Lecture - Fractured Pedagogies: An intersectional repertoire of stupidity, common sense and silence
Channel: Roots and Routes: A Living Archive
Date: 2022-10-27

The lecture was delivered at the "Decolonizing Academia" symposium at Maynooth University, Ireland on 27th October 2022. 

Abstract of the Talk: Despite the official end of physical colonization across the planet, the systemic, epistemic, and ontological impact of colonial ideologies through the Eurocentric parameters of knowledge production continue to regulate the habitual existential patterns of individuals and institutions in the contemporary era. The impact can be very well observed through our verbal language, body language, behavioral patterns, curricular structures, pedagogical practices, fashion ethics, economic practices, and many other aspects. With respect to the theme of this seminar, the lecture will focus on how colonially-shaped pedagogical practices continue to dominate and dictate the higher education system in India. I have chosen India to weave my arguments in this lecture because I am from the city of Kolkata in India. Most of the arguments in this lecture will emerge from my personal experiences as a student, researcher, and teacher across diverse schools and higher educational institutions in India. The Indian education system continues to be haunted by the specter of the 1835 Macaulay’s Minute on Education that expropriated the native indigenous systems of teaching and learning and appropriated the Eurocentric knowledge disciplines. Within India's Eurocentric education knowledge systems, the parameters of intelligence, intellectuality, and knowledgeability are interpreted based on one’s knowledge of specific Eurocentric sciences and literatures. To elaborate further, individuals, who do not possess knowledges about certain European sciences, technologies, histories, literatures, languages, and other disciplines are dehumanized; their intellectualities are dumped as stupid; they are demarcated as individuals who lack common sense, and they are convicted for not being enough vocal and aware about the modern (also read as colonial) knowledge frameworks. 
Based on these arguments, the lecture will unfold how the pedagogical patterns in the higher educational institutions in India continue to preserve the hierarchical, dictatorial, and violent pedestals of Eurocentric knowledge systems and how the pedagogies of stupidity, common sense, and silence can generate collective networks of resilience against such violent teaching-learning practices. The arguments about these pedagogical practices, which I celebrate as fractured pedagogies, will be widely shaped from a set of case studies across different higher educational and alternate educational institutions in India, which I have conducted for my ‘trilogy of fractured pedagogies’ – ‘Pedagogy of the Stupid’, ‘Pedagogy of Common Sense', and ‘Pedagogy of Performative Silence’.

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