Studying With, Without Guarantees

Reflections on the Risks of Taking Learning from the Classroom to the Land

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss an assignment we developed whose goal was to “unsettle” settler consciousness and critically foster a grounded politics of location amongst our postsecondary students. We analyze some of the important and sundry risks of taking learning from the classroom to the land, focusing on some of the assignment’s assumptions, effects, contradictions and complications. Drawing upon Moten & Harney’s urging of a “studying with and for,” Stuart Hall’s “politics without guarantees,” and Leanne Simpson’s “land as pedagogy,”we present our experiment in teaching as an exciting opportunity for learning – one that though rooted in aspirations towards more decolonial presents in our classrooms, is still always also deeply implicated in who gets made as a subject with access to the goods and protections of the colonial present within and outside of the university.