Featured Event.
Online Seminar
Towards a folk education for the global majority
Decolonization is not simply an academic topic to toil over in post-baccalaureate programs. It is a political mandate to return to right relationship with this land and the creatures that inhabit it. The process of colonization has diluted the cultural heritage of Native Americans and people in the African diaspora and Asian diaspora, otherwise referred to as the global majority. In addition to being negatively impacted by racial oppression, the global majority also includes the poor and working-class people whose undervalued labor has been exploited to financially benefit ultra-wealthy people.
To reindigenize, the global majority in the United States has sustained folk traditions such as homesteading, traditional craftmaking, and community preservation. There is a strong desire for reinstating Indigenous ways of knowing, as seen by the increasing interest in these practices. But we do not engage folk traditions to dwell in the past. Rather, these practices that have survived through generations are time-tested tools for creating a new social order—one where the global majority that has built and sustained the economic infrastructure through slave labor, underpaid immigrant labor and devalued domestic labor has an active voice in how we are governed.
This seminar and the chapter it is associated with are a prospectus for a 21st-century folk education model in the United States that is aimed at repairing the sacred, interdependent connection we have with one another as inheritors of a colonized and degraded land.
