Disrupting the Settler Colonial University: Decolonial Praxis and Place-Based Education in the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia)

This article demonstrates how decolonial Placed-Based Education can disrupt a settler colonial academic status quo. We begin by situating our analysis in the unceded Syilx Territories of the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia, Canada) and proceed by illustrating how both taken-for-granted colonial epistemologies and banal exnominations of white supremacy remain orthodox within mainstream Canadian higher education. We next define “decolonial praxis” by drawing from insights offered by critical feminist, anti-racist, and Indigenous scholars and community organizers before moving into a summary of how we embraced theories and strategies of decolonization coupled with Place-Based Education in an introductory Gender and Women’s Studies course. We conclude with our response to the ongoing exclusions being reproduced by neoliberal universities that result from the primacy they grant to Western knowledges and rationales. The piece reveals how decolonial place-based methods can be leveraged against settler colonial institutions, discourses, and logics to unsettle their claims to legitimacy, land, and authority over learning.