous Sovereignty and Abolition.” Antipode 54 (4): 1043–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12830.

Garba, Tapji, and Sara-Maria Sorentino. 2020. “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’.” Antipode 52 (3): 764–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12615.

Tuck, Eve, and K Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40. https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf.