 Bring us to talk about issues such as inequalities, ethical approaches to open and social justice. And Sue is a scholar of each of these things. So we felt that Sue would have some important things to say and perhaps some frameworks that might help us if this isn't our background to think through some of the challenges that we have. So Sue is a sociologist and a scholar of human rights, higher education, international development and decolonial perspectives. And her goal is to enact critical global and ethical higher education curricula. So please welcome Dr. Sue Ming-Ku. So I don't know about frameworks, but anyway, I'd like to just start thinking about open as a set of openings. And how these openings relate to inequities and the way our lives are connected and the ways in which these inequities are bound or could be unbound by our openings. So it's going to be a kind of like a little circular journey, this path. And I've chosen to make the path around the Pacific because the world of open is a kind of borderless world, but is strangely geographical. And a kind of whole missing area in our geography is the Pacific. So I want to start with a story from the northwest coast of the Pacific Americas. And then I want to explore the way we've been entangled through another kind of opening, the opening of resources. But I want to reflect back in upon ourselves and to think of what that opening did to us, to those who opened, and to look that in the face. I then want to look at some of the difficulties and the promising difficulties, the good trouble that this could bring to us. And we have to confront and face those wounds and open veins of dispossession in an educational context and how we in higher education are very bound up. I want to think about the hope that we have for repairing those openings which are painful, the open wounds of colonialism and of dispossession. And think about this opportunity to remake the public spaces in a way that visibly repairs and heals some of those wounds with commitments to justice. And to bring us together then in the open in this journey. So I hope I won't take more than half an hour to do this, to think about some of these things. So obviously I don't have a lot of time, but I just want to start then on the northwest coast of the Pacific and I want to travel all the way to the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia to use this, a circuit around the Pacific if you like. So I want to start with this story from the Haida Guai people of the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada. And I was very taken, absolutely loved this sculpture in Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology, a museum which I'm going to problematize museums, but a museum which I think is playing a very important role within a university setting in helping to repair using this idea I think of culturally sustaining pedagogies. And so this sculpture is by Bill Reed, he was Haida, his mother's Haida and his father was German I think, a very well known sculptor, very well loved and this is one of the treasures of the museum. And it's a depiction of the first opening of the world for the Haida people. The raven is the trickster, he's the most powerful being in Haida mythology and cosmology. And he's walking along the Rose Pit Beach, which is the country of the Haida people. And he's not hungry because he's eaten very well because it's been a great flood and it's brought a bounty of food and so he's not hungry, he's just having a look and he spies a clam and it catches his eye. So he goes down to have a look at it and he sees these tiny people, something moving and he decides to have another closer look and these people seem to be trying to get out of the clam, so he opens the clam and then the people are afraid, some of them want to go back into the clam and he decides that he's going to coax them, he's a trickster so he has a smooth coaxing tongue so he persuades them to come out and some of them, you can see that somebody's bottom is trying to go back inside the clam and some people are coming out but they don't really look very happy, he coaxes them anyway and he has these kind of supernatural powers and then he's brought these people into the world and he coaxes them come into the world because he says to them the world is wonderful so he cajoles them and they come out and of course they're not really fit for anything, these people, right, because they don't know how to look after themselves. So just through this kind of curiosity and his sort of like his random act of kindness if you like to these people, he helps them, he teaches them to use the salmon and the cedar and you know it's kind of like a guardian person, right, but he's only done it out of curiosity. So that's a beautiful little story about openings and how the first people came into the world in Haider stories but the fact is that we didn't come out of a clam, the world was all not new, it wasn't undiscovered, it was already opened so I wanted the story to start as thinking about the entanglement that we have with the natural world, with the places of the world and with the others of the world and to begin to face certain facts of this opened world that the Haider Gwai were dispossessed in the world, in the real world, by law, by markets and very importantly by education and these are the structures which continue in a world which is the colonial present. So we are entangled in the world through a history of colonialism and decolonization is not a historical event, it is a structure that has to come into being to answer to the structure of colonial entanglement. So colonization was not an event, it is a structure, all those events are not in the past, they are still in the present and one of the ways in which many people encounter and read about and learn about the colonial present is this idea of the open veins, the veins that were opened by colonialism through which wealth and knowledge and resources and territory was extracted from the majority world. So this very well-known book by Eduardo Galliano was published in the 1970s and continues to be read today, this idea of the open veins of Latin America, he is an Uruguayan writer and read extensively not just in Latin America but in its English translation and on the right is an illustration by a journalist, writer Angela Roscoe who wrote about how she also made this picture, how she felt when she read that book, Open Veins of Latin America, the pain that she felt when she read and discovered what this being opened was about. So colonial entanglement creates open veins and open wounds of colonialism which continue through, as you can see in Kate Bowles' address yesterday, extraction, prospecting for materials, biomaterials, for minerals, for knowledge but also through enclosure, enclosure of the knowledge commons as well as the resource commons and unbundling, something that we often think of as maybe in a more positive way, unbundling is also a form of extraction or can be because unbundling is about taking the resource away from its context and from the relationships that the context embeds the resource in and when that happens that is the door for extraction. So something for us to think about when we are thinking about unbundling and the information commons, when we think about academic resources, how are we going to deal with the colonial present and to enact decoloniality, how can we unveil and unmask the colonial wound and how can we use these open wounds, difficult as they are to be the places where reimagination, recreation, healing and suturing take place. So that's just, these are not literal frameworks, these are kind of motifs for thinking. But before I circle on, I want to circle back when we're thinking of suturing and healing. I first thought of this motif, I'm sorry, it's a very difficult picture, about the broken faces of our own modernity and our relationship with technology. And the ambivalent and critical thinking about modernity and technology reached a new breaking point at the outbreak of the First World War. People did not realize what had been unleashed by modernity imperialism and technology. We've had a hundred years to think about this now. And the centenary of the so-called Great War was a very important opportunity to open the archive and to look at it. So World War I was a point when we had invented more technology than we could handle. People had come up with a more efficient kind of gun. They'd also come up with a more useful form of safety gear. So the combination of the machine gun and the steel helmet and modern medicine, field surgery, hygiene techniques, these all led to a large number of people with horrendous head injuries who didn't die of the injuries. Their brains weren't blown out straight away, but half of their faces were. They survived, but they were traumatized physically and emotionally. And what were we to do then with the aftermath of this extraordinary technology which still kills more people every single year than the two atom bombs? The real weapons of mass destruction are rapid fire guns. So we came up with this for the aftermath. And this was the beginning of facial reconstruction surgery. And what facial reconstruction surgery could not help, art helped to mask. So the pictures taken from Smithsonian Archive manuscripts, some photographic archives of the artistry of an artist called Anna Ladd, who helped these facially wounded people in a studio in Paris. And she made thin metal masks which were painted in a very lifelike way with enamel paints to restore the semblance of a face to those who had lost part of their faces. Very extremely painful and poignant photographs. But of course actually what the masks were for were to protect the onlooker and not the wounded person. Because the onlookers could not bear, society could not bear to look at people whose faces that society had destroyed. So what could not be repaired was covered, masked, to protect the onlooker. And I think this gives us a very self-reflective and hard different kind of reflection on the famous decolonial writings of Franz Fanon, black skin, white masks. You think about what was masked by whiteness and by the mask of whiteness. And really the bottom picture is from the art archive of an amazing artist. I'm going to talk about him a little bit more. A French, Algerian artist who now lives in Germany called Cadet Atia. He's recently at a show at the South Bank Center in London. And he has done amazing artworks which are all around the theme of decolonization, colonialism and repair. And he's brought together then this idea of the broken faces. He used the French archive of broken faces, they're actually an association of veterans that were started, of veterans who required maxillofacial surgery. And they would call a girl cassée the broken faces. And this phrase just resonated and resonated. It wouldn't go away in my mind. I was thinking about the broken faces. And then I saw this work by Cadet Atia, which was about repair. And somehow kind of began to understand what he was trying to do as an artist was to create public imagining of what repair must look like. And he kind of criticizes this desire for the perfect repair. Like the perfect mask, the beautiful masks that Anna Coleman Ladd painted for the First World War veterans. That the repair should not mask and cannot mask the injury. But indeed that there's a certain kind of honor and value in repairs that are visible. I just want to reflect a little bit on what lies underneath and scaffolds colonialism extraction, the open veins and the open wounds. And this is a very kind of ordinary scaffolding. And I got thinking about this when reading this amazing book by Caitlin Rosenthal. I definitely one of the kind of books that's really deepened the way I think about resources and extraction and people and management and prices. And there are three figures then. They're too small for you to see them, but I explained what they are. This idea of the commodification of people underlies the brokenness of our modernity. Yeah, when on the left hand side a list from 1785 of prices. And what you see at the very bottom of that list, it's a bit too small probably to read, are people who are placed and priced alongside the things that people were used to produce. Tobacco, sugar, rum, these were the products of slavery along with the new Negroes priced at 451 to 501 pounds. And this is human lives exchangeable for the commodities that were made by these lives, appropriated and sold on the market. At the top right, which is far too small, is a list, it's replicated from this book by Caitlin Rosenthal. And it's a list of prices of slaves by an auction house, so the list is published by the auction house, of people ranked by gender and height. So if you were four foot three, you were a certain price. And if you were five foot eight, you were another price. If you were a man, you were one price. And if you were a woman, another price. So the ranking of commodified humans by height and sex. And in the book, she also details how people were ranked by skills. I just want us to think about education for a moment in brackets. Okay? So education is built upon the scaffold of substitutable commodities and ranked persons. It's a very difficult legacy that we have. And by the management of labor productivity via quantification. So the last piece of documentation from the archives in Rosenthal's book there is a list of slaves being measured by their productivity, how much cotton they picked in a day. So the Excel spreadsheet, right? The Gantt chart, the list of tasks, these are the all have their origins in slavery. I'm not saying that slavery caused these formats, but that these formats emerged at the same time as slavery. Commodification of things, of places and of people. So this scaffolding and background are behind our current boundedness and our boundedness to inequities. Because higher education we would like to think is a kind of zone of freedom. Is a zone that is autonomous, guaranteed by our academic freedom. When someone asks me what does it mean to work in higher education, I answered without hesitation. Academic freedom. And the person who asked me was taken aback. She said, oh, I'm a bit surprised. But that's what it meant to me. But that academic freedom is bound up and shaped by our structural entanglements. Entanglements with governmental power, with capitalism, and with the ordering logics, the scaffolding logics of capitalism, which were about valuation but also devaluation of people and things. So that is the colonial present. It's a present where we think of possession and dispossession. Of education and dispossession. Of inclusion but also exclusion. And it's a double bind. A double bind is a kind of a psychological situation when we have demands. And the powerful demand makes it impossible to fulfill the less powerful demand. But both of them are important demands. So we are caught in a back and forth. And I think this is the demand of commodification. The demand of capitalism. The demand of embeddedness in commodified labor, information, places, and things. That's not to say that it's, you can disentangle it at all easily. Because all forms of entanglement are actually drawing on lots of different types of theory about entanglement. The kind of continuous relationship of people and people and people and things and things and things. And I think it's important that we have a sense of, you know, the things and things and things. So it's very, you can't, you know, you can't untangle them because they are entangled. Entangled means that they are different things at the same time. Yeah? I'm not going to go into the quantum physics of entanglement because I'm not able. And there are many people who are far more able. Listen to Karen Burrard or read her work. But broadly then, the thing with entanglement, what that word means is that our situation is complex and we cannot reduce it to a single legacy with a single victim, a single perpetrator, a single responsible agent, and a single beneficiary, a single exploiter or oppressor. And just a little insight from a Sheldon Bambis amazing book called Critique of Black Reason says this is the little secret of coloniality. Coloniality has a little secret and that little secret is rather a special in education. And that is our very investment in the scaffolding and in the colonial present. In the colony, our complicity, our participation because education is not only a thing in itself, but it is a machine that produces desires and that we are part of that. And our desiring and our idea of what is desirable is bound and entangled with it. So how do we think of what is really the desirable in education? Okay. Sorry, now a little bounce and a bit lighter. Okay. I know it's a bit hard and I know the scary face is still there. The idea of visible repair comes through this Japanese art, the Zen no Wabi Sabi art of Kintsugi or Kintsukoroi, the art of the golden repair. The golden repair kind of invests a certain aesthetic in repair itself. So broken bowls and dishes are repaired carefully with gold dust and lacquer. And it makes the original thing even more valuable for the sake of being repaired. It's just such an interesting concept and something that maybe deserves to be brought to the fore for saking the idea of the perfect repair. So Kade Atia, this French, German, Algerian artist who is interested in reinventing ways to share the public and the political, given the dark times we are living in, has kind of drawn the analogy between this Japanese art of repair and other traditional non-Western arts of repairing things and the situation of entanglement we are in today with the aftermath and the present of coloniality. And just reflecting back to Kade's lecture yesterday about how the university is not a university anymore and the Murray-Darling confluence. It's not only the biogeographical and the natural we need to worry about. Our cultural and our social world is trying up, is not being replenished, is not being nurtured, is not being reforested, whatever that metaphor is. And I think that it's time we thought about this social and cultural infrastructure to begin to redesign our work within this desire for revisible repair, to visibly repair that which is broken by first facing what is broken in the face. Because that's the nature of these dark times, and we do need to reinvent this public sharing in this context where the sense of the public, the trust in the public, the benevolence of the public, the comfort of the public are becoming stripped bare. And part of this is addressing not only the physical, so we have these wonderful sponsors and participants who are involved in repairing and making reparative structures where people can communicate ethically, fairly, justly, inclusively and so on. But we need to address the psychological and emotional legacy of that colonial present and to attend to the needs of both the oppressor and the oppressed. So this is the important aspect in decolonial theory is to understand that oppression was not only for the oppressed, that oppressors were also oppressed by oppression and by being forced to be oppressors and to wear the mask of the oppressor. That that was a traumatic kind of injury and lack and denial of authenticity and identity. I'm on to the almost the last now. Okay, so in five minutes, I want to just think about one of the ask, go back to the scaffolding and the wound and what things can we start repairing with? And I think one of the things that is broken is the way that we think about economics. We've been left with a fragment of economics which is a disembedded, alienated and extracted fragment, extractive fragment. And that there are other ways that we can think of economics which may be more suitable. I'm not saying they're not problematic. They are also problematic, but they may be more suitable for thinking about the work that we do in education and in higher education because it strikes me that what we do is much more like what the anthropologists call a gift economy than a commodity economy. And that's because the things that we exchange are a bit like these cooler arm shells. So in the western Pacific, far west and south of the Haida Gwai peoples are the Melanesian people of the Trobriand Islands. And these people for centuries have practiced an art which is now really struggling to maintain itself. And this is a culture based on the exchange of precious, but so precious that they are valueless ceremonial gifts, these arm shells which are called moali. There are also some necklaces there called sulavas, but mostly about the moalis. And what happens is people in one village on one island set sail in their little dugout canoes across vast expanses of the Pacific to arrive in another island and be given a gift of one of these shells. When you're given a gift of one of these shells, you are now bound to the people of the island that you arrived in. And when they come to your island, they are recognized as your friends, your kin, your collaborators, your network. So it's not about the value of these shells, the value of the shells is the relationship that the shells represent. So gifts are not commodities because gifts are not about the value of the gift. The economic exchange value of the gift is not important. What is important is the relational and effective properties that the gift embodies. And this is something that gifts have that commodities do not have. To me, education looks much more like the arm shell than it looks like the spreadsheet. Because gift exchange is what creates social bonds and creates social cohesion and brings people into community and communication that root word, munos, around the table. And gifts are also problematic because with identity they are tied up with prestige. Not everybody can get an arm shell. Not everybody gets invited to give a keynote. It's kind of a prestige gift in part of this economy of exchange. So just to conclude then, I just want to conclude by mentioning this award-winning paper by Sarah Lambert on recentering open, where she recenters and places the idea of open in a way that faces towards social justice. And to me, yes, this is exactly how I, as a visitor to open, embrace open as a way of wordfully entangling demands for justice. With our social, cultural, justice demands of anti-racism to demystify the differences that have been scarred onto our collective body. I just want to briefly reflect on those things that were offered in the pre-conference, video conference that we had, and what the keynote with the different people seemed to be looking for. Tuscine looking for development. Judy asking who this openness is for and where our southern experiences. Carol with her deep reflection on wanting to understand the lived harshness, the bodily harshness of inequalities. And taking those and gathering those, I want to close by going beyond Sarah's recentering for a minute. And to talk not only about a recentered education, but what one might call an eccentric education. Not to forget that what we are doing is not only social justice, but education for social justice. And education for social justice must be educational. And this is where the idea of eccentric comes in. Because eccentric is about drawing attention to what is missing. To engaging with difference in a way that makes a difference to how we think. Using Gorminda Bambra's idea of connected thinking. And to willfully entangle demands for economic and social justice with the demands for cultural and racial justice. To mystify the experiences. And to be able to foster in people the ability for us in our education not to be ego centered, but to be de-centered. Ex-centered. This is what eccentric education is. So that's what I think educational open education is. It's about education that helps people to be at home in the world in the philosophy of Gert Bister. Education that is eccentric, not ego centered, but relational to those who are other. To involve us in a wider critical and reflective thinking that shares our existence as an in common. That's the end. You can stay, will you take a few questions? Thank you so much, Sue. From Twitter that I was looking at a little bit and just from the feeling at my back sitting in the front. I could feel a lot of energy towards you and interest and admiration. I just want to do a time check and see how much time we have for questions. We have ten minutes. Okay, so I would like to just moderate the questions for you, Sue. And there'll be a mic here. So this is picking up on something that Kate was talking about yesterday as well. She was mentioning that the university is no longer the university. And you brought up those really powerful images of the damaged faces and the bowl being repaired. And in all of those cases there's this sense that there was a time when these things weren't broken. And then they were broken. And now maybe they're repaired. And so my mild concern is that we might be generating a kind of imaginary history where education in the university wasn't broken. Whereas I just wonder whether what's happened is that we find ourselves, we just find in the complexity of the contemporary time, has just shone a light on the fact it's always been broken. Yeah. No, absolutely. So thanks for that. Should I answer one by one? Yeah. So thanks for that. No, I think that's the point about the not a clan. Okay, there was no clan. Because even at the time that you're telling the story about the clam, the people whose story that belonged to had been dispossessed, had their lives wrecked, had been forcibly removed. So removal is a terrible word. Yeah. Which means incarceration and de-institutionalization and deculturation and genocide. So no, there is no clam. There is no pristine moment when it wasn't broken. And that's the point about entanglement is we are already here. So no matter how much we would like to backcast to a nostalgic romance of when education was not broken. Yeah. That doesn't exist in any real institution. Think about this institution here. This lovely new, of course, in 1845, this lovely new lecture theater did not exist. But this institution, this university was built during the famine, which caused the depopulation of half of the country. So, yeah. Anyway, so I forgot to do the thing. My name is Connie Blomgren and I'm from Canada. And so I have a question about, you began right at the very beginning with Bill Reid's sculpture. And you brought forward the role of the raven. Who is that trickster archetype? So what could you tell us about the trickster archetype and what you see? Yes, we have a very funny way of thinking about power in Western thinking. Which is that, you know, it does the power over. And the raven's trickster, I mean the trickster is kind of a really interesting way of thinking about what has the power to make things happen and how things happen. And we have this idea that there's a kind of a straight line of logic of why anything is done. And I think that's why I gravitate so much to that raven character. And I think education is a trickster. And in order for education to be eccentric, it must be a trickster. Because it's not ours to know what is going to really happen. But yet we have a curiosity that we want to follow, that we can't help ourselves. Half the time that's the raven. He can't help himself. He's just too nosy. Yeah? That's why he opens the clam. And he sees the people and they don't want to know. And he's like, come out and play. The world is beautiful. I'll show you. And they're like, it's dark. We can't see anything. He goes up and steals the sun so that people can enjoy the world. He doesn't have a plan, like a strategic organizational vision of, you know, I'm going to open the world, let the people out, have to get the sun, and then sell us some stars and so, you know, and then they're only going to need skills and like training in the skills and they're going to need learning outcomes. He doesn't know any of that, right? And then he sees they need something because they're useless when they come out of the clam. So he's like, okay, you're going to need to use the salmon, guys. So yeah, and then they don't know what to do with the salmon because it goes off really quickly. So then he's like, okay, you need to take the wood and you need to smoke the salmon and dry the salmon. And here's how you do it. And yeah, and it's, and I think it speaks to us as educators because half the time we're just so curious to know what people are going to do with all that knowledge. And it's wonderful when we do find out occasionally. Anyway, look, more questions. There's one more question. Oh, no, sorry. Take two more. Mijalo Adi from NUIG. Sue, I thought that was really powerful. I was just wondering about the idea of the oppressor also as oppressed. And just if you could add a little bit more on that. I think it's pretty clear anyway, but I was just curious about how it may be tied in with Kate's. Well, I suppose it comes from living in Ireland. And, you know, we don't have colonialism or racism here because, you know, we had 800 years of colonization and oppression, et cetera. And it just, it's kind of really bogus excuse because no, we're all in it. That's the point. So that's the point of oppression which people don't really always understand. And it's really the great learning that's in decolonial theory. Is that decolonial theory is about understanding all the sides. And it's that, it's the generous reading of decolonial theory and decolonial attitude, which is about a continuous present of struggling to make better that which was wounded and opened. So to me, that's what, you know, and to say, well, it's the oppressor's fault. I mean, fault is a stupid concept. It doesn't help anybody. So it's that, it's that desire for overcoming and that being the basis of the struggle. And then the potential. So it's there in the works of Fanon. It's there in the works of Meme. It's there in the new works by Cervele and Lovogaccini. It's there in Shilman Bambis' work that he uses. It's, it's, that's the idea is that we're striving towards a common humanity that knows that it wasn't, that it was never whole in the first place, that brokenness exists in the world. And yet we, we want to use some of our educative purpose and some of our desire for common humanity to, to overcome those problems. And that it is extremely oppressive for an oppressor to be forced to become an oppressor forever. Okay. The successful project might be Gaggy Webster. You're not going to need a bigger budget. You're going to need... Be Gaggy Webster, Darker!