Module description
This module will examine the institutional and cultural production of knowledge as well as the various forms of power that structure and legitimize it. It will be taught in weekly 2-hour seminars and co-taught by colleagues from different departments. Engaging with a range of anticolonial, anti-caste, feminist, indigenous and anti-capitalist texts, the module aims to decentre the university as the exclusive site, and the individual as the paradigmatic source, of intellectual work. It will (re)consider knowledge produced in other settings such as radical and revolutionary movements, forms of collective study, and its tension with extant structures of power. Central to the module is prioritizing engagement with, rather than mastery of, theory as part of a broader political commitment to praxis and “doing” intellectual work collectively. To that end, the module incorporates a form of assessment that recognizes and rewards this style of engagement. As an Opportunity module that is open to all students in Arts and Humanities, this module does not expect students to have any specific prior knowledge – indeed, it is an opportunity for students from different disciplinary backgrounds to come together and learn from each others' unique intellectual formations, and consider how they might carry the perspectives they develop in this module back into their disciplinary engagements. It is expected that the seminar discussions will be all the richer for these multidisciplinary contributions. Students are also encouraged to work reflexively in their assessment tasks to take their engagement with ideas discussed on the module beyond the university.
Assessment details
Educational aims & objectives
The module aims to decentre parochial forms of knowledge in favour of praxis as the fundamental basis of new ideas. As part of a larger commitment to decolonizing the curriculum, it opens critiques around individualized and institutionalized forms of thought as well as the disciplinary organization of knowledge that has become central to the modern university. As students are expected to be taking this module in their third year of study, the weekly 2-hour seminars will emphasize collective study and the co-creation of knowledge. Group discussions will therefore be the primary mode through which engagement with readings is staged. As an Opportunity module, students are strongly encouraged to maximize the variety of disciplinary perspectives in the classroom both to interrogate their “home” disciplines/majors as well as place them in conversation with other perspectives. This model of reflexive, ground-up, collective study is envisioned as a way students can both actively build a learning community and exercise a model of political/critical engagement that exceeds the canonical form of teaching and learning in the university. In this way, students will work in a manner that moves from the negativity of traditional critique into the space of (re)building, (re)imagining, and (re)thinking.
Learning outcomes
Students will:
- Develop an understanding of anticolonial and decolonial thought through engagement with under-studied intellectual traditions and contexts
- Reflect upon their own weekly learning weekly and document this in a reflective intellectual journaling exercise
- Learn to observe intellectual convergences and divergences across historical and geographical contexts
- Collaborate and communicate effectively within interdisciplinary contexts and multidisciplinary formations
- Develop organization, communication and people relation skills that will continue to be useful in settings beyond the university
- Learn to develop a close and sustained engagement as well as a focussed argument by drawing on a suitable range of resources
- Identify and discuss, at reasonable length, the political affordances of knowledge production by drawing on appropriate resources both from the module and beyond (to be demonstrated in the final assessment)
- Critically reflect on their professional knowledge and skill capacities in ways that incorporate broad subject knowledge and perspectives
Teaching pattern
Weekly 2 hour seminars