The westernized university and us

Edgewalking stories and felt scholarship in higher education

Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Nathan D. Martin, na’im madyun and Peter Mataira

Introduction

We are four scholars whose research in our respective fields of education, sociology, school psychology, and social work extends across Indigenous, Black, and minoritized communities, schools, and organizations in the U.S., Latin America, and the Pacific. Coming from diverse geographic, community, family, and socioeconomic backgrounds, we hold in common ideas and experiences over the last decade that ultimately prompted our development of this volume. For example, we were all formally schooled and convinced by many, including our peers and mentors, to believe that training in the westernized university^[1] was the epitome of knowledge acquisition and perpetuation, not just for individuals but for the greater good. Over time, through our experiences first as students and later as faculty, we came to appreciate this assertion as conditional and complex: people and conditions shape and are shaped by institutions in ways that both help and harm the world. The westernized university is no exception and is a global model of leadership and complicity with Indigenous displacement, slavery, exploitation of labor, enforcement and concessions to state violence, the depredation of nature through infrastructure and uncritical curricula, and it offers helpful tools, vital resources, and great possibilities for healing this world. As a result, universities are training grounds where all kinds of damage and opportunities are exemplified.

The westernized university: From within, from without

In conversations with contributors to this volume over the last several years and through the Covid-19 pandemic, we have wrestled with questions concerning how those of us working in the westernized university structure reconcile the university’s part in establishing coloniality, perpetuating global extractive capitalism, and advancing the neoliberal paradigm amidst more recent attacks on the benefits of higher education altogether in the U.S. How and when do we confront the intersecting histories of epistemic racism/epistemicide, sexism, genocide, and ecocide that that undergird the westernized university (Stein, 2022)? As Ramon Grosfoguel argues (2013, p. 74), the westernized university is based on the epistemic privilege of men from five Western European countries—Italy, France, England, Germany, and the U.S.—and the post-World War II turn to modernity as global panacea for so-called underdevelopment and poverty (Escobar, 2011; Esteva, 2010, 2018). Like the westernized standard of living, the university and what it produces has become globally normative despite its European provincial roots, which Grosfoguel (2013) refers to as the magical effect of universal capacity.

Our own sociocultural identities are bound up with these and other academic ontologies (Tuck, 2018), leading us to ask, what are the real and perceived restrictions in the westernized university structure? How do people comply, negotiate, and resist? Towards what? As we approach these questions with contributing authors, we are cautious of serving superficially as the “critic and conscience of settler society” (Kidman, 2019, p. 1). Linking with examples from some of the most underrepresented peoples in westernized universities, we look to Indigenous experiences and theories. Māori scholar Joanna Kidman urges Māori and other Indigenous scholars to re-prioritize our scholarship to “face outwards towards native publics or else sit forever in limbo, neither transforming the institution nor fueling indigenous struggles against oppression and colonialism.” She adds, “The margins are not easy places to be. They lead us away from the academy’s glittering prizes…recognition in the white university. But they are spaces where change can begin and, for now, that may need to be enough” (Kidman, 2019, p. 12).

Similarly, a half-century ago, Vine Deloria, Jr. advised Indigenous scholars to recast their roles in academia, to delineate research and scholarly roles, and to make clear the benefits and negotiations among academics and American Indian communities (Deloria, 1988, 1991). As David Wilkins (2018, p. 5) notes, before “decolonization” became a ubiquitous term, Deloria introduced the idea that “Indigenous peoples can speak, think, and act for themselves,” rejecting government, institutional, and university paternalism, and demanding that the “so-called Indian experts leave Native peoples alone and show respect for Indigenous self-determination and diversity.” These examples remind us that universities have never been easy institutions for those connected to other value systems and knowledge traditions, and they offer bold assertions that motivate the essays in this volume.

Relatedly, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the broader socioeconomic and political dimensions of being underrepresented scholars conducting research from universities—an acknowledgement that carries the enormous weight to synchronize the work of the university with the priorities and ambitions of real communities and greater planetary needs in a time when the utility and application of undergraduate and graduate education is challenged by politicians and Artificial Intelligence (AI) entrepreneurs alike. We recognize AI as a new colonial frontier, extracting Indigenous data as if it were sacred lands. Such dispossession of stories and knowledge risks automating historical trauma. In this regard we acknowledge Indigenous data sovereignty and the importance ofreclaiming power through real community-led governance and support for transformation toward cultural continuance, not renewed assimilation.

Moreover, in the U.S., the humanities, social sciences, and transdisciplinary programs face enormous challenges, including dwindling resources and institutional support as universities scramble to rebrand themselves as science and technology training centers and as they limit graduate education due to cost. Also linked with cost and profit, universities have grown increasingly reliant on precarious contingent labor for the last several decades. When we first began developing this volume in 2021, we asked authors to consider as a provocation, what should be the objective of university-based education? What do Indigenous, Black, and minoritized peoples bring to and gain from the spaces that we occupy at the edges, margins, or in adjusting to the center where only some are invited and sit? Today, as we manage the inevitable shifts to what higher education will look like in the coming months and years, we still see the question as relevant, and how we answer it will contribute to institutional transformation.

In dark times for democracy and the question of public critical consciousness, we cannot surrender our ability to dream. Five years ago, we asked authors to consider transformative possibilities and their felt indicators and to imagine what kind of university we would build if we were inspired by our own knowing (Stein, 2022; Tuck, 2018). Today, we are still inspired “to figure out which parts of the university can be made useful for communities, and to figure out how to dismantle the parts that are not” (Tuck, 2018, p. 165)—particularly the exclusions that led many would-be researchers and scholars to believe that they were not talented or capable, thereby limiting critical thinking and ethical consciousness that are foundational for democracy and liberation.

A call to edgewalkers: Toward the “next university”

Identifying what serves communities, while also dismantling historical and recent harms, is the work of people in the westernized university. The authors in this volume represent only a small cross-section of these people, who in doing the work, confront severe consequences and are themselves transformed in the process. Authors offer resurgent and personally-inflected ideas of transformation (Tuck, 2018), examples of “edgewalking” and “edgework” (Beals, Kidman, & Funaki, 2019; Hill Collins, 1989; hooks, 1990; Krebs, 1999; Neal, 2006), critical notions of the cultural interface (Nakata, 2002, 2007a, 2012; Nakata, Nakata, Keech & Bolt, 2007b), and the “possibility of the third university” (la paperson, 2017).

The chapters in this volume move beyond making conventional connections between scholarship and social responsibility in the university and do not simply further institutionalized promotion of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Authors engage the lenses of ethics, politics, and poetics to explore the multiple ways knowledge and spaces of knowing can be produced (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012; Suárez-Krabbe, 2013). Through the felt scholarship of authors, the volume provides diverse and pellucid meanings of social and epistemic justice, decoloniality and embodiment, and offers vivid re-imaginings of what the university can be beyond repairing harms or surviving the moment.

The concept of edgewalkers and edgewalking is inspired by Indigenous interpretations, including Beals, Kidman, and Funaki’s (2019) work challenging conventional (anthropological) notions of “etic” (outsider) and “emic” (insider), where outsider is settler colonial research and insider reflects an “othered” life-world outside of academia. Yet, this binary is complicated by the stories we tell as researchers and who is represented in those stories. Beals, Kidman, and Funaki (2019) call on Indigenous researchers to “sit within the research narrative” and to position themselves in relation to their participants’ life-worlds, which are also our own life-worlds. This is not to diminish how the flux and tensions of edgewalking in the spaces between insider/outsider comes at a cost to the individual. As Krebs (1999, p. 5) explains, "an edgewalker feels astutely the paradox that occurs when you walk between two worlds but remain true to yourself.” Beals, Kidman, and Funaki (2019) further explain the tensions and countervailing forces associated with positioning themselves as edgewalkers in relation to their communities and academia:

When we as women, working class, and/or cultural Others enter into this space, we feel the call and the tug to strip aspects of our identity off and the pressure to speak from the center…We also feel the pull to hold on to ourselves as researchers who have intergenerational kinship ties to othered communities and to take the risk of walking the edge. And we realize that as we stand at the edge in our own research, the mythical center is exposed as an institution of individuals, communities, and groups with vested interests in maintaining power relations. (2019, p. 7)

These scholars offer a new possibility for how we can reconfigure what we bring to spaces where we are neither insiders and where the edges are spaces of opportunities and (re)storying. As editors, we see this collection as a way of acknowledging what it means to explore in-between terrain that allows us to observe the centers and the edges of our own and other worlds (Beals et al., 2019, pp. 7-8). In this vein, we ask readers to also note the book cover’s original artwork by Ojibwe visual artist Racquel Banaszak. Titled Zaagi’ mashkiki, Love medicine, her piece reminds us of the conviviality of multiple dreams and realities based on different vantage points of seeing and being, of making do, and humor as we work. As humans, what we hold within us as we occupy those vantage points in space and time—our histories, languages, memories, materials, and hopes—is always more intimate and powerful than their occupation and settlement by others.

The machinery of the westernized university

The mythicization of the westernized university as the only center of all knowledge is deconstructed in a critical text that we asked contributing authors in this volume to engage: la paperson’s proposal that a third university is possible. Integral to how we see ourselves as editors bringing together a collection of authors is la paperson’s categorizations of the university as an “amalgamation of first, second, and third worlding formations” and as “world-making.” He writes that first worlding universities are “the machinery commissioned to actualize imperialist dreams of a settled world,” while second worlding universities “desire to humanize the world,” which is “more genteel” but still a form of colonizing and that does not yet recognize the expansiveness of a more than human world—many us operate in this second university. Beyond the first and second universities, he argues that a third worlding university “is a decolonizing university” (2017, pp. xiv-xv), and it is this idea that we chase in our volume.

Furthermore, la paperson argues that as land-grabbing, transmogrifying, and capitalizing machines connected to other machines (i.e. war, media, governmental, etc.), the “terms of the struggle in the university are also over this machinery—deactivating its colonizing operations and activating its contingent decolonizing possibilities… What can we do with this hulking mass of ruins, conduit, fibroids, workhouses, and research facilities built on Indigenous land?” (2017, p. 32). Within this machinery, la paperson argues that there is perhaps us, the “machined people,” products of coloniality and containing decolonial hopes who will produce the third university. He describes the machined people as “scyborgs” who are “creatures of colonial desire” envisioned by the colonial to be successful, pretty, human. He writes that the scyborg is both evidence of the success of the first worlding university and a source of colonial anxiety—“please do not fail us, reject us, betray us”—yet has their own decolonial hope—“S-he is never a completely loyal colonialist and can often be caught in the basement library building the third world university” (la paperson, 2017, p. 56). Inspired by what la paperson offers, we are interested in how and when we scyborg, our connectivity to the machine, and our relationality to many systems.

Structure of the volume and overview of the chapters

Over two decades ago, Martin Nakata (2002, p. 286) challenged Indigenous students to answer this question:

What skills do Indigenous peoples then need to make the choices that serve interests that allow for continuity with traditional ways of thinking and experience…but not cut themselves off from recognizing the day-to-day reality of being circumscribed by other systems of Knowledge…and not make the divide too difficult to bridge without elevating one at the expense of the other?

We think that the next university is currently being built on these types of questions.

The book is organized into four sections that exemplify the westernized university as an expression of the domains of coloniality and the ways in which people struggle to remake those domains. Authors of various geographic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds as well as scholars of different generations represent the diversity of individuals laboring in these efforts. In Section I: Land, places, and economy, authors examine how university-occupied lands must be reframed as more-than-land as property/real estate and Euro-centric resources. Authors consider places as embodied power and memory, places of loss, and places in transformation, and they wrestle with the tensions of working in or with universities whose land-based economies and projects displace and exploit. The stories in this section address intertwined themes of labor exploitation, depredation of nature, and current university investments and actions that are entangled with consensual leadership in what coloniality does despite seeming benevolent institutional discourses of community engagement. Authors rethink the expanse of the westernized university while working to cultivate and protect counterstories that shift their own roles and interpretations of what it means to be part of their institutions.

Opening Section I, “Indigenous women in higher education” (Chapter Two) by Aboriginal scholar and university leader Bronwyn Fredericks writing with Tracey Bunda and Abraham Bradfield examines how the presence of Aboriginality in the university functions as both an opportunity for cultural interfacing and a source of irritation for westernized ways of being and knowing. The authors are clear that Aboriginal presence is not enough to displace the “blood on the walls” of institutions. An assertion of Indigeneity is required to effectively “talk back” to a system that centers white sovereignty and de-centers balanced collaborations. Readers will be led through the argument of how healing for Indigenous scholars emerges when Indigenous culture is embraced to replace residues of colonization.

“Awakening the social sleepwalkers” (Chapter Three) by university studies scholar Aaron Alvarado reexamines William Friedland’s (1974) “Social Sleepwalkers.” Friedland originally referred to the tendency of scientists “to blindly fumble through scientific discoveries” with little consideration for the social implications and consequences of their scientific progress. Written more than a half century ago, Friedland’s paper was itself timely, urging agricultural scientists to wake up to the social and ethical imperatives of doing research that impacts people, place, and communities. His focus on agriculture was in part due to ag-research being funded by public resources from public institutions. Alvarado reflects on how Friedland’s ideas offer insights into the imagining of a third worlding university and a commitment to decolonizing while posing questions for those committed to decolonizing systems, industries, and universities.

“Indigenous Feminist meditations” (Chapter Four) is crafted by Kanaka Maoli scholar, Kēhaulani Vaughn. By first centering as a generational truth the “umbilical bond” that tie Indigenous people to the land, Vaughan walks us through the ways in which the westernized university functions as expressions of genocide to Indigenous values, relationships and generativity. To discontinue nonconsensual community research and Native erasure, the author puts forth regenerative ways of being that focus on mentoring genealogies and education as kinship. Vaughn pushes readers to ask themselves if they are a part of world making or world ending.

In “Genealogy of the broken” (Chapter Five), Samira Chatila, Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Tsering Yangki, Porter Swentzell, and Belinda H.Y. Chiu address the centrality of place (and placelessness) as critical to their positionalities and as a means for exploring more creative educational practices through land–relations and stories and memories. They put forward collaborative autoethnographies as credible knowledge embedded in personal socio-histories and share experiences of connection to and separation from stories. They discuss the power of “place engagement” as critical and central to learning.

In Section II: Authority, power, and institutions, authors address university-based or -related institutions that are linked with systemic controls—military, policing, and the courts as well as the tacit and documented rules of power that govern people and structures within the university. In this section, authors consider the ways in which universities participate in securing their mechanisms and enforcing rules of power and the ways in which power is claimed and transformed by institutional and community actors.

Opening Section II, Steven W. Mumford, Christopher J. Broadhurst, and Kim Martin Long’s “Rowing upstream” (Chapter Six) provide a powerful metaphor for the struggle against the pervasive and oppressive injustices and barriers perpetuated by and within the westernized university. Their chapter reveals the collective efforts and setbacks faced in developing a transdisciplinary doctorate degree in justice studies at the University of New Orleans. The authors highlight the challenges perpetuated by the university’s neoliberal focus, capitalist motive, and the resource constraints that risk the co-opting or redesignating, and potentially derailing the program. Despite this, they speak to the power of the collective in creating positive buy-in from administrators, faculty, students, and the community. They share their journeys and struggles in the hope to inspire and reinspire others to also row against the current towards justice.

Gray Cavender and Pat Lauderdale reflect on decades of work in the Justice Studies program at Arizona State University in “Study of justice” (Chapter Seven). Cavender and Lauderdale apply the concept of justice as an analytic framework and its critical relationship within the academic disciplines of social sciences, justice, and law, while rejecting the universalist stance of justice, pointing out that any analysis must be specific to its social and political contexts. Theirs is as much a retrospective on academic departments and the study of justice as a call for universities to work for justice, including addressing police criminality, climate change, economic inequality, and COVID-19. As this book finally goes to print, both authors have since left this world, yet they still remind readers of the necessity to rethink what has been too often taken for granted about the power and misguided rhetoric of institutions and their political influencers.

“Decolonial reflexivity and Latin American universities” (Chapter Eight) is written by Carolina Guzman-Valenzuela and Ron Barnett. Through critical realism and decolonization this chapter examines Latin American universities. The authors address the pervasive strength and resistance of coloniality which they argue has constrained previous efforts to decolonize (and Indigenize) Latin American universities. They maintain that old and new colonial structures lie deep within these universities as they produce, perpetuate, and reinforce colonial practices. While initiatives to decolonize have been instituted, they acknowledge these remain largely invisible and insufficiently resourced to counter colonial dominance and power. To redress under-representation the authors propose utilizing a decolonial reflexive approach that enjoins corporate agency with communicative reflexivity, or the perceiving of what others think and desire and acting to address.

Akeem Anderson focuses on a case from the University of Minnesota in “Eugenics, law, and education” (Chapter Nine). Anderson underscores the entangled history of colonialism, racial violence, and Western science as practiced in the academy. Afro-pessimism, anti-blackness and intersectionality are used to merge multiple lenses of “othering” to create a framework that positions readers to see both how inhumane values are embedded within institutional life and how certain “bodies” are selected for comforting. The use of primary evidence as markers of the University of Minnesota’s history and tie to eugenics offers a complement to any discussion on the role of the academy in racial capitalism.

In “New university, old vision?” (Chapter Ten), Chathuri R. Illapperuma-Wood, Shengtian Wu, and Aaron J. Fischer draw from author personal reflections to illuminate the pathway from graduate student to faculty positions. The authors bring into focus the too common, yet critical moments that allow colonized beliefs and neoliberal policies to mold the behaviors, intentions, and values of academics. They contextualize the fluidity, fragility and falsity of privilege identities and make a plea for students to study neoliberalism as a means for understanding their own past and future journey on the pathways of the academy. Threaded throughout their reflection is the question for readers: What is governing the value we are taught to extract from our research foci?

In Section III: Normativity, being, and society, authors describe how under coloniality, ideas of normativity that have long been enforced are particularly insidious in this domain of struggle. Linked with land, authority, and knowledge is the normativity of being represent the colonial standard, as the ontology of the colonialist shaped by extractive agendas for infinite growth of capital. Normativity is what defines, builds, and secures notions of family, religion, gender and sexuality, wealth, and poverty. In this section, authors address normativity and meanings of whiteness applicable beyond European, western, and English-speaking standards, and they offer questions, personal strategies, and pedagogies.

“Shimá doo Shi ache’é’é Ołtá’igii” (Chapter Eleven) by Wendy S. Greyeyes and Delores Greyeyes, written together as a Diné mother and daughter, examines their intertwined perceptions and experiences of doctoral education. Their reflection responds to their own questioning about why they each decided to pursue advanced degrees, what skills and knowledge they gained along the way, how they have become more critically conscious about Indigenous and Diné histories and contemporary contexts, and the meaning of generational differences in values and expectations. Based on their experiences, they propose a framework for doctoral studies rooted in Diné epistemology that is also mindful of sociopolitical elements. They define—within the context of what they describe as their “liberal education”—the tools, skills, and knowledge to become more conscious and critical of the factors impacting the social conditions of their homelands. They conclude by offering insights as to what Diné people need to feel safe, including having the sacred space from which to honor and practice protocols and ceremony central to the building and sustaining of a Tribal Nation.

Next, Timothy Babulski’s “Precarity and identity in the neoliberal academy” (Chapter Twelve) argues that the neoliberal conceitedness embedded within the institutions of mainstream higher learning lie in the fact (or falsity) that education is viewed as the only source of upward social mobility, economic security, and by definition, success, especially for those historically underserved and marginalized. The neoliberal academy positions the place of precarity as an asset; one linked to identity that confers social capital and provides privilege. Yet paradoxically, it uses precarity as a manipulative tool to discipline faculty, limit collaborative work, and protect its own power. Babulski points out that precarity and identity are inextricably intertwined in the neoliberal academy. While devotees of the system may celebrate mission, vision statements and efforts to laud diversity, equity, and inclusivity, the ubiquity of such statements illustrates their utility as a commodity. Identifying as a masculinized genderqueer bisexual, Babulski shares his experience of how the denial of diversity “induces” social, cultural, and erotic precarity and how faculty “maintain” it by basing academic decisions on stereotypes and bias. While noting universities maintain the pretense that students compensate for economic precarity, the reality is much brutal.

Shizuko Hayashi-Simpliciano and Sachi Edwards offer a powerfully narrated reflection of graduate student and professor (now friends and colleagues) in “Deimperializing higher education” (Chapter Thirteen). The authors write as two women rediscovering their Ainu heritage in diaspora. They discuss their shared visions of higher education and offer vignettes, writing journeys (towards dissertations) and relationships with their academic committees, as well as the work they engaged in with communities. As scholars who experience personal struggles, both authors articulate how the boundaries between formal and community education could become less imposing and unblurred, where learning is honored to become more personalized, where genealogical histories and responsibilities can be expressed, and where the deceptive nature of colonial norms and imperial worldviews are named, decentered and disempowered.

In “Reciprocal mentoring” (Chapter Fourteen), Jennifer Richter and Beth Swadener draw from their own mentoring relationship and as dedicated mentors to their own students. They introduce the notion of reciprocal mentorship and posit that a critical reflexive praxis focused on compassion, humility and inclusiveness leads to a more positive, generative, transparent, and supportive relationship between graduate students and faculty. Mentorship is critical for students to navigate through their graduate studies. However, the authors point out that it is considered unrecognized labor that is often done by women faculty and faculty of color. Looking toward the third worlding university, the authors propose modeling positive mentoring relationships through community-based research, writing and peer group support, publications and presentations, and co-authoring that centers the activism of communities of scholar-practitioners.

In Section IV: Knowledge, subjectivity, and praxis, authors discuss how they understand knowledge and knowledge production to include diverse points of entry and dynamics—for example, historical and other constructs of time, places, communities, languages. Authors consider where knowledge is gained and how, along with purposes of knowledge and how they put knowledge to work for issues and goals that animate their work.

Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Stanley Steve E. Nwaogu and Annika Lindberg’s “Outrageous thinking” (Chapter Fifteen) is a striking collection of first-person narratives. The shared accounts of Steve’s struggle under the oppressive structure of the Danish asylum and deportation system, dealing with isolation, colonial violence, and racism is exposed. Each author shares their lived perspective of outrage. Annika’s Swedish citizenship as white northern European whose ancestors’ identities were reconfigured by the perpetration of colonial, racist, patriarchal violence, and exploitation is a scholar at Gothenburg University; Julia’s maternal ancestry as a light-skinned Colombian-Danish dual citizen and her father’s ancestry as a German peasant is an advocate for change; and, Steve, an African migrant to Europe, whose category (status) under Danish law is defined as “irregular.” As the authors note, the term irregular is often relabeled as criminal, which forces migrants like Steve to seek “regularization” papers, and in doing so, subject themselves to further state violence, public hostility, and intolerance. This insightful chapter dares to dream of a con-versity, an institution of higher learning where language and knowledge is not used to defend the indefensible, where decolonization is normative practice, and one that provides the space for connectivity.

Next, “Co-constructing decolonial futures in academia” (Chapter Sixteen) is offered by Nicole Dillard, Lyla June Johnston and Julia Storberg-Walker. Written as a collaborative autoethnography, the authors provide a comprehensive interpretation of their respective pathways navigating through the westernized university in the United States. They describe journeys that move from hopefulness to hopelessness and conclude that tensions were themselves necessary to break the seemingly impenetrable task of transforming the academy; to rehumanize it through a multivocal, reflexive and collaborative retelling. Revealed were the private worlds and lived experiences of each author which are rich, viable, and measurable data. Their efforts to engage collaboratively in challenging university conventions to be more open, innovative, and decolonial in the ways they produce knowledge is skillfully interwoven into their stories.

“Marhoatspekua” (Chapter Seventeen) is written by María Gutierrez de Jesus who writes about a P’urhépecha principle that “guides the communal structure,” a form that recenters displaced identities and migrant identities to calibrate their scholarship to be in service with community, regardless of one’s geography away from home. The author uses marhoatspekua as a guide for creating a diasporic vision that challenges the parallel, epistemic extraction mission of the westernized university. The chapter offers a culturally-grounded, divinely-aligned approach for a marginalized identity to create a zone of sovereignty to weather forces of erasure while conducting engaged research.

Vanessa Anthony-Stevens and Philip Anthony-Stevens provide an intersectional narrative co-crafted by two education and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) scholars in “Academic raiding” (Chapter Eighteen). Introducing the art of what they term to be academic raiding, based on Apache philosophies, they explore the work of returning balance to the world. Using highly descriptive narrative, they discuss how the westernized university reshapes Indigenous relationships between people and their places in the settler-colonial construction of state and society. They explore and analyze efforts within the university to disrupt the resulting imbalances. They propose academic raiding as a subversive undertaking by Indigenous and ally scholars to reassemble colonial technologies with decolonial desires and relay dreaming-doing as a vital relational dynamic that situates knowledge in places and histories, time, and Indigenous futurities beyond the reach of the colonial gaze.

Finally, “Una casa sin tierra” (Chapter Nineteen) by Tiago Bittencourt and María Susana Cervantes draws from their collaborative work to create a critical space—Casa de los Saberes—with and for Indigenous and Afro-descendant students in Ecuador. The authors present a multi-level account of how delegitimizing non-western knowledge systems and knowledge holders can be structured as a viable path forward when the westernized university remains rooted in an historical and national “whitening” agenda and thus celebrates marginalized students who survive its institutional mechanisms while declining to support sustainable programming and space that make survival felt and probable. The chapter integrates the conceptual metaphor of ancestral seeds as both historical sources of subversive resistance to assimilation and generative sources that link diverse knowledge holders. Building on etnoeducación, their chapter describes the struggles and compromises of their work as they continue to navigate the tenuous line between preserving autonomy while obtaining institutional legitimacy.

Conclusion: An invitation

As the editors of this volume, we acknowledge that writing and dialogue with others who are looking from multiple edges and reflecting on the meaning of the edgework that transformative possibilities call for is a privileged endeavor at a crucial moment. We appreciate scholars, researchers, students, community members, and activists who are unlearning the political, environmental, economic, authoritative, legal, and subjective sovereign that dictate the conditions of coloniality and who recognize the othering and racialization that coloniality has produced. We are grateful to be in company with the authors in this volume who are also looking within themselves so that they may confront what coloniality has produced through structures that have been aggrandized and processes that throughout recent human and earth history have harmed peoples, places, and life affirming relationships. Thank you for reading our stories. We hope that they lead to more felt scholarship that inspires many more visions and pathways to the next university.

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Notes

1. We refer to the westernized university or “the university” throughout this chapter and reference a structure rooted in global coloniality and racialization. We do view “the university” in this regard as a monolith, yet with inner workings that are somewhat movable. It is this movability and its drivers that are the focus of this volume.

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