Home > Calendar > Decolonizing Literacies: Paulo Freire, "Theory" and Rural Women's Antiviolence Organizing in Eastern India

Decolonizing Literacies: Paulo Freire, "Theory" and Rural Women's Antiviolence Organizing in Eastern India

By Piya Chatterjee, Dorothy Cruickshand Backstrand Chair in Gender and Women's Studies, Scripps College, California

Monday, December 03, 2012
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall

This is a "work-in-progress" talk which explores my work in building antiviolence and political literacy "circles" with rural plantation and village women in eastern India. It will work across two simultaneous registers of engagement. Within the first register of analysis, I will describe the feminist/Freirian philosophy that informed this organic and collaborative project that has (jaggedly) spanned six years of grassroots organizing in West Bengal. The analysis will also involve examining the contradictions and ethical tensions in claiming "collaboration" and rural women's "empowerment." In the second, I reflect more broadly (through Freirian lens as well) about the circuits of "academic capitalism" through which this kind of "activist" work is viewed and valued. Is it "theory?" Is it relegated to being an interesting ethnographic "case" study? How might we "decolonize" these old splits between activism and scholarship? The aim of the talk is open up space for critical dialogue around questions of authorial and authoritative investments around activist scholarship in all its complex geopolitical traffic of capital and knowledge.