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CITATION: Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Hunt, D., & Ahenakew, C. (2021). Complexities and challenges of
decolonizing higher education: Lessons from Canada. In S. H. Kumalo (Ed.), Decolonisation as
democratisation: Global insights into the South Africa experience. UKZN Press.

CHAPTER 3

COMPLEXITIES AND CHALLENGES OF DECOLONISING HIGHER EDUCATION: LESSONS FROM CANADA

Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt, and Cash Ahenakew

INTRODUCTION

New and resurgent movements to decolonise higher education are increasingly found throughout
the globe in the context of settler colonies, former colonies, and former colonial metropoles alike.
As Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars located in what is currently known as Canada, in this
chapter, we reflect on what we have learned from mainstream efforts to address the country’s
history of harm toward Indigenous peoples, and specifically, to address the ongoing role of higher
education in colonialism. These efforts have created precarious openings for not only reflecting
on but also transforming universities within a still-colonial society. Without dismissing the
possibilities enabled by these openings, we find that in practice many circular patterns emerge
that reproduce underlying colonial ways of knowing, doing, desiring, and being that make up the
primary infrastructures of modern modes of existence. While the mainstream academic
imperative would require that we follow-up this diagnosis with prescriptive solutions for how to
interrupt these colonial patterns in order to arrive at a predetermined decolonised future
(decolonisation as a singular event), we suggest instead that decolonisation requires a long-term
commitment to sit with and work through our individual and collective investments in harmful
patterns so that we might disinvest from them and learn to be otherwise (decolonisation as an
ongoing process). Particularly in the context of contemporary crises that are themselves a product
of harmful and unsustainable modes of life – climate change, political instability, economic
insecurity – only the latter approach to decolonisation offers the potential to open up new
possibilities for current and future generations to learn to live together differently on a finite
planet. Our conception of decolonisation takes on a holistic view, one that transcends or rather
challenges an anthropocentric worldview and begins to take seriously our collective commons as
the starting point for conversation around justice, in its substantive form. Further, in this context,
the need for alternative horizons of possibility takes on a renewed urgency.
We begin the chapter by briefly reviewing the primary dimensions of colonialism and current
efforts to address colonialism in the Canadian higher education context, so as to situate our
contribution. Then, we review critical commentaries on the limits of approaches to decolonisation
that are premised on the inclusion of (Indigenous) difference and do little to address the
underlying colonial conditions of possibility for the institution. Rather than diagnose the problem
of inclusion as one of tokenism that can be addressed through more radicalised inclusion (e.g.
centring marginalised knowledges), we suggest that inclusion itself is a flawed proposition as it
presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and
violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities. In order to gesture
toward what might be possible if we did not presume that the modern/colonial university can or
should be salvaged, we propose two pedagogical invitations that gesture toward the
decolonisation of higher education as a complex, multi-layered process of learning to be
otherwise: 1) Starting and staying with the complexities and difficulties involved in making
change, including the structural complicity of those making change, so as to develop the necessary
stamina for long-term transformation; 2) Drawing on Santos’s notion of an ecology of knowledges
and ignorances, while developing the ability to discern the contextually-relevant gifts and
limitations of all ways of knowing, so as to ultimately cultivate socially, historically, and
ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking.

DIAGNOSING COLONISATION

In our diagnosis, colonisation is the constitutive underside of modernity – that is, colonialism is
what creates the conditions of possibility for modern existence. According to McKittrick,
modernity is premised upon the presumed imperative “of survival-through-ever-increasing-
processes-of-consumption-and-accumulation” (in Wynter & McKittrick, 2015: 11). Within this
modern imaginary – which is in fact a modern/colonial imaginary – existence is reduced to one’s
assigned value within economies oriented by consumption and accumulation. Perhaps the most
obvious impact of this imaginary is to naturalise a (capitalist) material economy that sanctions the
(racialised) expropriation and exploitation of humans, other than human beings, and the earth
itself, for profit. However, modernity not only naturalises a particular material economy, it also
feeds extractive intellectual, relational, and affective economies. These economies in turn feed
each other, and while it will be difficult to unravel coloniality if we do not address them all, it is
also nearly impossible to address them all at once.
For instance, within modernity’s intellectual economy, knowledge is treated as a set of universal,
objective facts about the world that can be accumulated and consumed; these facts represent an
effort to describe the world in order to control it. Furthermore, anything that cannot be known in
this way (particularly that which is not only unknown but also unknowable) is deemed not to
matter or even exist (Ahenakew 2016; de Sousa Santos 2007). This intellectual economy is thus
fuelled by a sense of entitlement to epistemic certainty, authority, mastery, and universalism.

Within modernity’s relational economy, the separation of humans from the earth and of humans
from one other denies our metabolic interdependence and our intrinsic worth. Indeed,
colonialism has been described as “a severing of relations between humans and the soil, between
plants and animals, between minerals and our bones” (Davis & Todd 2017: 770). Following this
severing, our existence can then be defined by our perceived value within the various different
economies. In particular, one subset of humanity is deemed to matter more than the others, and
is secured at the expense of humans and other-than-human beings, including the earth itself, that
are deemed to matter less (if at all). In these separations and hierarchies of value, the integrity of
our entangled existence on a shared planet is violated, our simultaneous insufficiency and
indispensability is obscured, and our deep responsibility to all beings is denied.

Together, the combination of these economies produces the conditions for the reproduction of
modern existence, which we elsewhere summarise using the metaphor of “the house modernity
built” (Andreotti et al. 2018; Stein et al. 2017).
 Figure 1: The house modernity built

The house is built on a foundation made of concrete that separates humans from each other and
the rest of nature; or rather, it creates the illusion of separation. It is this illusion of separation
that makes possible modern economies premised on perceived utility and the imperative to
accumulate and consume. The exact nature of the house’s many walls shifts over time, but the
two carrying walls remain the same: one carrying wall of the house is represented by Western
humanist values and Enlightenment knowledge traditions that promise deliberative consensus
and universal relevance. On the other side, there is the carrying wall of nation-states, which
promises security through the mechanisms of borders, rights, and national homogeneity. The roof
of this house is made of tiles of global capitalism, layered over beams of continuous economic
growth and consumption as a measure of progress and civilisation. While these basic elements of
the house modernity built offer many shiny promises, these promises have a colonial underside:
the externalised and invisibilised costs of building and maintaining the house (see Figure 2 and
Table 1). These costs include historical and on-going expropriation, land-theft, exploitation,
destitution, preventable famines/malnutrition, incarceration, dispossession and epistemicides,
ecocides, and genocides (Byrd 2011; Chakravartty & Silva 2012; Coulthard 2014; Kapoor 2014; de
Sousa Santos 2007; Sharpe 2016; Silva 2014).

Figure 2: The hidden costs of the house modernity built

Offers modern promises of… Enabled by colonial processes of…

Capitalist Continuous growth and Racialised expropriation and

economic distribution of growth by way of exploitation of humans and the earth
system (roof) social mobility as progress for commodity production

Nation-state Social cohesion through a shared Securitised borders, domestic policing,

political system national identity, and the and international militarism
(wall) protection of property (sanctioned state violence)

Eurocentric A single, universal rationality and Suppression of other knowledges, and

knowledge set of values (determined through attempts to describe the world in order
system (wall) debate and consensus) to assert control over it

Existence Autonomy and authority of Alienation from a wider ecological

premised on (certain) human populations over metabolism, and objectification of the
separation others, and the earth itself earth and humans (determined by
(through hierarchies of value) perceived capacity to create value)
(foundation)

Table 1: Modern promises and colonial processes of the house modernity built
In order for the economies that fuel the house to continue, we must continue to “invest in” them
and their promised dividends, and thereby premise our existence on practices of separation,
consumption, and accumulation. The reproduction of these economies is largely enabled by an
additional economy, the modern affective economy, which helps to keep all other economies
functioning smoothly. Yet, modernity’s affective economy is rarely addressed in relation to the
decolonisation of higher education, which tends to emphasise intellectual engagement with the
house’s hidden costs. This is a significant oversight, as affective investments often override
intellectual critiques: we tend to think that if we can point to the inequitable infrastructures that
organise the house and implicate people in its harms, then our epistemic and/or moral authority
will prompt others to change their actions to calibrate with this critique. However, often even
when we have access to knowledge about the harms of colonialism, investments and attachments
to the modern promises that colonialism enables lead to a disconnect: we may know very well
that modern economies are ecologically unsustainable and enabled by ongoing structures of
colonial violence, and yet that does not necessarily interrupt or rearrange the affective desires we
have for enjoying the comforts, entertainments, dreams and securities that the house offers
(Kapoor 2014). This means that interrupting and unraveling colonialism is not (only) an intellectual
problem of ignorance that can be solved with more knowledge and information; it is also an
affective problem of investment in the house, and thus in denying its true costs. These affective
investments need to be addressed in other ways, including through embodied and experiential
practices and pedagogies.

The affective economy of the house is experienced differentially by different communities, which
different responses and forms of support. Communities that are subjugated by the violence of the
house are more likely to carry the affective weight of trauma from its organizing structures, and
their well-being is most compromised by those structures. Meanwhile, those who are empowered
and elevated by the house are more likely to carry the fragilities that make them unwilling to face
and accept responsibility for their complicity in violence and unsustainability (Ahenakew, 2019).
Nonetheless, here we emphasize the general patterns of harnessed fears, compensatory desires,
and perceived entitlements that are products of the infrastructure of the house modernity built,
and a set of enduring investments that keep the house going with business as usual. The house
modernity built constructs and harnesses certain existential fears to mobilise investment in its
reproduction and expansion. These fears are rooted in its foundation of separability and its
project of transcendence (of “nature”): once we are no longer perceived as interwoven with the
land, and the land becomes a “resource” or “property”, all other beings (including humans) need
to justify their existence by producing value within the various colonial economies of worth. The
project of transcending nature can take different forms, but is often characterised by an aversion
to death, pain and loss, the overcoming of nature/flaws/material conditions/inter-dependence
and control of a path that can secure the achievement of a specific higher ideal (which may or not
relate to a notion of God) (e.g. a better life, “greatness”, sovereignty, civilisation, progress,
development, evolution, etc.). These fears become existential insecurities related to our
vulnerability, lack of autonomy, and self-insufficiency in the face of death, pain, “nature” and the
universe at large. Fears of scarcity, worthlessness, destitution, existential emptiness, loss, pain,
death, impermanence, incompetence and insignificance are all mobilised by modern economies
of value production where the intrinsic worth of human and other-than-human life is denied.

Figure 3: Fears, desires, and entitlements cultivated by the house modernity built

As we engage in the production of value for the validation and worth of our existence through
intellectual, affective, and material economies established by modernity, our desires are allocated
accordingly. For example, our harnessed fear of scarcity is turned into a “positive” desire for
accumulation, and an entitlement to ownership; our harnessed fear of chaos becomes a desire
for order, and an entitlement to control; and our fear of worthlessness becomes a desire for
importance, and an entitlement to affirmation. Enacted within, dependent upon, and contributing
to the continuity of the house, our compensatory desires become naturalised entitlements that
mark and limit our ability to face and navigate the complexities and uncertainties of the world.
These entitlements calibrate our hopes and fantasies, supporting harmful and unsustainable
modes of existence, and trapping human life-force within the house.

With all of this in mind, the challenge and perhaps even the impossibility of decolonising higher
education becomes evident. If decolonisation requires interrupting, disinvesting from, and
unraveling these modern economies – in other words, if it requires the end of the world as we
know it (which is not the end of the world, full stop, but rather the end of a particular
modern/colonial mode of existence) (Silva 2014) – then decolonising higher education would
mean the end of higher education as we know it as well (Stein 2019). In practice, however,
decolonisation has been taken up in many different ways (Andreotti et al. 2015), which we review
in the following section.

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON DECOLONISATION

Through processes of European colonisation, the modern economies and the house they uphold
have been forcibly exported throughout the world, but they also vary in their character depending
on the particular context. The Canadian context is governed by the specific social formation of
settler colonialism. According to Coulthard (2014: 7), settler colonialism is characterised by

interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state
power [that] has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical
social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their
lands and self-determining authority.

The exact character of settler colonialism differs depending on the specific context and its internal
historical and political dynamics (see Kelley 2017, for discussion of South Africa as a settler
colony). However, in his famous treatise of settler colonialism, Wolfe (1999) summarises it ‘as a
structure, not an event.’ If colonisation is enabled through the ongoing reproduction of the
economies that naturalise separation, consumption, and accumulation, and thus, the
(infra)structure of the house, then decolonisation must be an ongoing process of undoing these
economies and creating space for entirely new or previously exiled possibilities for existence
outside the house.

Not surprisingly, the colonial economies that govern life within modern institutions, including
institutions of higher education, are generally at best unconcerned with decolonisation, and at
worst actively hostile to it. However, at certain points in time it has become difficult for these
institutions to entirely ignore decolonial demands – generally, when ignoring them threatens to
compromise their perceived legitimacy. Particularly in societies that conceptualise themselves as
liberal democracies, these concessions tend to be organised in ways that offer highly conditional
inclusion within a purportedly universal system. This paradoxically equates to a selective
incorporation of difference as a strategy to maintain the claim to universality and exceptionalism.
For instance, in the contemporary Canadian context, the national discourse on “reconciliation”
regarding the country’s history of forcibly placing Indigenous children in residential schools
represents a moment in which a settler colonial country and its institutions – including universities
– are forced to adjust their practices in response to decolonial demands. As expected, however,
these adjustments largely take the form of conditional inclusion (Ahenakew 2016; Ahenakew &
Naepi 2015; Ahmed 2012).

The dominant approach to Indigenisation/decolonisation is that of “Indigenous inclusion”

(Gaudry & Lorenz 2018), which offers the guise of change while largely reaffirming Western ways
of knowing, being, and relating. A limited number of Indigenous peoples and knowledges are
included, but they are expected to adapt to existing University values. Incorporating select
elements of difference into existing institutional structures allows for the strategic management
of conflict without interrupting the hegemony of whiteness or conceding to more substantive
demands for changes in relationships and resource distribution. In this sense, those (Indigenous
peoples) who are “being included” still remain objects of difference that are being invited into the
institution by those who retain the power to arbitrate the space and make – or rescind, or deny –
that invitation (Ahmed, 2012). Hospitality is highly conditional not only before but also after the
invitation, and even with all of these conditions, some are still openly hostile to those who are
“being included”. Those who are “welcomed” are expected to perform gratitude, and affirm
(rather than challenge) existing organisational values and structures. Thus, inclusion remains on
the terms of those who have historically held power, and the emphasis is on Indigenous peoples’
adaptation to the existing institution, alongside the development of greater ‘awareness’ and
cultural sensitivity from non-Indigenous people that does not address historical or ongoing
relations of domination. In this approach to inclusion, Indigeneity is framed as a form of
‘difference that makes no difference to business as usual’ (Ahenakew 2016: 330). We elsewhere
describe this as a “soft-reform” approach to decolonisation (Andreotti et al. 2015). This approach
frames decolonisation as an event with a clear beginning and an end, which can ultimately be
absorbed into the colonial mode of existence.

Figure 3: Different interpretations of decolonisation

The most common response to the limits of this soft-reform approach to decolonisation is what
we call a “radical-reform” approach. This approach offers a deeper critique of the colonial
economies of modern existence. A radical-reform approach can be said to ‘radicalise’ the
conditional inclusion of the soft-reform approach. For instance, rather than having a handful of
Indigenous peoples and perspectives that are kept at the margins of the institutions (i.e.
tokenism), it advocates for centring these peoples and perspectives, and redistributing resources
in more substantive ways. This approach offers an important challenge to the soft-reform
approach, and it can create important spaces in which to nurture and engage with historically
marginalised knowledge systems. However, it also has two potential limitations. The first is that,
although this approach is understood to offer an alternative set of economies that will not
recreate the same problematic patterns as the colonial ones, it risks recreating some of the same
patterns of separation, consumption, and accumulation, albeit in a different register. In other
words, it enables a shift in vocabulary, but not in grammar; and a shift in epistemological terms
(at the level of knowing), but not in ontological terms (at the level of being). The second potential
limitation is that while the radical-reform approach was somewhat effective in affecting change
in the previous, Cold War era of relative abundance and Western states’ concern to maintain
political legitimacy, in the contemporary context of greater scarcity and the perception that
“there is no alternative” to (neoliberal) capitalism, the radical-reform approach no longer retains
the same power to affect institutional change. Our concern is not to dismiss the possibilities that
are opened up by this approach, but rather to address what may be unintentionally reproduced
when this approach is taken up uncritically, and to assess the extent to which it holds strategic
impact in our current conjuncture.

Radical-reform approaches seek the transformation of existing higher education institutions that
exceed tokenistic inclusion efforts and enable a much more substantive redistribution of both
resources and institutional power to marginalised populations. The idea is that these changes will
lead to a substantively different institution. However, these approaches also point to the difficulty
of enacting another way of being and opening up different possibilities in ways that do not
reproduce at least some of the same colonial economies that they seek to transcend. In fact, it
may be this will to transcendence that fosters some of the circularities: the desire to arrive
immediately at a changed future can result in glossing over important underlying and enduring
issues. For instance, there are significant political challenges involved not only introducing but
also centring marginalised knowledges in a context that has historically been characterised by
uneven power relations, which can lead to increased commodification of Indigenous knowledges,
as well as a grafting of Indigenous knowledges into Western frames (Ahenakew 2016).

Another challenge of the radical-reform approach is that having an intellectual critique of harmful
colonial patterns does not necessarily result in an affective transformation, that is, a shift away
from wanting and desiring the promises that colonialism offers. However, if we do not interrupt
the modern affective economy, then it will not be possible to engage the difficult, messy, and
even painful work that is required for decolonisation – particularly when that work challenges the
notion that we are entitled to be the leaders and architects of this change. In other words, saying
that we want something different does not necessarily equate to wanting to give up the securities
and entitlements that are rooted in systems that maintain the status quo – particularly when
those systems offer us the promises of affirmation, leadership, control, comfort, authority, and
even heroism that we have come to desire within the house modernity built. In fact, the desire
for quick resolutions and arrival at an ‘elsewhere’ without giving up these promises can actively
suppress necessary engagements with our own complicity in and dependency on the very systems
that we critique (Jefferess, 2012; Shotwell, 2016).

Figure 4: Looking for decolonisation in all the wrong places

In addition to the potential circularities of the radical-reform critique, the conditions of the
contemporary context may also undercut or narrow the potential impact of this approach. During
the Cold War era, the language and strategy of radical-reform enabled significant changes to the
canonical University and its centering and universalisation of Enlightenment knowledge. Access
for traditionally marginalised populations was expanded, and there was a greater (though still
selective) inclusion of marginalised ways of knowing, for instance through the inauguration of
Black Studies and Indigenous Studies programs. The way these programs were ultimately
institutionalised meant that they supplemented the Western canon, rather than supplanted it.
These concessions within universities were made as part of a larger social effort within Western
liberal capitalist nation-states to demonstrate their commitment to anti-racism in the wake of the
Nazi regime, as well as their commitment to equity and redistribution in the context of the
creation of viable alternatives to capitalism, particularly the USSR (Bell 1980; Ferguson 2012). In
the US, Melamed (2006) characterises this as a shift from overt white supremacy to racial
liberalism, which granted the nation-state moral legitimacy on the global stage without it actually
giving up (and in fact, globalising) its strategies of racialised capital accumulation. Although she is
speaking about the US, similar patterns were at work in Canada. That is, convergence of the state’s
international interests in ensuring smooth economic functioning with the interests of
marginalised domestic communities demanding radical change resulted in still limited but
nonetheless significant social shifts, which generally resulted in limited redistribution and
expanded access to mainstream institutions. Thus, concessions like the expansion of civil rights
and the conditional inclusion of difference were made only to the extent that they were perceived
to facilitate the continuity of capitalism and institutional legitimacy.

With the fall of large-scale alternatives to capitalism as well as the shift toward neoliberal financial
capitalism and the increasing sense of scarcity that has emerged in the context of slowing
economic growth and growing austerity, the strategies that affected substantive changes in an
earlier era may no longer have the same effect as they do today. Narratives that mobilise moral
arguments to advocate for inclusion have less impact in a context where there are no apparent
alternatives to the dominant system, and where there is greater competition for fewer resources.
Although critical discourses are present and perhaps even granted new space within the
neoliberal multicultural University (for instance, in relation to discourses of reconciliation), their
political and practical impact is declining as they compete for epistemic space and legitimacy
within an increasingly cacophonous landscape of theoretical and political perspectives, aided by
the rapid proliferation and spread of information that is enabled by technology (Bauman 2001).
In this way, difference is allowed to proliferate to the extent that it offers no real threat to the
status quo. Despite the diversity of intellectual perspectives on offer, this landscape is effectively
dominated by modernity’s financial and affective economies: knowledge that produces (or
enables the production of) profit to serve the ends of global capital accumulation is the most
highly valued by institutions. Meanwhile, knowledge that speaks to the existential insecurities
that are produced by the house modernity built is the most highly valued by individuals. Within
this context, the competition for epistemic authority that characterised earlier iterations of
modernity’s intellectual economy appears outdated; the rules of the game have changed. Rather
than the old pattern of changing peoples’ political and ethical convictions so as to change their
behavior, an even more basic challenge today is to retain their attention (Bauman 2001). This
challenge and its impact should not be underestimated, particularly as many national leaders are
speaking directly to this sense of not just economic but also existential insecurity (Stein et al.
2017). A discourse of demands based in radical-reform may not be able to compete in this context,
leaving the field open for other, often-violent discourses to take hold.

In response to our recognition of these potential circularities and contextual challenges with
regard to the radical-reform approaches to decolonising higher education, we have also
conceptualised a beyond-reform approach. This approach recognises that universities that
emerged within the context of the house modernity built, and which remain dependent on its
economies, are unlikely to survive the current context of volatility and ongoing and impending
crises related to its long-term unsustainability. Within the beyond-reform approach to higher
education, the horizon of hope is not to salvage existing institutions, nor to immediately dismantle
them, but rather to minimise their immediate harms, learn from their mistakes, and, as the house
collapses, to utilise and redirect their resources toward experimenting with other possibilities for
education and existence outside of the house, without a guarantee that this will result in
something different or better. The beyond-reform approach calls into question many of the
modern economies while recognising that their momentum makes it difficult to challenge them
from the outside, and that they may only collapse under the weight of their own contradictions
and destructive tendencies. That is, while it might be impossible to transform these entrenched
institutions through human will alone, their own inherently violent and unsustainable nature
might be what leads to their downfall (Andreotti et al. 2015). This is particularly important in light
of the fact that the structure of the house is increasingly fractured under the weight of social,
ecological, economic and political crises, including unsustainable growth, overconsumption, a
surplus labour force, mental health crises, and cancelation of welfare and rights (see Figure 5).
 Figure 5: Structural damage to the house modernity built

If indeed the house is collapsing, and its economies no longer offer the promised benefits they
once did, then there are many possible responses: Should we fix the house? Expand it? Build
another house? Or create other types of shelter? The proposition that one poses in response to
the crumbling house tends to be shaped by one’s diagnosis of the crisis itself. Importantly,
contemporary narratives of crisis often centre the precarity of the implicitly white middle class
whose abundance in previous eras was (and is still) subsidised by the subjugation of those largely
non-white, lower/under class people who continue to be the most vulnerable to declining health
outcomes, economic insecurity, and ecological devastation, and who at the same time often have
strategies for survival in the midst of slow violence (Chakravartty & Silva 2012; Whyte 2017). If we
do not address the fact that the construction and maintenance of the house has long resulted in
crises within marginalised communities, then responses to the current crises risk ‘remain[ing]
embedded in many of the political and institutional rationalities that have caused, and continue
to replicate, the conditions of crisis’ (Menzel 2010: 1). Indeed, if this is the case, then strategies
for addressing the crises that originate from inside the house are likely to reproduce at least some
of the same problems. Addressing these alternative histories of crisis also points to the fact that
the contemporary crisis of the house is not an external threat (as it is often framed), but is rather
the delayed impact of the house’s own toxic and extractive infrastructures: although the house
successfully externalised the true costs of its operations for a long while, this is no longer possible.

PEDAGOGICAL INVITATIONS

If, from the beyond-reform perspective, the house modernity built is inherently unsustainable
and cannot be ‘fixed’, then what does this mean for higher education? If existing colleges and
universities are not redeemable, then we will need to develop other approaches to education.
This does not necessarily require that we preemptively leave existing institutions, but rather that
we do not invest existentially in their futurity. While we cannot imagine a substantively different
approach to higher education from where we currently stand, lest we reproduce the same
harmful economies, it is important to experiment with other possibilities, and learn from both
successes and the failures that result from them. Further, within the cracks of existing institutions
we might find spaces and resources with which we can undertake these experiments. In a gesture
toward these possibilities, we end this chapter with two pedagogical invitations to imagine higher
education in ways that view decolonisation as a difficult, messy, and ongoing process.

Invitation 1: Start and Stay with Complexity and Complicity

This invitation emphasises the need to sit with and learn from: 1) the difficulties of trying to keep
visible the complexities and tensions involved in decolonisation, without becoming overwhelmed
by them; and 2) the structural complicity of those involved, without spiralling into non-generative
patterns of guilt that in turn lead to seeking redemption rather than taking responsibility. Instead
of seeking a position of absolution, purity, or innocence, Shotwell (2016: 5) suggests the need to
‘start from an assumption that everyone is implicated in situations we (at least in some way)
repudiate.’ This invitation asks us to consider what responsibility looks like when the starting point
is not the transcendence of our complicity in harm and the arrival at a position of innocence, but
rather a simultaneous recognition of the impossibility of transcending our implication in harm and
the need to nonetheless try to interrupt it. This will require interrupting the modern/colonial
illusion of separation and un-numbing our sense of entanglement so that we can remember and
reaffirm our sense of relationship and responsibility to everyone and everything (before will).
However, this approach also recognises that our situated positionalities will affect the precise
shape of what we are called to do in order to affirm our responsibilities to one another, without
letting anyone off the hook. As Shotwell notes, even as none of us sits outside of complicity in
harm, we ‘are not equally responsible or capable, and are not equally called to respond’ (2016:
7). This approach invites an orientation to learning premised on humility and critical generosity,
and suggests further that these are not intellectual choices, but practices of encountering and
engaging the world that are only made possible if we divest from desires for control,
accumulation, authority, and entitlement that the modern affective economy cultivates.

This work is not easy, and may even be painful, particularly for those who have the most to ‘lose’
with the decline or fall of modern economies. When complicity is not something to be
acknowledged and then transcended, but rather serves as a ‘starting point for action’ (Shotwell
2016: 5), learners are invited to sit with and be taught by the complexity, discomfort, and
contradictions that emerge in efforts to make transformative changes that challenge inherited
material, intellectual, relational, and affective structures. In other words, this is in an invitation
not only to learn intellectually about the harmful institutions, social relations, and subjectivities
that have brought us to our present conjuncture, but also to unlearn our affective investments in
these institutions, relations, and subjectivities. Within the context of this invitation, for instance,
encounters with different knowledge systems and social practices are not intended as a strategy
for acquiring and accumulating new knowledges within modernity’s intellectual economy, but
rather for denaturalising the structures of knowing, being, and wanting that treat knowledge itself
as a site of acquisition and accumulation, and for facing the affective responses that emerge when
those patterns are challenged. This relates to the second invitation, which is to cultivate the ability
to discern the gifts and limitations of any particular way of knowing.

Invitation 2: Cultivate Socially, Historically and Ecologically Accountable Pluralistic Propositional

Thinking

According to de Sousa Santos (2007), Western thought can be characterised as “abyssal thinking,”
which institutes a divide between Western knowledge as universal truth, and all other knowledge
traditions on the other side of the divide, in the “abyss.” Knowledge traditions in the abyss are
denied relevance and even existence – they are made invisible, and actually become illegible from
within the frames of Western knowledge. From this diagnosis de Sousa Santos (2007) proposes
the need for “post-abyssal thinking,” and the creation of an “ecology of knowledges” in which all
knowledges are insufficient and indispensible. This framework suggests that rather than approach
knowledge through a search for either universal relevance or absolute relativism, it is possible to
consider that all knowledges have both internal integrity and contextual relevance – that is,
knowledges are valued for the interventions that they enable within a particular context, rather
than for their ability to ‘objectively’ or ‘authentically’ represent reality across all contexts. In this
way, multiple knowledges might co-exist without a battle for hegemony or a demand for
synthesis, because each is understood to offer contextually-specific, partial, and provisional
mobilisations, just as each has attendant limitations and ignorances of other knowledges that it
must bracket in order for its internal logic to work. De Sousa Santos (2007: 16) suggests that even
as we enact this bracketing, we must remember the partiality and provinciality of our own
knowledges, affirm the importance of the knowledges we have bracketed, and recognise the need
for ‘constant questioning and incomplete answers.’

For de Sousa Santos (2007) the ‘ecology of knowledges’ is based on a recognition of the, ‘plurality
of heterogeneous knowledges (one of them being modern science) and on the sustained and
dynamic interconnections between them without compromising their autonomy’ (2007: 9). In the
ecology of knowledges, knowledges and ignorances intersect: ‘as there is no unity of knowledge,
there is no unity of ignorance either’ (de Sousa Santos 2007: 11). He argues, ‘ignorance is not
necessarily the original state or starting point…it may be a point of arrival’ (de Suosa Santos 2007:
11). We understand this ‘arrival’ through what Spivak (in Spivak & Harasym 1990) calls
foreclosures – the constitutive disavowals and sanctioned ignorances that enable the logics and
practices of a particular way of knowing. In terms of Western knowledge production, Spivak talks
about foreclosures as sanctioned ignorances that authorise the denial of the violence that is
necessary to sustain modern/colonial systems (see also Andreotti 2007). In decolonising work, we
are called to arrive at these sanctioned ignorances and face our complicity in systemic harm.
However, much work on decolonisation only applies these principles to Western knowledge
production, creating a desire for a “better” (often marginalised) system of knowledge to replace
the modern/colonial one as an act of redress. In an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, facing
sanctioned ignorances and identifying potential systemic violences would be extended to all
knowledge systems and forms of knowledge production as a practice of prudence.

In other words, working toward an ecology of knowledges and ignorances does not equate to
decentring Western knowledges only to replace them by instead centring non-Western
knowledges, as this would reproduce the same underlying structure of seeking universalism and
exceptionalism. However, it does consider that in order to practice an ecology of knowledges it
would be necessary to reconfigure existing power relations and redistribute ‘material, social,
political, cultural, and symbolic resources’ (de Sousa Santos 2007: 9) – that is, to address not only
the modern intellectual economy, but the material, affective, and relational economies as well.
At the same time, we may recognise the need for different approaches to knowledge in the short-
, medium-, and long-term. In the short-term, we might prioritise the (more substantive) inclusion
of often delegitimised knowledges and knowledge holders within existing institutions. In the
medium-term, we might engage in difficult conversations about the limitations of inclusion within
deeply colonial institutions and how we might address the potential tensions that arise when
different, incommensurable knowledges meet – for instance, the risks of romanticising or
appropriating non-Western knowledges, or betraying their gifts by trying to understand them
through Western frames (Ahenakew 2016). Finally, in the long-term, we might look toward both
developing ecologies of knowledges and ignorances, and developing the capacity to respect the
contextual gifts and limitations of each knowledge system, including those that are not our own
and even those that we do not understand. This includes, for example, using (modern/colonial)
scientific knowledge in counter hegemonic ways to ‘enable epistemological consistency for
[socially, historically and ecologically accountable] pluralistic, propositional thinking’ (de Sousa
Santos 2007: 11).

CONCLUSION

In this chapter we have attempted to show how efforts to decolonise higher education can
operate in multiple ways, depending on how one frames the problem of colonialism, and what
one poses as a solution to it. We conclude with a reflection on what we identify as more and less
generative aspects we have encountered in decolonising work. In Canada, movements towards
decolonisation have been extremely generative in the creation of more spaces in which
questioning colonial habits of being is considered both legitimate and intelligible, leading to
important efforts to contest and reimagine institutional practices, individual investments, and
conscious and unconscious (harmful) hopes and desires. These efforts have enabled difficult
conversations about the limitations and circularities of political horizons oriented by
representation, recognition, reconciliation, redistribution, and redress. Because of the expansion
of these spaces, it is no longer possible for people to ignore or silence questions about the
conditional terms of inclusion and integration, about the instrumentalisation of bodies and
struggles, and about naturalised practices of resource theft, land expropriation, and cultural
appropriation.

Decolonisation approaches may be less generative when they lead to entrenched dogmatism or
self-righteousness that fragment communities of struggle and cause widespread burn-out
amongst those who are deeply engaged in decolonising work – especially those operating within
the radical-reform space. We also note that for those operating in soft-reform spaces, sometimes
more assertive decolonisation claims are perceived as conversation stoppers that prevent further
discussions and interrupt the desire to ‘move forward.’ In our experience, while it is indeed the
case that critical questions and demands can foreclose the possibility of certain conversations and
create a barrier toward certain forward movements, this interruption is generally only temporary
and often necessary, as these interventions can serve to push the boundaries of what we
commonly ask, imagine, and desire. The result can be to open up other kinds of conversations
(often uncomfortable, but nonetheless important) and movements (not always forward, but
nonetheless generative) that were not previously possible.

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