| For the past 500 years, higher education has been entangled in the reproduction of social and ecological violence around the globe. This presentation asks how universities, and those of us who work and study within them, might meaningfully reckon with and enact repair for our complicity in historical and ongoing coloniality and unsustainability. It approaches reparations as a potentially regenerative process of enacting material redistribution and restitution, (re)building relationships grounded in respect and reciprocity, and repurposing our institutions to be more relevant and responsible in the context of the current polycrisis. The talk will also review several resources for navigating the complexities of confronting the colonial foundations of higher education and enabling different futures.
Sharon Stein (Educational Studies, University of British Columbia) is the author of Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (Johns Hopkins, 2022), founder of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network, and a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Collective.
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