Wayne Yang will speak at Colgate on March 25, 2014.
Please join us on Tuesday, March 25 at 7pm in Love Auditorium for a talk by Dr. K. Wayne Yang entitled: “A Ghost in the University Machine: A Methodology of Organizing.”
Within the colonizing university also exists a decolonizing education. That is, occupying the same space and time are the colonizer’s territories and institutions and colonized time, but also Indigenous land and life before and beyond occupation. In this respect, paraphrasing the words of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the present of school is permeable to the time now (colonization), the time before that (pre-colonial), and the time beyond of all of that (postcolonial).
To assemble a decolonizing machinery out of the university requires a special mode of organizing, a peculiar type of agency, or more precisely, a peculiar agent of organizing. The scyborg, this agent of change, is the ghost in the machine, rewiring machinery to decolonial intentions. This talk will explore the university’s settler colonial role, as produced not only upon land but from land, and its desires for colonizer (and paradoxically Indigenous) futures. This talk will also conjure the methodologies of the scyborg, this queer gear, the lopsided bot, that makes the machine work (for freedom sometimes) by helping the machine (of unfreedom) break down.
K. Wayne Yang is an assistant professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His work transgresses the line between scholarship and community, as evidenced by his involvement in urban education and community organizing. He was a public school teacher in Oakland, California, for over 15 years, and also served in the Office of School Reform within the Superintendent’s cabinet. He co-founded the Avenues Project, a youth development non-profit organization, as well as East Oakland Community High School, which were inspired by the Survival Programs of the Black Panther Party. Currently, he is collaborating with Roses In Concrete to create a K-12 school center in Oakland.
His research interests include: ghetto colonialism, decolonization, popular culture and social movements. With his frequent collaborator, Eve Tuck, he wrote, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” (2012) which is one of their most widely read articles. Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change (2014), is their most recent collaboration – an edited book examining a range of topics from foundational theories of resistance to contemporary studies of the DREAMer movement, the bodily resistance of LGBTQ street youth, urban Native youth resistance, the decolonial struggles of Palestinian diasporic youth, and STEM institutions for collective Black resistance.
Currently, he is writing a book on community organizing, and revising a draft of “A third university is possible,” an essay about scyborgs and decolonizing machines.