Co-Creating Transdisciplinary Decolonial Curricula

Academic education emerged in the geopolitical zones of hegemonic Europe during an epoch labeled “The Enlightenment.” It supported the project of colonization that continues as an ongoing coloniality. Disciplinary silos that compartmentalize, specialize, and commodify knowledge for capitalistic reproduction were constructed. The ecological, economic, and political context of the academy is a neoliberal education based on racism, patriarchal heterosexism, extractivism, and environmental destruction. Co-creating approaches to counter modernism require a commitment to delink from the colonial ideologies and practices that have been normalized within the academy itself while centering the cosmovisions, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and praxes from populations that have been marginalized through the violent project of “progress and civilization.” In this chapter, we, a collective of scholar-activists, share the steps we have been taking over a decade to develop curricula that include pluriversal theories and praxes within ecologies of knowledge from the Global South and its diasporas. We are still confronting coloniality, contradictions, and paradoxes that present inevitable challenges, obstacles, and struggles. The creation of decoloniality is an ongoing and always incomplete project that requires building relationships among communities, faculty, and students to generate plurilogues, departing from anthropocentric norms to evolve shifts in curriculum, pedagogy, research, and community praxis. Through these approaches, new and creative possibilities may emerge in multiple localities beyond a single discipline or sub-discipline. We share our struggles, tentative understandings, collaborative research, and strategies to incorporate decoloniality within the academy.