Imagining and Shaping Pluriversities

When: Wed, Apr 14 2021 4:00pm - Wed, Apr 14 2021 5:30pm 

Where: Online

Pluriversity Imagination Collective virtual dialogue series (SP21) titled Imagining and Shaping Pluriversities: Land-based Indigenous Knowledges and Pedagogies of Resistance.

Scholars/activists from across the country—Drs. Jennie Luna, Lisa Grayshield, Timothy E. Nelson, Rabab Abdulhadi, and Antonio Duran will prompt and join the Borderlands Pluversity Dialogue Series on four Wednesdays (February 10, March 10, March 31, and April 14) this semester, @ 4-5:30, using the link bit.ly/3oo421o —see attached flyers.

The Pluriversity Imagination Collective intends to organize and facilitate this dialogue series to journey together, opening spaces to begin imaging a pluriversity in our lives and these Borderlands. Pluviersities are the intended outcome of decolonizing university institutions, which shape "a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity" (Mbembe, 2015). Hence, we invite you co-image pluriversal paths that "disrupt the totality from which the universal and the global are most often perceived" (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

We hope for dialogues that may open the possibilities to cultivate conviviality, resistance and coexistence/re-existence in dignity beyond the singularity and linearity we expect in traditional university systems. With shared ethics, we propose to root our dialogues in mutual trust and desire to build coalitions of individual allies and collectives of community members, organizations, students, faculty, staff and administrators toward shaping a Borderlands Pluriversity.

The speakers will offer their nuanced understandings, practices, and knowledges and pose questions on the following topics:

• Historical and contemporary realities of settler colonialism
• Scholars’ experiences of colonialism in higher education/academia and resistance to structural oppressions
• Reflections on NMSU’s mission as a land grant and HSI/MSI and settler colonialism’s legacies
• Land grant/grab universities
• Indigeneity/Indigenous universities
• Decolonial pluriversities and imagining NMSU as a pluriversity
• Indivisibility of justice in/on transnational Borderlands
• Solidarities across borders in the US, Mexico and Palestine
• African American history in the Southwest, complexities and intersectionalities
• Mexicanness vis-a-vis De-Indigenization practices
• Relational community collaboration
• Land-based resistance and pedagogies
• Land~back, belonging, healing
• The "pace" of paradigmatic shift

As a collective of organizers, speakers, co/sponsors, scholars, activists, and artists, we are working to shift the content and terms of the conversation about land-based knowledges and pedagogies of resistance in a land-grant university and HSI/MSI on the southwest Borderlands. We chose to think and feel with Anzaldúa’s Napantla, within third spaces, liminal spaces to find and create fissures for otherwise possibilities. We also seek to deepen solidarities for decolonial education across the borders of US, Mexico and Palestine. Those are the spaces of creativity and consciousness, spaces contesting outside/beyond boundaries and binaries, and spaces of knowing and refusing the colonialist notions of racial difference.

As a collective, we will facilitate an intellectual and feminist inquiry about how to delink from the structures of colonialism, racism and heteronormativity, and the foundations of the colonial matrix of power. We will invite the audience to think with/against the history and legacy of settler colonialism, colonization and modernity/coloniality and their manifestation in, among all spaces, higher education institutions of the US. The Pluriversity Imagination Collective also invites participants to make connections to and between the intense Black Lives Matter uprising and Indigenous land protection movement, the potential of strengthening transborder collectives that resist the structures and actions of racism, heteronormativity in the US, Mexico and Palestine.

Organizers & Facilitators: Pluriversity Imagination Collective—Drs. Dulcinea Lara, Judith Flores Carmona, Georgina Badoni and Manal Hamzeh.

Sponsors: Chicano Programs, Dean’s Fellows of Equity, LGBT+ Programs, Dean's Fellows of Inclusion and Diversity at the College of Arts & Sciences and Borderlands and Ethnic Studies (BEST), New Mexico State University.

Link: Registration