Graduate Certificate in Decolonial Global Studies (DGS): Certificate Aims and Vision
Courses that will count towards the certificate are being offered from Fall 2023.
The DGS Graduate Certificate provides an opportunity for students to learn interdisciplinary methods for analysis of culture, society, and geopolitical economy outside the prison-house of Eurocentric, capitalist, colonialist, and androcentric framings. It focuses on both the embedded narratives that have enabled material-epistemological violence and the legacies of care and creative world-making that have sustained human communities over generations. DGS courses highlight the historical-political dynamics that underlie both the crises and the new solidarities of the present. In other words, the Certificate will foster your ability to reconceive what has been called Global Studies by restructuring the field around decolonial, intersectional approaches. Equally essential, in its interdisciplinary, co-teaching pedagogies, the Certificate aims to support extra-disciplinary projects, creative forms of theorization, new networks of relation, and unorthodox angles of vision. As part of this process, we cultivate intellectual and social-political community that will support your journey and foster positive change more broadly. Courses and DGS events bring visitors from activist, artist, policy-making, and other such spheres; and our Mellon-supported Liaison Fellows Program offers short-term internships in these spheres for DGS Certificate graduate students.
At the same time, we also recognize that our collaborative decolonizing of diverse yet linked systems of power has distinctive stakes, risks, and potentialities for each of us, arising from our particular positions. We remain aware that our relations are hemmed in by language hegemonies and other entanglements in colonial, capitalist, sexist-racist histories. Therefore, the courses in this Certificate cultivate the practices of slow listening and trust-building alongside experimental thinking, expansive reflection, and attentiveness to languages. We understand the classroom as a key arena of practice and as part of our field of relations.
Finally, a note on terms. In recent years some scholars have distinguished between decolonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial studies. In order to build alliances among the scholars and projects focused on this work, we prefer to recognize the generative practices and diverse genealogies of all these methods, while also honoring the distinctions among them. We take the same approach to the concept of intersectionality, which has recently been debated for its applicability across different regions and colonial formations. While critical methods must involve what Samir Amin has aptly called de-linking from colonial norms, we propose that the building of a decolonized future also entails what Julia Suárez-Krabbe calls re-linking of decolonial imaginaries and practices.