 Well, I'm at the top of the hour, so let's begin. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a terrific guest on a vital topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. For the seven years of the Future Transform, we have touched on the theme of colonialism and decolonizing higher education. We had people make arguments about this. We've had at least one guest from South Africa and Britain lead a session on it, but this is the first time in a few years that we've had a chance to really dive into the subject. I'm very, very excited to introduce Dr. Sharon Stein. She is the author of a new book on the subject called Unsettling University, which I cannot recommend highly enough. If you look, by the way, in the bottom left corner of your screen, you should see a kind of little yellow tan color bar linked to it. Click that and grab a copy of the book. This is one of the most powerful, provocative, thoughtful, ethical books about higher education I've written in years. And I'm so happy to have a chance to host the guest. So let me press a button and bring Dr. Sharon Stein on stage with us. Greetings, Professor Stein. Hello. Good afternoon. So good to see you. Is it morning where you are now? It's morning, yes. Very good. Well, thank you for joining us. It's a real pleasure. Let me just ask, when I asked people to introduce themselves in academia, usually, we just start repeating our CVs out loud. But here in the forum, our goal is to ask about the future. And I'm curious what you're gonna be working on besides enjoying all the conversation feedback and sales of this new book. What are you gonna be looking forward to? What are the big ideas and the big projects that are top of mind for you for the next year? Thank you. Well, first, if it's okay, I would like to just start by acknowledging the territory, which I'm speaking to you from. Please. Which is the traditional ancestral unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Swayla-tooth peoples in what is currently known as Vancouver, Canada. Conversations about decolonizing higher education, one sort of theme that is this question of land acknowledgments and how to make them more meaningful so they don't become sort of tokenistic acknowledgments, but rather indicate their accountabilities to the indigenous peoples of this place to have their rights recognized and their land restored to them. So I just wanted to start by saying that. Excellent, thank you. But yeah, when I think about what I'm gonna be working on next, I think in many ways it's a continuity of the themes that are in the book, but actually having that more of a focus also on these questions about the climate and nature emergency and how this actually intersects with colonialism. So my approach to the climate nature emergency and our role as educators in relation to that is asking questions about how we can invite students to engage critically with the root causes of climate change, which for me in my analysis is colonialism and capitalism. So asking if our universities are embedded in those systems, what does it mean for us to take climate action in justice-oriented ways? Well, thank you. And that's what you're gonna be working on in terms of your teaching and your scholarship and your service. That's my focus right now and I do it in collaboration. I do most of my work in collaboration because decolonizing work is not something we can do alone. We need everybody to be part of the conversation. So I specifically work with a research collective called Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. And the work that we're doing right now about climate justice is actually led by one of our indigenous community collaborators, Chief Ninoa Khan-Pui, who is a hereditary chief from the Amazon in Brazil. Oh, excellent, excellent. And can you say the name of the collective again so that people can find it online? It's called Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and the website is decolonialfutures.net. Excellent, thank you, thank you. Friends, I'm gonna ask Professor Stein a couple of questions about her book. But what I'd like you to do is to start thinking about your questions, your comments, your thoughts that you'd like to share because in just a few minutes, I'm gonna open the floor to you and the whole idea of the forum is to be driven by you, all of you, your thoughts, your questions, your hopes, your fears, your anxieties and your desire to connect. Professor Stein, I have so many questions from this book because it's such a powerful book. I found myself starting to read parts without loud people. One of the key elements of it is your focus on attributability, the idea that you would like to have people in and around academia recognize that the academia itself is structured on the history of colonialism. And if I can get this passage right, that the privileges and benefits that one enjoys within academia, the ability to pursue life of the mind, for example, they're rooted in historical and ongoing colonial and ecological harm. And it's such a powerful call. It's such a powerful way of rethinking higher education. How do we go about doing this? What are some of the ways that academics can actually do this kind of work? The great question. I think for me, and that's also why the subtitle of the book is Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education. I think often we want to jump to how do we decolonize when in fact, we have taken the time to confront the coloniality of the institution, which is the first baby step toward doing that. And I think one of the things that I try to emphasize is that it's not just intellectual work. On the one hand, the book is sort of one intellectual dimension of this, but because of the ways that our lives and livelihoods are entangled with colonialism, I like in the collective that I work with, we say it's not just an informational problem. Like if we sometimes assume that if we just told people about these histories, then that would change their action and motivate them to do something different. But in fact, we often find that people can understand and even feel a sense of commitment toward decolonization. But if they haven't done the internal work of addressing their affective investments in the promises that colonialism offers us, then we're gonna keep doing the same thing. So part of it is sort of doing our homework intellectually about how our institution and our specific disciplines are entangled with colonialism, but it's also about developing the affective and the relational capacities to be able to show up and do this work differently, recognizing extent to which we are embedded in colonialism and the difficulties and the complexities of undoing that really can't be overstated. So we need all different kinds of work, but I would say intellectual, affective, and relational work are all needed on this front. And the relational work would be with people within higher education, but also outside of higher education, especially those excluded from higher education. Absolutely. So what are our accountabilities, for instance, to the local nations on whose lands our institutions are situated? And to me, that's not just about their historical and systemic exclusion, but also the fact that institutions have been developed at their expense. So what are our responsibilities in terms of reparations and rematriation to recognize that colonial debt that is ongoing to those communities and figure out how we might repay that debt and repair those relationships so that a different future actually becomes possible? I'm gonna thank you, Wesson, for sharing the link to the site. Thank you for that terrific, terrific answer. I'm trying, if I can, to take notes and to tweet out parts of them, but I'm really struck by how you ask academics to do internal work in terms of affective, emotional, psychological work and reflection. And as you say in the book, saying Donna Haraway, you want people to stay with the trouble, not to relax into what's useful or familiar, but to stay with what is friction, what is challenging. And at the same time, when you do external work with relationships and the intellectual work crosses over both of those domains. I'm gonna ask a bit more about this at the end of our session if we can, but I'm curious if you could, if you'll forgive the expression, gesture towards what the university that does this work might look like. For example, do we abolish some universities and instead rematriate the land completely to the native peoples who are there? Do we redesign our curricula so that we teach not only Western and European topics, but also more in terms of the digitized ways of knowing and knowledge? What are some of the many ways that the universities can look like? Well, it's such a common question that arises. And I think not to deflect the question, but it's really, for me and the work that I do, it's really hard to know exactly what a decolonized or decolonized university could look like because we are really not there yet. And so what happens is that we want to imagine something different, which often means skipping a lot of steps. And the reality is that if we imagine something from where we are now, we're likely going to be imagining many colonial patterns being reproduced because that's the place in which we're sitting. Now that being said, there's all kinds of proposals and different projects for how we might move slowly towards decolonizing our institutions. My institution, for instance, has an indigenous strategic plan where they lay out their commitments to indigenous peoples at the university, in particular, Musqueam, which is the nation. My university sits, but the reality is that stating the commitment is one thing, actually enacting it is quite another. And sort of that gap between what we say we're doing and what we're actually doing is often very significant. And the other piece that you also really emphasize is that it's not easy, but the question we have to ask ourselves is what is my particular contextual role in this work? So what often happens in decolonizing work is that settlers like myself put the labor on indigenous folks to tell us what to do or to lead this work. And it ends up creating a lot of unrecognized, unpaid, additional, intellectual, affective, relational labor for them. So how do we sort of try and redistribute that labor so that we're taking the responsibility for our part in this piece? And it's not easy to always identify what is my part and what someone else is. But a lot of it really depends on who we are and where we find ourselves. So me, assistant professor, white woman, has a very different role than my indigenous colleagues, but how could we sort of coordinate so that we can be the most accountable and impactful, whatever that context might be and thinking about what's possible in that space and what the next most responsible small thing to do might be instead of thinking that we have to have a master plan for how D. Hall of Assumption is going to play out. Well, that is how hard education often proceeds is by that kind of grand strategy top-down planning. Do you... So if I understand correctly, what you're saying is we need to prepare for imagining such a future, that we need to be entering a space where we can do that, but we can't do it right now. Yeah, because part of the way that the Western way of thinking about the future often works is that we think we have to know where we're going, and usually we think, like white people like myself, that we are the ones that should determine that. And so we project an idealized future and then we drag everybody toward that. And in reality, if it's actually the colonizing work, we would have to do it collectively. And that is very complex because we're dealing with many different perspectives and investments and it really requires us moving at the speed of trust and focusing on the integrity of our relationships and the learning as we move, as opposed to knowing in advance exactly where we're going and having this predetermined outcome in mind. But it's very difficult for our institutions to work that way. And so it's not that there's no place for these grand strategic plans, but there have to be sort of counterbalance with this other more relational, more emergent work as well. Moving forward at the speed of trust is a fantastic phrase. Wow, wow. Do you think a venue like the one we're in right now is just the place where we can do some of this work even in a small way? I think it's work to be done in every space. The question is, what would that work look like in that space? And that really should be determined by the people in that space. And in order to do that, it requires sort of being able to see the different layers that are in play in that place. Who's present? Who's absent? What is the work that I need to do? How do I not try and speak for others but rather take responsibility for my little piece in this? Thank you, thank you. And we are always, always eager to do that kind of work here. We had a couple of really good comments that came up in the chat. Shandell Holden said that we need to create the conditions in which we can imagine the future differently. She11 about Luli said that, yes, futures for all cannot be imagined by a few. Here, here, I completely agree. So friends, I have more questions, but this is the place for your questions. So let me try to give as much space for that as possible. And we have a couple that just came in. So let me flash these on the screen so that everyone can get a chance to see them. This is one from our friend, Charles Finley and at Northwestern and he says, I often hear recommendations regarding adopting indigenous ways of knowledge. How would you describe indigenous ways of knowing and learning? Great question. And I don't feel like I'm the person to necessarily speak to that, but I'll do my best. One piece is sort of recognizing that there's not one indigenous ways of knowing, right? Hundreds of different nations, both within what is currently known as the US and what is currently known as Canada, and they have their own particular place-based knowledge systems and making sort of grand generalizations about indigenous knowledge can be quite tricky and go to this an indigenous mode. But on the other hand, thinking about what's intelligible in our context, sometimes we do have to do that piece about thinking about general differences between Western and indigenous knowledges. But the primary thing I would say is that it needs to be indigenous folks who lead this work of indigenizing and bringing indigenous pedagogies and indigenous knowledges into the institution. So one question is how do we prepare if you don't currently have spaces where indigenous folks are present in your university? How do you actually prepare the institution to receive and welcome those people and their perspectives so that we're not just sort of adding them in as an afterthought, in which case it has to be quite tokenistic. And often there's many patterns that get reproduced in this, which again is this idea of putting all the labor on them to make the change. So yeah. Well, that's, I appreciate the sheer complexity of this. I mean, there's an extraordinary diversity and extraordinary number of indigenous nations in North America right now. Charles, forgive me for putting you in the wrong institution. You're at Northeastern University, not Northwestern. And thank you for that question. If you're new to the Future Transform, that is an example of a Q&A box question. So just if you have any, please go to the bottom of the screen, look for that little question mark button, hit it, type in your question and we're good to go. And as I say that, more questions are coming in. So this is one from our dear friend, John Hollenbeck who is in the frozen tundra right now. John, I hope you're not getting slammed by ice too badly. He says, decolonizing is a classic issue as well, no? Higher education privileges learning the facts and symbols that create the management class as opposed to valuing the skills. It creates a world where privilege manages. I guess that's a comment to respond to. Yeah, I think in reality, all of these layers are intersecting, so questions about class, questions about gender, questions about nationality, intersect with colonialism as well. And I think there are some cases in which we need to really think about them all together, but there's also a place where centering the question of dispossession and expropriation of land and resources is a different conversation, although related to conversations about sort of exploitation and class. But in reality, of course, they're quite intermixed as well. That's a good question, and Sharon, thank you for that very, very concise answer. There are folks in the chat who are putting in all kinds of comments. And friends, it would be easier if you can, just to put your chat comments in the Q&A box if you want me to share them, so I can then flash them on the screen and it's easier for everyone to see. We had a couple of notes I thought were really important. Mark Johnstone shared some perspectives on indigenous knowledge from a link, so thank you, University of Mexico. Deborah Penner says that at her college, higher education is integrated with faith, arts and education. The arts are celebrated here as well as sustainable and organic farming. But Deborah, where are you? Which institution, if you could? And so we have more questions coming in, and I'd like to give people a chance to compose those. But I do have one more question, Sharon, to ask along these lines. What happens do you think two institutions that right now are nominally committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, but often resist making structural changes? And in terms of the climate crisis, seeing hell bent on doing very little, I mean, how can you pry loose these systems into actual transformation in order to be able to take decolonization seriously? Yeah, and again, it really depends on the context and what is intelligible in that context and what we think will move something in that context. But one thing that I have been sort of emphasizing with my colleagues is that young people are asking for this. They're asking for deeper conversations about racial equity. They're asking for deeper conversations about decolonization, climate action. And there's an, I sense increasing gap that they observe between their concerns and the education they're actually receiving in our institutions. And if we want to be relevant and responsible to those current and coming generations, then we will have to adapt. Because reality is that when institutions do this work tokenistically, they might get away with it for a while, but eventually people start calling it out. And then there's a lot of work to be done to see, well, what happened? Why didn't it actually go anywhere? And how much time and resources have we wasted by doing things superficially, as opposed to actually digging into this long-term difficult complex work? Because usually institutions want it to be easy. They want it to be fast. But if we're doing it right, it's not going to be easy. It's going to be uncomfortable and it's going to take a while and there's going to be mistakes and failures that we need to learn from as we move along in the process. How can we do that when so many academics around the world are suffering from unusually high levels of exhaustion and stress, in part because of the terrible pandemic, in part depending on which nation you're in because of political unrest? In the United States, we have the extra problem that the higher education system is under enormous financial pressure for various reasons. How do we help faculty and staff and of course students in this, in that context? It's a great question. How do we develop the stamina for this work given all of the other demands on our time and given the fact that it is going to be long haul work? And I think one thing is to zoom out and say, well, actually these things are all connected because the colonial academic system that we have is precisely the system that has led us to this crisis point of the way resources are distributed, the way labor is organized and actually seeing the connections between those things and colonialism is one piece. There's also the question of again, how do we distribute the labor of this so that those who do have more time and resources like myself as a tenure track faculty member take on more of this work? When I know that for instance, my indigenous students don't have as much time and space to do that, or they're already doing a million other things. So I think it's really about seeing what is present in a space and how we can work with what we have. And sometimes that's just this tiny little piece, but that piece can move the needle a little bit and then we keep going in that way. Thank you, thank you. That's a very inspiring and very wise answer. I'd ask Deborah Penner where she is. She's at Kansas Tabor College, a small man at college. We have more questions coming in and this is one from Mark Johnstone. Mark asks, institutional impediments to change include policy, the fact of the government's processes and cultures. What are some potential strategies for overcoming those barriers? Yeah, it's a good question. I will have to go back first and foremost to the fact that it really, I can't say because every institution is gonna be different, but I think zooming out, asking where is the institution at in relation to this conversation and what is the next step to push the conversation a little bit and seeing what the leverage points are. So in some cases, as I said, I've used the leverage point of how is this work gonna be relevant to our students? In other cases, we could say, for instance, in Canada, there's a commitment to fulfill the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. So although that's currently being negotiated, what that's actually gonna look like, it may be that at a certain point, securing the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous nations about things that happen on their land might become an institutional requirement for us. So lots of sort of places where we can play with the things that people see as relevant. So even if they're not held by the call for decolonization in general, there might be a piece of it where there's an entry point and then you just start there and then see what happens, reassess, and then see, okay, what's the next small, most responsible thing we can do to continue moving the conversation forward? Thank you, that's a really, really thoughtful answer. In the chat, I just wanted to surface two comments that came back to back. And as always, I'm just so deeply impressed by what the members of our community think. Suzanne Buglione, I hope I got that right, Suzanne, said that she finds that this work brings her hope and I want this back. That's excellent as a psychological as well as political issue. And then Charles Finley says, career focus and skill development is what gets financial support. Yeah, well, I mean, and again, this is me speaking from the Canadian context. I know things are not quite there yet in the US but because of the fact that reconciliation which in brief is sort of a product of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada that looked at the history of Indian residential schools and there's an equivalent in the US of Indian boarding schools. Reconciliation is sort of the agenda for many institutions and professionals. So thinking about the career training, an entry point for that is that many different professions are now integrating into their professional standards basic understanding and appreciation of histories of colonialism and the particular barriers that colonialism creates for Indigenous peoples. For instance, if you're a healthcare worker, there's a lot of new considerations that are brought into the healthcare profession's requirements about a basic entry point at least level of understanding these things. So again, even though people might not have a strong commitment to decolonization, if we say, well, maybe you don't but reality is that the professions are moving in this direction. Therefore, we also have to adapt. That's another entry point into the conversation for our community. Well, that purport, that was 2015, 2016, that was a huge development in Canada. Yeah, we're not anywhere near that in the US but that was very inspiring. Thank you, thank you. We have some more questions and they're breaking into a few different areas. So I'm gonna try and bring these together if I can. A couple of these are campus-based for lack of a better word and here's one. I'm interested in Dr. Stein's point that there's distance between the University of British Columbia as Indigenous Strategic Plan and Action. Can you tell us about some of the action-based work that motivates you at UBC? That's Kendall Newman. Yeah, well, first I would just say that the work that my Indigenous colleagues in all departments of the University are doing is what inspires me because despite all of the institutional barriers that are put in place, they continued to do this work and they have been doing it long before decolonization was ever on the radar of networks like me. But that's something that should be reflected and they continue doing that work whether there's institutional support or not. But in my own work, one of the things that I'm involved in right now is that there's an interdisciplinary institute called the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC and I'm part of the leadership team this year and we created a theme for the year which is about the climate and nature emergency. And whereas in past years, this was sort of a fellowship only for faculty, this year we created cohorts for faculty as well as staff, undergraduate students, graduate students and emeriti to all get involved in intergenerational and interdisciplinary conversations about the climate and nature emergency. We organized this according to four themes, one of which was sort of self-critical intellectual depth, another of which was ethical collaboration, another piece was repetitive redistribution, sort of recognizing the debts we have to the communities on the front lines of the climate and nature emergency and the fourth was actually to demonstrate how you're going to respond to universities indigenous strategic plan. So in this crack of an institution that is now sort of a closing as current form, we were able to create this space and all of the possibilities and complexities that came with that as well. But having these organizing principles really gave an orienting direction for the work that we're doing despite the fact that people are coming from very different life experiences and disciplinary backgrounds. That sounds like a terrific event or series events. Is that happening now? Yeah, it's a year long program at the Peter Wall Institute here. That sounds terrific. I'd love to follow up afterwards and ask you about that. And if anybody on our call right now has any more information or a link to that, throw it in the chat please. We'd like to see more of that. So that's, first of all, Kendall, thank you for the question and thank you Sharon for the very detailed answer. That's a good example of what you're looking for. We've had another question along, pretty much along the same lines here from Chandel Holden. Gosh, Chandel, if I've got your name wrong, I'm really sorry, if it's Holden perhaps. But Chandel asks this question, decolonization isn't just an intellectual or theoretical task, what strategies might you recommend for engaging decolonization as an embodied or holistic process? Yeah, great question. So I think the one, I'll start by focusing on the affective dimension that I mentioned earlier and one of the pieces that I often do, not just my pedagogy, but also my writing sometimes is I say, as you're reading this resource or this text, rather than approach it in the usual way or in addition to approaching it in the usual way, which is like, what do I think intellectually? How does this relate to other themes? Observe what's happening in your body in response to this. So are you having a sense of resistance? Are you having a sense of excitement? Are you having a sense of sadness? And often it's all of these and more, right? Because we are not sort of coherent beings. We are also complex and parts of us might be excited by the idea of decolonization. Others might, parts of us might feel threatened. So actually taking a step back from ourselves and observing our own responses to, for instance, a call for decolonization can be very important work that we do in relation to ourselves because it shows us where we're at. What parts of us are resistant? Where is that resistance coming from? How would we need to address it so that we can actually show up to this work and not have our resistance forefronted, but rather have our commitments and our accountabilities and our sense of needing to try even though we don't know exactly what we're doing at the fore. So I think that's one piece of the affective work. As part of my research collective, we created an online course. It's open access. It is called Facing Human Wrongs. And as part of that course, there are many different layers of exercises, one of which is read an academic article, but there's also embodied exercises. There are forest walks, which are sort of guided walks for people to take, to sort of metabolize the things that they're reading about intellectually in their bodies. So for instance, in one of the walks, we invite people to take the ecological footprint quiz, as well as the modern slavery quiz to see how many earths it would be required if everyone consumed at the rate that you do, as well as how many modern day slaves are working to sustain your lifestyle. And we ask people to take these numbers and actually work with them and walk with them so that it's not just sort of an abstract number, but they actually start to feel the implications of that and what it calls them to do. So we have several forest walks like that that are calls to responsibility, but to actually feel that in visceral way as opposed to just flexually. So you're literally walking with them. That's, wow, wow, that's really, really powerful. What do you, first of all, Chandel, thank you so much for the really good question. And Sharon, thank you for that powerful answer. I have to ask the kind of, I don't know what question, or is it in some ways a lame question to ask, but what happens when we ask academics to feel? And most academics don't like to feel, feels for other people who are intellects, but also in a body, right, to somatically engage with us. And then some of the academics feel terrible and they want to go with that into a savior complex or as you put it, so right in your book, they want to re-center their own experiences. How do we work through that? How do we keep, I was gonna say, how do we keep academics feeling terrible and not doing the wrong thing in response? Well, first I should say the point is not to make people feel terrible, but it is to act as a responsibility. And that is what the indigenous communities that we work with, especially communities in Brazil whom we try and direct any resources to in terms of redistribution. Their analysis of colonialism is that at its root, it's a relational issue. It's the fact that non-indigenous peoples have numbed ourselves to the pain that we are causing to the earth itself and to other people so that we can sustain this lifestyle. So what they say is you would have to figure out how to un-num that sense of connectedness and that sense of responsibility. So that the responsibility is not just utility maximizing calculation of if I do this then I did this, but rather something that we do because we can't not do it, even if it's inconvenient and goes against our self-interest. So one sort of inquiry that my collective has is how do you activate that sense of responsibility in the guts as opposed to just the head? But the reality is that we can only make the invitation. We can't force people, whether it's our students or our colleagues or anyone else to do this work. They have to decide that they wanna take this on and not everyone will take that up and not everyone will take it up in a deep way but what we wanna do is make the resources and the invitation available when possible. And then when it's not possible to do it in this deeper way to then use the other strategies that we have, which is that well if we don't do this we're not fulfilling the requirements of this professional program. So you can enter the conversation in multiple ways and you're not able to get entered in in that embodied affective way for everybody if they're resistant. Although I always say if you feel resistance like if you're reading the book and you feel resistance that's fine, that's great. Use the resistance and see it as your teacher. What is it showing you about the investments that you still have in this colonial system and the work that you still need to do in order to be able to show up and actually do this work? Making the resistance your teacher. That's a very powerful. I have to put in a plug and Sharon please correct me as I mispronounce or get the incorrect names for here for. The very, very powerful book, Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Mohador-Odera Henriati, which does a lot of this work in great detail. How did you, Sharon? Did I totally mangle the name? Not bad. Yes, Vanessa is a colleague of mine and a collaborator in the Dress Train Towards Declonial Futures Collective and I would highly, highly recommend her book Hospicing Modernity as one way into this work that has great intellectual depth but also has a lot of embodied invitations for how to actually feel your way into this work and exactly as you can work with that resistance as well. That's a very profound book, a very disturbing book. I mentioned, well, thank you, thank you. Sorry for me intervening with that question. As a moderator, I'm trying to moderate and get everybody else's questions instead. As I mentioned, we had a few different clumps of questions and a few of these turn on the question of indigenous ways of knowing and curriculum. So let me just put these out there and see where you get to build on these. This is from Mark Johnston again and Mark asks this, would a broad lens and decolonization of curricula include addressing the range of people and cultures alienated from participation, Hispanic, African-American women, et cetera? I mean, I'll flash that on the screen again in case that, yeah, about time. Yeah, thank you, Mark. I mean, to be honest, everyone's gonna have a different answer to this question. And that's one of the ways that I also approach this decolonizing work is that there is no one entry point, there's no one way of doing it, how I do it is gonna be different from my colleagues. But I certainly think that addressing these intersectional dimensions of domination would be is part of decolonizing work. On the other hand, there's a lot of indigenous academics that say we can't use decolonization as a catchall for all social justice issues. And then we lose the particular focus on the colonization of indigenous peoples and then the need to restore indigenous lands. And it's not a competition between that and justice issues. It's just maintaining the specificity of what, if we're talking about settler colonialism at least, what decolonization asks of us that those other social justice issues are intersecting, but they might in some cases be viewed as parallel work rather than trying to collapse them all because then we lose the particularities of the experiences of these different groups, each of which require a different conversation, although ultimately related. Well, thank you. That's a solid answer and a terrific question, by the way. Building on that, I actually bring into going back one step. We have a question from our dear friend, Roxanne Riskin, who asks us about the emotional aspect of this in a different way. What are you doing to help those who are suffering feel to not feel more traumatized? Yeah, so this is an interesting conversation that I would generally defer to my colleague, Kasha Henekew. He's Senator, Research Chair, Indigenous Peoples' Well-Being, and he's trying to sort of theorize around this emerging conversation and education about, for instance, trauma-informed pedagogy. And one of the things that he does is he offers context for when he's introducing a conversation or an educational resource as, for instance, this resource, to take one example, is going to draw attention to and focus on the legacies of colonial violence experienced by Indigenous peoples. If you are an Indigenous person, you might have different responses to this. One response may be that you feel a sense of relief that these things are being named when they have been silenced for so long. On the other hand, you might also feel that you're being re-traumatized by having to read through this again. And then, for people on the settler side, especially for white settlers, you might also feel a sense of resistance, but it's coming from a very different place. And the invitation of the exercise is to actually get you to go into that place of discomfort. So the discomfort that is experienced by the Indigenous student in the class and the white student are very different kinds of discomfort, and he says at the end of the day, for both of you, you get to decide how deeply you engage with this because only you can make that decision. But I think what he does points to the reality of the fact that there's no universal conversation about decolonization. There are times when what's very educationally powerful for white settler students to work through can be re-traumatizing for Indigenous students. And conversely, there's conversations that Indigenous students or other white students need to have where if the white students were present, they would feel like they need to censor themselves because of the fear of activating white fragilities, which is why sometimes we do our work in caucusing, where we break out groups and say, this is a conversation, we're maybe going to look the same resource even, but Indigenous peoples are going to have a conversation over here, and white people are going to have a conversation over here. Maybe we might have another group for non-Indigenous BIPOC people. And it might come together in the end to reflect on that process, but actually recognizing that we might need different spaces and different conversations because what's powerful pedagogically for one group can be difficult for another and vice versa. Wow, that's a great answer. I mean, it feels, Sharon, like you have another three books in you about this. I mean, I feel we can just talk for another few hours and then we'll get John Hopkins on the horn again and you're good to go. Thank you for that answer. We have another question, and it's such a large question that it takes over two different boxes. So I'll show you what I mean. And this is from Sheila Malouli. And so the first part is this. The bar is so high for Indigenous scholars who publish Indigenous space within core disciplines. Meanwhile, settler scholars sprinkle a few words related to Indigenous knowledge production. That's part one. And then part two is, and are commended for their commitment to DEI. How do we further social justice from all social locations? Yeah, thank you, Sheila. That's such an important point. And to reference back to my colleague, Kasha Henneke, he has a 2016 article called Graphing Indigenous Ways of Being on to Indigenous Ways of Knowing on to Western Ways of Being or something along those lines. But he has in it a poem called Academic Indian Job Description where he actually lays out all of the things that are actually expected of Indigenous faculty members, which is sort of like three times the amount of things that are expected of white faculty members. So for instance, not only that you bring your Indigenous knowledge systems but that you understand the critique of Western knowledge systems and you understand the critique of Indigenous knowledge systems and that you educate your settler colleagues and your settler students and your Indigenous students and work with your Indigenous colleagues and work with their community members, et cetera, et cetera. So I recognize that I have in a way a very different job than my Indigenous colleagues because of all the expectations that are placed on them by the institution and in their community responsibilities as well, where for many non-Indigenous faculty members, especially white people like me, we're not necessarily, at least we don't recognize, accountability to other communities, right? So I think this is an incredibly important point and that's why there is this invitation for settlers, especially white settlers, to step up and step into this work, knowing when also to step back in order to allow our Indigenous colleagues to be at the core, but really understanding that it's not optional for our Indigenous colleagues whether or not they do this work. They do it as a matter of that's just who they are and that's what they do in order to be in the institution. So what is our responsibility in order to actually make our institutions a place where Indigenous colleagues and students feel that they can bring their whole selves and they don't have to put on all these filters so that they don't activate, for instance, our insecurities and our fragilities. So I think there's a lot for us to do. And again, what that work is will really depend on who we are and where we're coming from. I appreciate that attention to specificity and Sheila, I love that question very much. Thank you. Sheila also shares a link and I don't know if we'll be able to see it on the screen. Yeah, thank you. Yes, there we go. The Indian jaw description, there we go. And I'll see if I can paste that into the chat there just to make sure it's there. Yeah, so thank you. Thank you for that. The article, it's a grafting Indigenous ways of knowing onto non-Indigenous ways of being the underestimate challenges of decolonial imagination. Yeah, a great one. Great, great. I just tweeted that out and threw that in the chat. Thank you for the great answers and Sheila, thank you very, very much for the excellent question. We have another question that comes in from the Mediterranean and hello, Philip. Thank you for joining us this evening. Philip, since the 600-year-old university of Malta, great place, predates all three colonial powers. Malta is only 58 years independent. Can decolonization be misused? The short answer, yes. In any context, it can be misused, it is all the time. I would not, I don't know enough about your context to know what that might look like. But I think that is why the context of the conversations is so important. Even in the US versus Canada, right, there are different conversations happening or different parts of the country or where an institution is at in relation to these conversations. And I think that's why in the gesturing towards the colonial futures collective, we on the one hand situate ourselves in terms of where we work and who we work with, but we also really emphasize this complexity-based approach to decolonization, where there are no simple answers, there's many moving parts of reality and complexity that are always at play. And part of what we try and support people to do is to develop the discernment of knowing, of leading the government being read by the context and knowing how might the intervention that I wanna make land in this place and how would I have to adapt it in order to be intelligible and of consequence in another space and maybe that other space is actually not for me, it's for someone else to do, but respecting that people in their own context are the best people to determine what is gonna be relevant and responsible in that space rather than offering some sort of universal prescription, which is often what is sort of asked of us in this work and is not really possible within them. Well, thank you. Thank you. And I appreciate your humility. Malta is a fascinating nation and the university is a fine one. And I appreciate, Philip, the depth of your question. We are coming up on the last few minutes of our program and I wanna make sure everybody gets a chance to ask their question. So if you haven't yet, please hit the Q and A box or click the raised hand to join us on stage. You can tell that both of us are very welcoming and very nice, even if I don't have as cool a background as Sharon does right now. We have a question from my good friend, Chris Mackey, who asked another higher education specific question and he's someone who would know. Curious, what higher education institutional culture out there comes closest to your ideal? Not just at their best, but as a messy holistic reality. Who's doing this well? How are you? What gaps remain? Yeah, another difficult question, because as I said about my own institution, what looks really good on the surface and is actually like celebrated by people across the country. If you talk to the indigenous faculty or actually here is often more window dressing than anything else. And I think the most, the deepest work that I see happening is the work that is going into the radar. It's happening in the cracks of our institution where people are using little pots of money and resources to try something really interesting. There wouldn't be possible in a grand scale and maybe would even be down if more people knew about it. But where people say, what can we do in our little space given the collective wisdom of the people here and our commitment to do this work? And I think then not so much of looking for models of how to do this, right? But looking for telling examples where there's people learning from successes and failures. Because I think often in this work or any kind of difficult work actually, social justice work, we are looking for people to tell stories of success. We're not as welcoming of people telling stories of failure, but that's one of the things that we focus on in the gesturing towards decolonial futures collective because it's inevitable in this work that we're gonna fail. So we say how to fail faster and fail forward, learning from that mistake so that we don't repeat it, but knowing that we're gonna create new mistakes as we move forward in this process. And what kind of sort of practices can we have where we actually look at failure as a site of learning so that we can be more accountable going forward? It reminds me of, gosh, this is my day for gargling names. Yaw Paperson, which is a student name, third university is possible, concludes with that hope for finding small cracks of work within larger edifices. In the chat, Chandel Holden says like, it sounds like it's happening more what Moten and Harney call the under comments. So, and Chandel, if you wanna throw in a citation for that, that would be great so that people can follow up. We have one last question, and this comes from John Hollenbeck who asked an early question. And this is a typically provocative question from John who asks, isn't integrating indigenous ways of learning reductive? Bringing something into higher education means altering to fit the institution. Indigenous people don't give grades, don't we need a new higher education? Yes, to the first question for sure, it's reductive and I think most, especially indigenous faculty who are doing that work recognize that and that's why there's a whole range of different sort of critiques and strategies where some people say it's just not possible to decolonize the university. It would be the end of the university as we know it. Whether that is sort of like, and that can be interpreted in different ways as well. And then there are some people who say, well, it's better we do this than nothing. And most people are in between saying, I'm gonna do what I can. What's within my sphere of influence in this space, knowing that it's gonna be partial and imperfect and have its own flaws, but it's the most responsible thing I could do right now. And I'm gonna keep deepening that work and sort of finding those cracks and finding those possibilities, but also paying attention to exactly the kind of thing you're pointing out in your question, which is that these modes of inclusion and integration often become strategies of assimilation or as Dr. Ahaneke talks about in his article, grafting and totally misreading indigenous ways of knowing by importing them into the Western Colonial University. And that's just a paradox that, for instance, Dr. Ahaneke says I have to work with because that's where we are. Well, sorry about that. I managed to try to do something fancy and managed to make myself invisible for a couple of seconds. Thank you, Sharon, for the really solid answer. John, as always, thank you for your questions. In the chat, we have all kinds of resources. People are going back and forth, offering really good links and really good ideas. And Marla, I think maybe if we can wrap up on this point, Marla says this really good point, she used to go right to your book's point, recognizing and acknowledging that colonialism-ness and higher education is a thing I think is the first step. Definitely. Well, excellent. I'm glad we could end on a first step. And you have given us so much, so much else to go on. Professor Stein, thank you so much for this fantastic conversation. I'm just in awe and very grateful. Thank you for having me. Oh, my pleasure. But before you go, please let us know, how can we keep up with you? How can everyone in the community follow what you're working on next? Well, you can always follow my academia page or my research page where I share my latest research. And then decolonialfutures.net also has a lot of the work that is coming out of the collective. And there's a great deal of resources there in the archives as well. Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you so much. And we will be in touch to ask you still more questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. Don't go away, friends. I've got just want to wrap things up with a few more notes, but thank you all for your really, really great participation, your questions and your comments. If you'd like to keep those going, if you'd like to keep thinking about what decolonization of higher education means, please use the hashtag FTTE on social media. If you're on Twitter, you can tweet at me, Brian Alexander, or at Shindig events. Here's my long, massive done handle. And of course, you can go to my blog, bryanalexandry.org. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, where we touch on decolonization as long as related issues, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and subscribe. You can also find that on the Future Trends Forum website. If you'd like to dive into some of our research, please go to ftte.us to look at the Future Trends and Technology and Education Report. And if you'd like to support us on Patreon, we welcome that. Just go to patreon.com slash bryanalexandry to support more of this work. We have more topics coming up. Just go to the Future Trends Forum website to see where they are and to sign up. And if you have anything you'd like to share with us, please just email me. And I'd love to share the work that our community is doing. Once again, thank you all for a great conversation. It is, as always, a pleasure thinking with you. I hope you're all safe and well, especially those of you in Northern climates being hammered by a nice storm. Take care of yourselves, and we'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.