Decolonial Pedagogy for Environment and Other Urgent Matters

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences </strong> Seminar Notice <strong>Dr. Meena Khandelwal</strong> (University of Lowa, USA) a talk on <strong> Decolonial Pedagogy for Environment and Other Urgent Matters</strong> Date :<strong> February 5, 2015</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Big Ideas" courses are a new type of interdisciplinary General Education course being piloted on the University of Iowa campus. These courses bring together a team of faculty from different departments to address a question of broad public concern and interest, such as "Why do we sing?" or, in the case of the course I will discuss, "How should we live with the earth?" As part of this initiative, I developed and taught—along with four other faculty—a course entitled People and Environment: Technology, Culture and Social Justice. The instructors represented mechanical engineering, anthropology, gender studies, geography and urban planning, and the course was different from any other we have taught. It was organized around an admittedly idiosyncratic--but decolonizing--comparison of environmental concerns in Rajasthan and Iowa, to address the question of how we might bring together knowledge from different fields to solve a complex human problem? Addressing the real-world problem we outlined on the first day (deforestation in Rajasthan), we suggested, necessitates bringing together the epistemologies of interpretation associated with the humanities and the goals of explanation and prediction central to climate science. This radical interdisciplinarity revealed that asking different questions produces different kinds of knowledge and required us to explicitly address questions we don't generally pose at the introductory level: What makes a good comparison? What is data? In this lecture, I will explain the motivation that animated this course and outline the pedagogical strategies we employed to help our students cultivate critical thinking abilities, intellectual flexibility and collaborative skills—in direct contrast to our conventional pedagogy. Bio-Data: Meena Khandelwal's monograph Women in Ochre Robes (SUNY Press 2004) charted the gendered dimensions of sannyasa. To highlight a new and growing body of research on female renunciation, she co-edited a volume with Sondra Hausner and Ann Grodzins Gold entitled Women's Renunciation in South Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2006, Zubaan 2007). Turning her attention to transnational studies, she has also written about foreign swamis who have settled in Rishikesh and about sannyasa's cosmopolitanism. More recently, Khandelwal has published on discourses of marriage in US feminism, transnational feminist methodologies and the politics of race and culture among second-generation Indian-Americans. She is currently focused on two distinct projects, one on gender and environment and another on Indian diaspora philanthropy directed towards development projects in the homeland.