DIN coordinator Sandew Hira has started a series of weekend courses on Decolonizing The Mind. The first series was held in London in the weekend of 24-25th of February and was organized by the Islamic Human Rights Commission.
The second one is in Amsterdam in the weekend of 28-29th of April and is organised by Studio-K.
The third one is in Finland in the weekend of 19-20th of May and is organized by SahWira Africa International.
Background
The weekend course Decolonizing The Mind (DTM) explores the concepts and tools from the theoretical framework Decolonizing The Mind. Two narratives of liberation had dominated knowledge, culture and activism the past 150 years: Liberalism and Marxism. They are rooted in the European Enlightenment. Decolonial thinking is a collection of contributions to a third narrative of liberation with different labels (postcolonialism, orientalism, subaltern studies, Islamic liberation theology). DTM aims to develop a coherent theoretical framework as an alternative to Liberalism and Marxism.
This course is aimed at activists and academics who want to know about and make a contribution to the development of this coherent framework.
Topics
The course deals wit the following questions:
- What are the differences in theoretical framework between Liberalism, Marxism and DTM?
- What are the differences in producing knowledge from the three frameworks: theories of knowledge including logic, methods of research and analysis for academics and activists?
- What is the DTM framework: concepts, methods of arguments, attitudes of a (de)colonized mind, skills of a (de)colonized mind.
- How do we apply the DTM framework in different areas of knowledge production and activism? We will deal with the following examples:
- Decolonizing social theories: three views on race, class, gender, intersectionality en sexuality.
- Decolonizing cultural theory: three theories about authority of knowledge production, identity formation, religion and ethics.
- Decolonizing world history: three views on world history
- Decolonizing economic theory: Islamic economic theory, liberal and Marxist economic theory.
- Decolonizing political theory: three political theories on democracy, political systems and activism
- Decolonizing mathematics (you don’t need expert knowledge on mathematics).
- How do we apply DTM theory in everyday life?
- What kind of attitudes and skills have colonialism installed in white people and people of color?
- How do you recognize and analyze these attitudes, skills and colonial knowledge in everyday life: workplace, school, daily interaction, friends an family encounters?
- How do we develop a decolonial attitude and acquire decolonial skills in fighting racism?
Course material and preparations
The course is an intensive interactive engagement that starts with a preparation, the course itself and engagement after the course.
Before the course the participants will receive access to an E-Learning application (Moodle) with PowerPoint presentations on the different topics of the course. Participants are supposed to go through these presentations before attending the course.
Teaching methods
Each session starts with a summary of a PowerPoint presentation. Then we spent the course with debates, presentations by participants and analysis of arguments in propositions that develops the topics in the Powerpoint. Special attention is given to possible critiques of the DTM theoretical framework, apart from the critique on Liberalism and Marxism. Participants are asked to prepare a presentation of maximum 5 minutes on a topic by using or criticizing the DTM framework as explained in the PowerPoints. This is optional. If you don’t want to make a presentation, you don’t have to.
After the course
An important aim of the course is to enable participants to use the DTM framework to intervene in political discussions from a decolonial perspective. Participants are invited to use the course to prepare such intervention (writing an article, making a review, submitting discussion pieces, organizing a debate etc). After the course Moodle will be kept open for further communication after the course.
