Remapping local and global imaginaries

How can local and global imaginaries be challenged trough education? This paper explores this question through analyses of students work with an educational design intended to produce critical thinking about migration, and awareness about current and local colonial structures. The design involves collaboration between young people who are refugees and have a relatively short history in Norwegian schooling, and students who take social studies in upper secondary schools. The pedagogical design was developed in order to explore how one can utilize «outsider within» perspectives (Collins 1986) to produce alternative knowledges about contemporary Norway and the world. Drawing on indigenous art based research that has recovered Sami place names in Trøndelag, Norway (Bergh et. al. 2017), we have facilitated learning about the colonization of southern Saepmie, including current land struggles. Learning about settler colonialism in the local community has been the basis for a majority inclusive approach to issues of race, land, property and migration. The students have produced three overlapping layers on blind maps with different geographical centres. Firstly, they map indigenous areas locally and globally. Secondly, they map movement of people through the history of colonization. Thirdly, they map current migration patterns. We worked with the presumption that the refugee participants are epistemically privileged (Harding 2004) vis a vis many of their Norwegian born counterparts because of their experience with the European border regime, and often also knowledge of countries in which colonialism is acknowledged as a significant heritage. The intended outcome of the design was to facilitate understanding for how colonization is constitutive of current struggles between Sami interests and those of the settler colonial state, and border regimes locally and globally.

In the presentation we will analyse material generated from pilots of the course, and discuss the knowledges about indigenous issues, colonization and migration that is reflected in them.

References:
Bergh, S. M., Grahn, M, Grønstad, R.M., Helander, N., Jåks, I, and Thoresen S. F. (2017) noe beveger seg sakte i en annen retning. Kunsthall Trondheim. 1. juni – 3. september, 2017
Collins, P. (1986). Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14-S32. doi:10.2307/800672
Harding, S. G. (ed.) 2004. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, London & New York: Routledge.

Stine H. Bang Svendsen is Associate Professor of pedagogy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU. Her research focuses on how sexuality, gender, race and coloniality come to matter in current Nordic cultural politics and education. Among her most recent publications are „The Cultural politics of Sex Education in the Nordics“ in Eds. L. Allen and M. L. Rasmussen The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education (2017), and the edited volume Bodies, Symbols and Organizational Practice: The Gendered Dynamics of Power, with Agnes Bolsø and Siri Ø. Sørensen (Routledge 2018).

Christian Skotnes is Lecturer in social studies and history at the Dept. of teacher education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU. He is also a teacher at Orkdal Upper secondary school. He is engaged in the research project Language, Integration, Media at NTNU.

Christian Skotnes, Lecturer, Dept of Teacher Education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.