Body-Oriented Postcolonial Pedagogies: Reading Sociologist Biko Agozino's Syllabus

Trevor Jeyaraj, Virginia Tech

The paper aims to argue that rationality-based education in a Western context does often come at the expense of care for one’s body, especially for a subaltern postcolonial scholar-subject. Towards orienting bodily well-being for the postcolonial young scholar, the paper aims to emphasize on body-oriented academic context. It is to this end and objective, the paper turns its attention by reading one of Sociologist Biko Agozinos’s syllabus for a graduate level course, attended by the presenter, as a pedagogical tool of bodily hope and a site of constructing a pedagogy of decolonial well-being. Drawing on this postcolonial oriented syllabus, the paper aims to explicate the question of the subaltern, postcolonial scholar's body as a site of knowledge production on par with the mind and as to how the syllabus has emphasized such a bodily-oriented scholarly wellbeing. The scholars and theorizations engaged in the paper include Sociologist Biko Agozino's intersectional methodologies with regard to race-gender-class, Paulo Freire's ideas of pedagogy of hope, pedagogy of the oppressed and liberationist theologian Mayra Rivera’s conception of thinking bodies and notions of flesh. [References] Agozino, Biko. "Committed objectivity in race-class-gender research." Quality and Quantity 33 (1999): 395-410. Freire, Paulo. "Pedagogy of the oppressed." In Toward a sociology of education, pp. 374-386. Routledge, 2020. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Rivera M. 2011. “Thinking Bodies: The Spirit of a Latina Incarnational Imagination.” In Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/ o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta, 207-225. New York: Fordham University Press. _________. 2015. Poetics of the Flesh. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822374930.

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 Presented in Session 189. Learning Well: Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Contestation