Decolonizing the English curriculum in the Souths

Titling this talk embodies a political act -one embedded in the politics of naming- which allows me to articulate, and therefore bring into existence, one of my research queries, itself containing geological layers of complexity and a double locus of enunciation.

First, to see and show the two-sided face of Modernity/Coloniality inaugurates the possibility of problematizing a narrative or common sense (of modernity, coloniality, race, globalization, interculturality, pedagogy, language, etc.) through a genealogical approach from 1492 to the present, that informs, situates, historicizes, and politicizes my work. This enables a path of unlearning in relation to such hard cores and allows me to enter into the specificity of my task from pedagogical (de)coloniality, that is, from the border. It provides for the opening of multiple questions and two alternative outlooks: 1. a decolonial one upon modern/colonial perspectives (and not a modern/colonial alternative one); 2. ICT in its disclosure, uncovering and unlearning of the canon on which both traditional and critical views feed. The former and the latter root their struggles in common grounds: making the epistemicide visible and drawing on ancestral wisdoms, on ways of thinking, feeling and acting otherwise. Both seem to agree on the possibility of an ecology that counteracts the modern/colonial capitalist western rationality. The decolonial perspective will refer to westernization and de-westernization as processes tied to the colonial matrix of power, whereas decoloniality will be the border option to resist and re-exist. ICT will contribute with a sense of the curriculum as the weaving of epistemologies otherwise, inscribed in the rhizomatic pluriversality which inhabits the exteriority of Euro-USA-centric totalizing hegemony. Relying on praxes of reconstitution, the epistemicide can and will be stopped. Education is a privileged soil for this conversation to be sowed, taken care of and harvested. For it to flourish.

Grounding the density of my conceptual formulation in a situated praxis, that is, in the resignification of my academic spaces - Introduction to English language (ILE) and Initial teacher education (ITE) in English- and in the design of ad hoc itinerant, decolonial teaching materials, accounts for the occupation of a geo-corpo-political locus of enunciation in and from the language other, that is, a critical awareness of exteriority, of coloniality, and of the urgency of an itinerant, decolonial pedagogical endeavor.

I therefore intend to converse about a trajectory of increasing disobedience and rootedness, in (dis)harmony with (in)discipline, but also about being moved by coloniality (of power, being, and knowledge) in the privileges and stigmas that mark the entry into English degree programs in my country, Argentina. The colonial wound—both my own and that of others, the symptom that persists—anchors this conversation in an infinite web of intersubjectivities inside and outside the institutional space.

Short bio

Graciela Baum is Professor of English Language and Literature at the National University of La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina (UNLP). Master in Linguistics from UNLP. Specialist in Education from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences. Full Professor of the Chair of Special Didactics and Teaching Practices in English Language 2. Full Professor of the Chair Introduction to the English Language (UNLP). Full Professor at the university undergraduate level (UNLP). Coordinator of the Decolonial Studies Group at the Center for Linguistic Studies and Research (UNLP). Categorized Researcher and Director of Research Projects (UNLP). Member of the collective “Siembra Decolonial” coordinated by Dr. Walter Mignolo.