The Festival of New

As the world faces a global climate crisis and widespread social and political unrest, Indigenous peoples are leading efforts to defend the land, air, and water on which we all depend. These struggles are part of longstanding Indigenous resistance to colonial occupation, land dispossession, and state violence, including violence against women. Yet many institutions, including schools and universities, continue to erase Indigenous knowledge and resistance efforts—contributing to ongoing epistemic violence and furthering an agenda of assimilation that privileges anthropocentric and Eurocentric knowledge systems and forms of social organization. The coloniality of power and knowledge persists. What would it mean to center Indigenous knowledge, history, and social movements at The New School, as it celebrates 100 years as “a dynamic center of scholars, artists, and activists”? How might such a change shift the way we look at climate and environmental justice, colonial violence, state building, migration and border control, design strategies, racial justice, capitalism, and radical social and global transformation? How would it influence our hiring practices, the focus of our research projects, our methodology, our pedagogical goals and strategies, the choice of texts in our syllabi?

Professors Leonardo Figueroa and Jaskiran Dhillon take up these critical questions and discuss the urgency of decolonization and the politics of knowledge production at The New School and beyond.