Globalization has brought increased opportunities for educators to collaborate across borders, sharing everything from curricula, teaching practices and educational standards to learning technologies, institutional structures and organizational policies. In the literature, this is often referred to as educational transfer, or the borrowing and lending between educational systems from different countries or cultures. Today, institutions that share between educational systems—whether schools, community groups, development organizations, corporations or governments—are so ubiquitous that some may think of it as a natural, inevitable and benign process. Yet as perspectives shared in this study illustrate, for many in-field practitioners, transfer can be challenging, have processes and outcomes that are not always clear or beneficial, and be fraught with many problems. This study examines the perspectives and problems of hosts when Western educators and development practitioners work within their postcolonial communities. Drawing on concepts, methods and strategies from postcolonial and critical education theory, this study examines how transfer can perpetuate historically inherited patterns of Western imperialism to answer the question, as educational borrowers and lenders, how do we know we are or aren’t neocolonial actors when transferring Western education into postcolonial countries, and what can we do to help ensure that we aren’t? Using a mix of grounded theory, narrative inquiry and action research, this study draws on data from interviews, narratives and group discussions that were collected between 2014 and 2019 from over 33 participants representing visiting and hosting volunteers and staff at three universities in Ghana and Vietnam. The results demonstrate that although their specific problems are individual and varied, hosting professionals can struggle with similar themes like Eurocentrism, developmentalism, inequality, harm and racism, requiring practitioners to use additional evaluation methods besides traditional needs assessments and outcomes-based program evaluations to decolonize their work. In addition to theorizing how practitioners might improve transfer evaluation, the study also examines how hosts and visitors might develop more critical awareness of neocolonial patterns and better support decolonial goals like participant consent, self-determination and empowerment. To this end, the study shares postcolonial perspectives, theoretical models and piloted problem reduction strategies to help future transfer practitioners develop deeper and more critical understandings of educational transfer. / Graduate / 2021-12-03

Indigenous adoptee scholars across Turtle Island and beyond have done good work in coming to understand their identity through community connection, culture, education and practice. A plethora of research has guided young Indigenous interracial adoptees on their journey, yet there are few stories focused on the experiences of interracial Maya adoptees reconnecting to their culture in KKKanada. Currently there is limited research documenting Maya adoptees experiences of displacement and cultural reclamation in KKKanadian adoption studies. Research must make more space for these stories and the stories of local Indigenous communities supporting them. In this story (thesis), through engagement with current literature and ten research questions, I explored what it meant to live as an interracial adoptee in West Coast Indigenous communities. An Indigenous Youth Storywork methodology was applied to bring meaning to relationships I have with diverse Indigenous Old Ones, mentors and Knowledge Keepers and their influence on my journey as a Maya adoptee returning to my culture. My personal story was developed and analyzed using an Indigenous decolonial framework and Indigenous Arts-based methods. This storying journey sheds light on the intricate intersections of interracial adoption, specifically for Maya Indigenous Youth who currently live in KKKanada. The intention of this Youth Storywork research work is to create space for Indigenous, Interracial, Transracial and Maya adoptees in Child and Youth Care, Social Work and Counselling Psychology education, policy and practice. / Graduate / 2021-11-18

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (hereafter, NATO) invasion of Libya in 2011 demonstrated and revealed the operative logics and technologies of global coloniality. Global coloniality names the trans-historic expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation of its effects in contemporary times. This thesis critically examines how coloniality of power was manifested in the invasion of Libya by NATO forces in 2011. Deploying a decolonial epistemic perspective, the thesis delves deeper into the invisible colonial matrices of power, and in the process exposing and unmasking the very conditions that made the invasion possible in the first place. The decolonial epistemic perspective combines historical and world systems analyses to shed light on the convergences of local histories and global designs in creating conflicts. At the centre of the concept of coloniality of power is control, expressed in four main levers of analysis, namely: control of authority, control of the economy, control of knowledge and subjectivity and control of gender and sexuality. At the centre of global colonial matrices of power, is the United Nations (UN), which is controlled by the few powerful states of the Global North with veto power. The UN is used to justify liberal imperial invasions. Libya just like Iraq before it, and Venezuela today, are victims of neo-liberal imperialist onslaught. What emerges in this thesis is how global coloniality has appropriated liberal discourses of liberal democracy and human rights to justify liberal imperialism. The main findings are that a Euro-North American-centric power configuration was challenged by Qaddafi’s introduction of the gold-backed dinar currency, the pursuit of acquiring a telecommunications satellite for information and knowledge-creation for Africa, Qaddafi’s rising popularity in Africa and the Global South, and Qaddafi’s conception and position on women-empowerment, thereby redefining the conception of gender and sexuality, which was antithetical to a Euro-North America-centric worldview. As a result, the delinquent Qaddafi had to be punished and eliminated. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Political Sciences / PhD International Relations / Unrestricted

This study addresses the decolonial program of the French party Les Indigènes de la République (PIR). By means of contemporary concepts of Coloniality, Decoloniality and decolonial resistance as theoretical framework and a qualitative content analysis as method for this study thirty articles of PIR authors that have been published from 2016 to 2018 are analysed in regard to the party’s particular understanding of racial inequality in French society, its conception of a decolonial society and its’ strategy for systemic change. The study asserts, how the PIR identifies a continuity of colonial ideology in the form of white universalism and supremacy as the source of racism in contemporary France and how it envisages an alternative, decolonial society based on multiversalism, cultural multiplicity and the refusal of hegemonic attitudes of one identity group towards another. Although the PIR is open for decolonial alliances the analysis shows, that the party insists on a primary non-white identity of its decolonial movement. The research concludes, that practical steps have to be taken in order to reach the PIR’s objective of a decolonial society.

In my essay, I have considered whether the data in publications on sexual violence against children reflectreality. I suspect that there are cases of child sexual abuse that goes underreported, and I try to investigate why this happens and the key possible reasons that lower the statistics. My essay focuses on the community in Western Kenya, yet I think the presumptions I made can be generalised and applicable to other contexts. I analyse material from research in Kisumu County and national data, and I support myself with information about child abuse from UNICEF. I name four key reasons why the data may not reflect reality: the taboo of being a sexual victim, economic dependency, psychological manipulation, and how society defines rape and sexual abuse. I use critical feminism as a framework to tackle the issue of a marginalised group of people.

Stories about the future are a powerful tool for navigating uncertainty, building agency, and detecting opportunities for transformation. For communities that have weathered colonialism, future visions grounded in local values and knowledge are especially powerful. Futures based in diverse value systems are also valuable assets for global efforts toward sustainability transformation. This thesis project began with a participatory visioning workshop in Mombera Kingdom, a community located in Malawi. We invited the kingdom’s traditional leaders to imagine positive futures for nature and people in their district. This workshop was a case study application of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), a heuristic tool that enables explicit discussion of different ways that people value nature. Following the workshop, I applied the NFF in a novel way to translate the rich and diverse participant visions into distinct, packaged future scenarios. First, I built a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) that represents dynamics in the present. Second, I organized possible interventions according to their expected impact on the NFF’s value perspectives. Third, I used those interventions to build three desirable scenarios of the kingdom’s future, each of which is desirable according to different values. Finally, I gathered stakeholder feedback on the scenarios at a follow-up workshop. The CLD suggests that misalignment within agricultural and energy production institutions causes failure to mediate ecosystem health and human well-being. The intervention analysis demonstrates that value-diverse visions can be translated into value-discrete scenarios. The scenarios capture images of modernity firmly grounded in Mombera Kingdom’s cultural values, rather than the culture that once colonized them. These results suggest new problem framings and strategies in the case study context. This project is a useful step toward regional- and global-scale future scenarios able to include Africa’s locally situated value systems. / AFRICAN FUTURES

This research seeks to explore the origins and values of participatory action research, as well as its role in transforming possibilities to knowledge production and shaping equal relationships between research participants. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of intersectionality and decoloniality and with a focus on the experience of the asylum interview, the research seeks to explore the ways that those epistemological paradigms intertwine with participatory research to deconstruct the dichotomy between researcher and research subject (expert/community) and re-balance the power differentials embedded within academia, canonical knowledge production and traditional research methodologies, to initiate change.On one hand, the research documents the tangible difficulties and practical obstacles that young researchers may come across when employing participatory and inclusive approaches to research, discussing with honesty and self-reflectivity the limitations and shortcomings of this effort. More importantly though, it provides the space and framework for a young woman who navigated the European asylum system, to voice, without mediation and within academia, her narrative and lived experience, and discuss ways towards fairer and more humane asylum systems. As such, it is also a testament to what PAR can offer when conducted with respect and reference to its ontological and epistemological origins, within universities that can sustain it.

This study sets out to investigate Sahrawi women’s understanding of maternities as bodily and embodied experiences of collective and individual resistance within the Sahrawi liberation struggle against the occupation of Western Sahara. By using the Sahrawi liberation front’s pronatalist politics as a starting point to explore Sahrawi women’s positioning in the liminal space between reproductive health and biological reproduction as a socio-political action, I draw on a decolonial understanding of agency to analyse the relationship between individual health and collective resistance – especially in correlation with the increase of humanitarian projects targeting sexual and reproductive health. As a result of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and desk review, I argue that the change in the social landscape of the camps with the arrival of humanitarian aid provided Sahrawi women with new perspectives on biological reproduction that, in turn, affected the way they contribute to the revolutionary cause, confirming their role as socio-political agents implementing new strategies of survival as acts of individual resistance.

The work presented aims to show the complexity, causes, and challenges of being stateless in the Dominican Republic through the medium of documentaries. This thesis will also uncoverpossibilities of resistance and coalitional engagement. To do so, I align myself with a decolonial feminist approach, which is a way of searching for alternative ways of being, doing, sensing, knowing, and loving for resistance, change, and a different future. This approach opens the possibility to understand statelessness within the triad of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and to move beyond the Eurocentric inventions of human rights, the concept of citizenship, and the figure of the 'citizen'. Decolonial feminism also grapples with the problem of victimization and gives us a possibility to see stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent both as an oppressed and resistant community. In a phenomenological sense, the documentaries Stateless by Michèle Stephenson (2020) and Our Lives in Transit by Sofia Olins (2015), are used in this thesis to explain and explore the lived conditions of being stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. I am conscious that film studies and particularly documentary filmmaking are colonized spaces and tools of modernity to spread the white / Anglo male gaze through the films' very impact on our senses and perception. For this reason, the work presented delinks from traditional methodologies which are often taken for granted in social sciences and migration studies. I aim to achieve this goal by practicing decolonial feminism as a theory and methodological guide for this thesis. Consequently, this thesis is a bridge-making process and an exploration of methodologies to grasp the complex reality in the Dominican Republic by practicing this work as a researcher, an audience, and a resister. Through the inspiring work of black feminists, decolonial and Caribbean scholars, but most importantly the lived experiences and voices of stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent, I intend to argue statelessness as amodern form of genocide to explain its root causes and persistence. Then, I will support this argument by bridging the links between statelessness and the coloniality of gender. Lastly, the different "world"-traveling experiences of directors Michèle Stephenson and Sofia Olins will deepen the discussion around possibilities of resistance to ongoing modes of subjugation through decolonial feminism.

This dissertation examines representations of the forest in Canadian and Brazilian literatures and cultural imaginaries in order to question utilitarian models of environmental use and discuss issues of deforestation in both countries. I argue that these models draw on aesthetic and narrative strategies that were consolidated through cultural myths about the Canadian woods and the Brazilian Amazon during the period of colonization and settlement which reified the wilderness and the jungle as uncultivated environments in need of being tamed, optimized, and civilized through consistent projects of land transformation and economic development. Furthermore, I argue that myths about the wilderness and the jungle founded a particular mode of knowing, interacting and existing in and against the environment based on the antagonism between humans and non-human nature which was imposed as universal and continues to shape current material practices in both countries. Despite the differences between the Canadian wilderness and the Brazilian jungle, similar patterns and problems are visible in the literatures of both countries because of their colonial histories and economic models based on the capitalist development of primary resources. Thus, by analyzing a variety of Canadian and Brazilian texts, my dissertation draws attention to the relations of power within which "the forest" was constructed in the Canadian and Brazilian national imaginaries, and which, in turn, were naturalized by particular representations of the wilderness and the jungle. In so doing, my project shows the centrality of Western-centric ideals of progress, culture, nature, and modernity in both countries, and how these concepts continue to inform current institutional policies and environmental debates about forestry management, deforestation, and conservation. I argue that by questioning utilitarian models of land management, writers like Brian Fawcett, Daphne Marlatt and Jeannette Armstrong in Canada as well as Márcio Souza, Regina Melo, and co-writers Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa in Brazil call for a critical reinterpretation of master narratives while also inviting alternative frameworks of knowledge that run against dominant economic, environmental, and ontological models. The Canadian wilderness and the Brazilian Amazon occupy a central role in the national literatures and cultural myths of these countries. Nevertheless, the idea of the wilderness and the jungle they reify is mostly symbolic and, as such, tends to obscure the material realities of these landscapes. In turn, the texts I analyze in this dissertation unveil a connection between the imaginary and actual forestry practices enacted by companies and governments to call for epistemic, ontological, and material changes on the ground. Put another way, these narratives mediate between real world issues and aesthetic form, and try to offer a discursive structure for acting upon current environmental, cultural, and economic crises. In their critique of the sustained exploitation of humans and non-humans in postcolonial nations like Canada and Brazil, the writers I examine in my project offer the seeds a theoretical (un)thinking that brings epistemology, ontology, nature, and politics to the forefront of discussions about the environment.