Retrospective Autoethnographies: A Call for Decolonial Imaginings for the New University

Abstract

In this article, we present “retrospective autoethnographies” as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our present and our desire for a utopian future to begin to create an image of the New University. Together, as people raised in the postcolony and within coloniality, we begin at the negative affect as neoliberal universities invisibilize, surveil, audit, and discipline—but then, we strive to imagine a New University characterized by radical hope, doing so alongside student movements pushing for decolonizing the university. This article is envisioned as an exhortation for a decolonial intervention of radically dreaming the New University into place.

Decolonial Enactments of Human Resilience

“…[and] necessitate a fundamental shift in vantage point" (p. 273). These shifting visions and vantage points are so critical, as Bell et al (2019) argue, because the minds and bodies of segregated and colonized front liners are the only ones who hold the knowledge of the ways toward a place outside the Wall-beyond the system of compartments. This is a desegregated and decolonized place of healing and justice.…”

“…This structural violence can take many forms, however, all of which compromise capacities of Indigenous and racialized populations to thrive. These structural violence of settler-colonialism are becoming exposed and better understood (in academic writings in English) as scholar activists and community allies explore theoretical and practice implications of critical race theory, Black consciousness, Indigenous intellectual traditions, and decolonial transnational feminisms (e.g., Atallah, 2016;Bell, Canham, Dutta, & Fernandez, 2019;Davis, 2019;Fanon, 1963;Said, 1993;Wynter & McKittrick, 2015).…”

“…Furthermore, as de Sousa Santos (2018) summarizes when exploring the work of Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, a Cape Verdean and Bissau-Guinean decolonial revolutionary and philosopher, "the knowledge born of struggle is the most precious of all, for it is the one in which the relation between theory and practice is the most complex" (p. 72). Storytelling can be a powerful way to hold this complexity and shed light on the messiness of human relationality, while contesting the master narratives embedded in settlercolonial discourses, including the ones apparent or hidden within rigorous and empirical scientific studies (Atallah, Shapiro, Al Azraq, Qaisi, & Suyemoto, 2018;Bell et al, 2019;Smith, 2012;Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). Tuck and McKenzie (2015) underscore how Indigenous scholars have "extensively theorized the role of storytelling as practice of shaping and being shaped by place.…”

“…Instead, I aim to shed light on an alternatively painted language to contribute to the building of the alternative thinking on resilience, a mural of discourses inspired by Palestinian families' fluid, messy, and intersecting processes of becoming and shaping their possibilities for dignity and decolonization. Before turning to the narratives of the two participating families, however, consistent with decolonizing scholarships (e.g., Atallah, Shapiro, et al, 2018;Bell et al, 2019;Smith, 2012), it is important to engage in reflexivity and work toward attempting to make this research and writing more accountable to the people most impacted-in this case-Palestinian refugee families living in the UN camps.…”

Tempered radicalism and intersectionality: Scholar‐activism in the neoliberal university

“…We urge administrators and faculty to redesign universities as spaces that recognize and advocate for socially‐just causes that can contribute to create more equitable, transparent, and welcoming conditions. Bell and colleagues (2019) pose the question: What would it be like to work without the pressure of neoliberal competition and producing research that “counts”? What would it be like to be allowed to fail in research and teaching?…”