Reconnections: remembering land when the university wants us to forget

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we describe how activist and creative impulses led to the establishment of the Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE Lab) at the University of New Mexico. The mission of the lab is rooted in a Pluriversal vision of environmental pedagogy, pulling from Indigenous ways of knowing to inform a creative practice that challenges the mechanisms of purposeful forgetting at the center of the modern public university. We offer critique of today’s “land grab” university that inspired our campus activism, specifically the ways the MUVE Lab seeks to rebuild and reconnect to the lands on which our academic institutions stand.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual environments
• Artivism
• Pluriverse
• land grant universities
• Vincularidad

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Reconnections is a joint effort. The Extended Reality for Learning (xREAL) Lab at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) is helping the MUVE Lab render designs and manage the online hosting simulations for the multi-user environment.

2 Chris Dixon, “The Opposite of Truth Is Forgetting: An Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,” Upping the Anti no. 6 (2008): 57. https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/06-the-opposite-of-truth-is-forgetting.

3 Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s project on “Land-Grab Universities," (landgrabu.org).

4 Ibid. It should be noted that Indigenous peoples in the United States were not granted citizenship rights at that time.

5 Sharon Stein, “A Colonial History of the Higher Education Present: Rethinking Land-Grant Institutions through Processes of Accumulation and Relations of Conquest,” Critical Studies in Education 62, no. 2 (2020): 212.

6 For more on the history of the field of Communication Rhetoric and its colonial legacy, see Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–85.

7 Karma R. Chavez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

8 Patricia K. Wood, “Aboriginal/Indigenous Citizenship: An Introduction,” Citizenship Studies 7, no. 4 (2010): 371–8; Jessica Hartrick, “How to Outlive the University?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 410–7.

9 Nina Pacari, “La Participación Política de la Mujer Indígena en el Parlamento Ecuatoriano: Una Tarea Pendiente,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, July 17, 2013.

10 Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, “Possessing Land, Wind and Water in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca,” Australian Feminist Studies 35, no 106 (2020): 321–35.

11 Arturo Escobar, “Transiciones: A Space for Research and Design for Transitions to the Pluriverse,” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (2015): 13–23.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid, 14.

14 Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” (2015). Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research [conference presentation]; Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

15 Carol Azumah Dennis, “Decolonising Education: A Pedagogic Intervention,” in Decolonising the University, eds. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancioğlu, and Dalia Gebrial (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 190–207.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Allocation Committee, The University of New Mexico.