Water as Teacher: Pedagogical Practices of Liberation
Description
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s multimodal work as a Nishnaabeg theorist (e.g., As We’ve Always Done), musician (e.g., Theory of Ice), storyteller (e.g., Islands of Decolonial Love), and organizer (e.g., A Short History of the Blockade) organizes her decolonial art and education practices around “the liberation of living beings” in an ecocidal, genocidal world. Enacting “the liberatory potential of Indigenous Knowledge systems,” Simpson’s work has had a profound impact within and beyond the academy. Her latest book, Theory of Water: Nishnabee Maps to the Times Ahead (Haymarket 2025), poses our panel’s guiding questions: How might humanities education “serve as microsite of world making”? What must we unlearn to enable the embodied, relational practices of pedagogy Simpson calls forth?
Simpson joins many other Indigenous theorists (including Eve Tuck, Glen Sean Coulthard, Daniel Heath Justice, Heidi Stark, Aaron Mills, and Zoe Todd) who challenge us to practice decolonial critique not only in, but also on post-secondary institutions that continue to be shaped by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We aim to assemble an interdisciplinary panel of scholars, artists, educators who are likewise investigating the conditions under which humanities education might help scaffold “world building toward liberation.” We invite a wide-ranging conversation that takes seriously Simpson’s animating insight: “It’s not just pedagogy. It’s how to live life” (“Land as Pedagogy”).
We encourage participants to approach Simpson’s work as an occasion to explore a variety of topics including (but not limited to): land-based and water-based pedagogical practices; the intersections (and incompatibilities) of Indigenous resurgence and humanities education; embodied and relational methods of teaching and learning; Indigenous knowledges as practices of liberation; the role of cultural activism in anti-colonial education; grounded normativity as a critique of the neoliberal university; decolonial art and education as “world-making practices.”
Anyone interested in submitting a proposal for this seminar should first contact the organizers at [email protected] and [email protected].
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sarah Dowling is the author of two scholarly books, Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern, 2024), and Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism (Iowa, 2018), as well as three collections of poetry. Sarah teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
Speaker Bio
Jenny M. James is Associate Professor of English and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. Her research explores new paths of kinship, community and repair by engaging in literary and cultural studies as well as gender, critical race and queer studies. Her work has been published in GLQ: The Journal of Gay, Lesbian and Queer Studies, MELUS: Multi-ethnic Literatures of the U.S, James Baldwin Review, and Studies in American Fiction.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Roldan (He/Him) is a graduate student at York University pursuing a Master of Education in the Urban Indigenous Education cohort. His work explores the intersections of Indigenous education, philosophy, and curriculum development, with a focus on creating equitable and culturally responsive learning environments. Professionally, he works as a high school teacher and corporate diversity instructor.
Speaker Bio
Kate Stanley is associate professor of English at Western University. Her first book is Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson (Cambridge 2018). She is co-editor of a PMLA special issue on aesthetic education and William James & Literary Studies (Cambridge 2026). Her essays have appeared in PMLA, ALH, Modernism/modernity, Criticism, and LA Review of Books. She is at work on a SSHRC-supported project about navigating the climate crisis within and beyond humanities classrooms.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tanner R. Layton is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, where he examines how experiential encounters provide the conditions for lasting existential, ethical, and everyday fidelities. His interdisciplinary work critically explores how these encounters offer an antidote to the contemporary pressure to live ‘authentically.' He also teaches a variety of courses in the humanities and social sciences in Alberta and Ontario.
Speaker Bio
Sherally Munshi is a Professor of Law at Georgetown. She earned a JD from Harvard and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia. Her areas of teaching include property law, race and migration, and Asian American legal history. Her research and writing focus on histories of race, migration, and empire.
Speaker Bio
Susie O’Brien is a professor in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where she teaches and studies settler colonialism and anti-colonial environmental humanities. Her publications include What the World Might Look Like: Decolonial Stories of Resilience and Refusal (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and a co-edited special issue of Studies in Social Justice, “Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding: The (In)humanities, Artistic Practices, and Planetary Crisis”.