297A2

SoSe 22: Decolonizing Classrooms

Thomas Stodulka

Comments

This seminar discusses methodological, theoretical and conceptual innovations and reflections on the potential of a decolonized psychological anthropology that is increasingly concerned with power asymmetries, critical epistemologies, and the social and human effects of universalizing ‘Western’ psychologies and pedagogies. In the face of growing human and cultural interconnectedness, contemporary psychological anthropology fosters important insights into new forms of inequality and structural violence in local and global contexts, into changing forms of human subjectivity, and into how different emotions, affects and behaviours are understood, managed and responded to in diverse settings. Today, as the global political economy becomes more multi-polar, the assumption that psychological, pedagogical, and bio-psychiatric ‘insights’, predominantly produced in the ‘West’, are to be imposed on other social groups, is itself now open to question, creating new tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of the human condition that psychological anthropology is uniquely positioned to address.
The seminar will address these questions through the lens of decoloniality in the context of education, learning, and self-formation. We will read theories on decoloniality, (alternative) education, learning, and schooling, and work our way towards preparing a final workshop on the topic (with invited guests) by reading and discussing contemporary ethnographies on alternative education and (un-)learning.
Students will be provided with the opportunity to write term papers (roughly 5,000 words), or two essays (roughly 2,000 words each) that can later be published on the anthrometronom blog. close