Nothing Never Happens: A Third University Is Possible

Podcast conversation with K. Wayne Yang

Uncovering the decolonizing ghost in the colonizing machine

Wayne Yang is a scholar and organizer whose work transforms lines between these domains, and—we think we can say with confidence—spurs his many readers to engage in that same project. With over 15 years of experience as a high school teacher in Oakland, CA and as a current professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, Prof. Yang employs multiple qualitative methodologies in his research and activism, from youth participatory action research, to ethnographies of youth popular culture, to ethnographies of central administration, to critical cartographic methods. His work on settler-colonialism and ghetto colonialism within university initiatives to liberal so-called “community engagement” have been particularly powerful in calling educators to methods of refusal that “make transparent the metanarrative of knowledge production” and which “generate territories that colonial knowledge endeavors to settle, enclose, domesticate” (to quote the article “Unbecoming Claims” co-written with Eve Tuck).

 

Listen to part 1 of the podcast.
Listen to part 2 of the podcast.