Decolonial feminist pedagogies: entering into the “world” of the zombie as praxis

Abstract

To teach about race is to recognize how there are communities whose worlds are shaped by violence, death, and resurrection, such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, George Floyd, and the many unnamed. Resurrection invokes the zombie figure. Zombies are iconic, and as implemented in an interdisciplinary course, a means to foster opportunities to engage with a social figure whose multiple meanings are cultural, historical, and political, and also notions of race and racial meaning-making. Through the figure of the zombie, this autoethnographic revisiting of a course takes up what Lugones calls playful “‘world’-travelling.” To unpack “‘world’-travelling” we examine how it was facilitated through the “world café,” a teaching modality. This article examine an educational environment where students engaged in the complexities of race relations in the US by hacking learning rituals that foster understanding racism.

Keywords:

• Classroom
• decolonial feminism
• praxis
• race
• rituals
• world café
• “‘world’-travelling”

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 University renamed to anonymize the context.

2 Original spelling by the globally recognized decolonial feminist philosopher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annie Isabel Fukushima

Annie Isabel Fukushima, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, and Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, at University of Utah. She is author of Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Tanjerine Vei

Tanjerine Vei is a PhD candidate in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah whose research focuses on pedagogies that promote critical consciousness and healing, spiritual activism, and community building.