Damage, Desire, and Decolonization: Indigenous Knowledge and University Futures

Can Native Studies save the university? Should it be saved? This microseminar examines the contemporary crisis of the university through the work of Eve Tuck and related Indigenous thinkers, artists, and activists. Organized around the visit of Eve Tuck, the course asks what universities are for, whom they serve, and whether they can become sites for repair and collective flourishing rather than extraction and exclusion. Drawing on Tuck’s influential critique of “damage-centered” research, students will explore how Indigenous knowledge traditions offer alternative ways of imagining education, governance, land relations, and responsibility. Particular attention will be paid to Indigenous aesthetics, as vital forms of theory and political practice. Indigenous artistic traditions not only preserve cultural memory and relationships to land, but also model different understandings of democracy, collectivity, and futurity that challenge the university’s colonial foundations.

Attending Eve Tuck’s Katz Distinguished lecture on Thursday, October 15 at 6:30pm is a requirement of the course.

This seminar is connected to the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Not Apart: Indigenous Knowledges, Global Reciprocity, and the Art of Democracy”

Add code required. Please email the instructors a short statement about your interest in the course. (jal26@uw.edu, jbperea@uw.edu, gardnerb@uw.edu)