Annual Lecture 2019 ‘Decolonising pedagogies? Conspiring for Transformation’
Speakers: Dr Stephanie Davis (University of East London) and Dr Rachel Jane Liebert (University of East London)
1st May 2019, 18:00-21:00, University of Westminster
Hosted by the Critical Pedagogies Group and the Centre for Education and Teaching Innovation
About the lecture
As two scholar-activists, one racialised as black and the other as white, we share some of our ongoing conversations and collaborative work in which we conspire together to work towards possible transformative and decolonising pedagogies. We will discuss the importance of attention to both content and form, space for imagination and spirit, and questions of survival. We will explore the difficulties of working for decolonisation, our ambivalence about our place in and the possibilities of the University and the challenges of dismantling whiteness.
About Dr Stephanie Davis
Dr Stephanie Davis is a scholar-activist, a queer Black troublemaker, and a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London. She has a specific interest in the intersections of race, gender and sexuality; critical community psychology; critical pedagogies and decolonising academia. She has previously worked in a community development and activist capacity on issues of sexual health with young people and Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities and on issues facing her local community such as police harassment and gender and sexual diversity. In 2013, she co-founded Rainbow Noir, a social support and organising space for queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC) in Manchester. As an educator she is inspired by bell hooks’ ‘education as the practice of freedom’ and strives to create learning environments with her students that encourage openness, dialogue, debate, and critical thinking. As a scholar-activist she is excited by the possibilities of working both within academia and beyond its boundaries.
About Dr Rachel Jane Liebert
Born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, Rachel Jane Liebert has a PhD in Critical Psychology from the City University of New York and a Lectureship in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of East London. Seeking to breach the genocidal legacies of her intellectual and settler ancestry, she collaborates with decolonising and feminist scholarship, art and activism around madness, whiteness and education. Her recent book with Routledge, Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia and the War on Imagination, experiments with a spiralling, uncomfortable, imaginative praxis for destroying whiteness as we know it and making space for otherworldly correspondence. In turn, she is a staunch believer that attempts to ‘decolonise’ must be as attentive to form as they are to content, and as attentive to feeling as they are to knowing. You can see this and some of her other projects here: www.racheljaneliebert.com
Access information
We will arrange for the lecture to be in a room that is wheelchair accessible with accessible all-gender toilets nearby. If you face other access barriers or require more detailed accessibility information, please let us know so we can support your full participation. If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. For more information, contact Jennifer Fraser (j.fraser@westminster.ac.uk)
Critical Pedagogies Project 