How to change without ‘eating the other’

The following recording is a short reflection on an opportunity that emerged through the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership in fall 2023. The opportunity was co-create land-based learning for senior bureaucrats in the federal government. In this audio reflection I am processing my physical and intellectual reactions to the opportunity out loud, and am thinking/feeling my way through what I found unsettling about how the training was being envisioned.

I don’t think I would have had the same physical gut reaction to this training proposal three or four years ago. Having spent time reading the work of Jennifer Nash, bell hooks, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other Black feminist scholars has provided me with new analytical frameworks to push my thinking.

I am now sitting with the question…how to we learn to co-exist without falling into patterns of consumption and without putting folks from the margins into positions of permanent service?

I wonder about the possibilities of “world traveling” (as described by Lugones) as one potential conceptual framework to guide this kind of intercultural learning and epistemic transformation. I haven’t yet read the materials from my QE list that engage with this concept, but I am curious about the potential it holds.

Works cited

hooks, bell. (1992). Black looks : race and representation. South End Press.

Wildcat, M., McDonald, M., Irlbacher-Fox, S., & Coulthard, G. (2014). Learning from the land: Indigenous land-based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), I–XV.q