In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire writes that “any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.” And I agree.
He went on to describe two opposing models of education: the traditional ‘banking model’ and the ‘problem-posing model’. In the former, learners are treated as containers into which knowledge is a thing deposited by authority figures, and in the latter, knowledge is a thing produced through dialogue and relationship: co-investigated, co-created, and lived.
I understand the banking model as a core expression of coloniality, a product not only of imperial conquest, but also of other forms of domination (interpersonal, institutional, and cultural) that condition us to distrust and denigrate our capacity to attend to our subjectivity and tell the truth about ourselves and our worlds as we see them, and our freedom to have those truths stand on their own, notwithstanding other truths and/or claims.
Colonisation, once enacted, cannot be undone. Some ruptures remain. But we can make new justices. We can cultivate alternative ways of relating to ourselves, to each other, to history, and to the environment… what I think of as sweet medicines, life-affirming practices of knowing, knowing as relationship and process rather than accumulation or possession.
My work here in Studio Styles is to experiment with, think about, and produce these sweet medicines for social healing, the process of increasing our capacity to say what is real for us. This work is part of a shared labour carried across time by those who have thought, built, and cared before me, and those who will continue after.
Some influences and resonances: texts I’m in conversation with:
Sara Elamin & Dr. Houman Harouni talk about how meaningful change isn’t about quick solutions or surface-level shifts, but about developing the capacity to see clearly, stay present, and respond differently over time.
quote by an Aboriginal Rights group in Queensland, Australia, 1970s.
from the John O'Donohue episode in the On Being podcast
photo of a rose bush by Jamie East
'Black Woman with Peonies' by Frédéric Bazille (1870)
I recognise that the state of disconnection/fragmentation is not a universal or dominant felt experience for all in post-colonial societies.
For many of ‘us’, violence, extraction, and precarity are more immediate than questions of knowledge. For some, clear hierarchies of knowledge are the only sources of stability they can recognise in their lives, and questioning them can feel destabilising rather than liberatory in the moment, and we just haven’t yet cultivated the capacity to hold the tension and destabilisation that comes with questioning authority.
And then, there are communities among us with strong, continuous knowledge traditions where knowing remains relational by norm and necessity, and for whom what I offer, my theories of knowledge, are already a given. For example, those who work closely with land and self, such as some farmers, herbalists, craft communities, and spiritual traditions where knowledge is made and transmitted through embodiment, and so they don’t suffer this disconnection/fragmentation in the way I see it occurring.
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I am most interested in those of ‘us’ whose ways of knowing have been shaped and constrained by coloniality, an external force of dispossession, and who are seeking more life-affirming and attuned ways of moving through the world, whether because these systems have harmed us, or because we sense their limits even as we might benefit from them.
What is at stake is not only individual coherence, but the kinds of worlds we are able to build collectively. When people are estranged from their own ways of knowing, they are more easily governed through manipulation, more easily exploited, and more likely to reproduce systems misaligned with life. Recovering & cultivating ways of knowing our worlds through a posture of relationship is necessary to make more sustainable, just, and liveable futures possible.