13th Annual Decolonizing Conference

This plenary brings together grassroots organizers, Elders, youth advocates, scholars, and community collectives across Canada and the Black diaspora to confront escalating attacks on equity, justice, and so-called “wokeism.” As governments and institutions intensify pushbacks against DEI, and culturally responsive education, and introduce policies such as Bill 33, Black communities have developed relational, insurgent forms of resistance that often operate beyond public protest. Grounded in kinship, care, and collective responsibility, these strategies respond to shared harms across education, child welfare, health care, neighbourhoods, and the criminal justice system. Through local and transnational perspectives—from Canada to the Caribbean, South America, and Africa—Panelists on this panel will speak about how Black communities build solidarity, mutual aid, and protective networks, imagining liberation as collectively held, locally rooted, and globally connected.

Speakers: Dr. Amal Madibbo and Marycarmen Lara-Villanueva

The Cross-Racial Dialogue Plenary creates a shared space for racialized communities, scholars, activists, and organizers to engage in honest, relational, and transformative dialogue about race, power, solidarity, and collective resistance. In a moment marked by intensifying anti-Blackness, xenophobia, “anti-wokeism,” renewed attacks on equity, and the expansion of carceral practices in schools and neighbourhoods, this plenary examines how racialized communities—Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, Arab, and others—experience overlapping yet distinct forms of systemic harm. Moving beyond surface-level unity, the dialogue invites participants to confront anti-Blackness within and across communities, acknowledge historical tensions, and cultivate practices of listening, truth-telling, and collective responsibility. Through critical conversations, storytelling, and shared analysis, the plenary highlights how cross-racial coalitions can resist punitive systems, challenge surveillance and criminalization, and advance community-based, humanizing alternatives, affirming that liberation is relational, interdependent, and strengthened through accountable, co-created action.

Speakers: Dr. Vidya Shah, Dr. Arlo Kempf, Harpreet Ghuman, Nigel Barriffe, Derik Chica, Sayema Chowdhury, Monica Tang

The Global Indigeneities Plenary brings together Indigenous knowledge holders, scholars, community leaders, and cultural practitioners from across the world to explore shared struggles and interconnected futures. Grounded in anti-colonial theory, Indigenous resurgence, and relational worldviews, it affirms Indigenous knowledge as living, dynamic, and futurist practice rather than historical artifact. Connecting teachings from Turtle Island, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Oceania, the plenary examines how colonial institutions reproduce harm through schooling, policing, Land dispossession, and state control, while also highlighting Indigenous-led practices of resistance, resurgence, and transformation. Rooted in relational accountability, this plenary positions Indigenous knowledge as a critical framework for disrupting racialized violence, resisting assimilationist policies, and building collective futures grounded in sovereignty, care, and interdependence, reminding us that the knowledge needed to dismantle colonial systems already exists within Indigenous communities worldwide.

Speakers: Dr. Njoki Wane, Dr. Maria Mackay, Cristina Jaimungal, Juliana Rodriguez Barrera, and Sandra Stryes

This plenary will build on conversations during the CIARS Summer Institute on African Indigeneity and ElderCrits, a transformative two-week program held in Ghana in August 2025. The Institute was delivered in collaboration with The University of Education, Winneba (UEW), SDA College of Education, Asokore–Koforidua, and the College of Education, University of Ghana, Legon–Accra. Rooted in African Indigenous knowledge systems and de/anti-colonial educational praxis, the Institute offered an immersive experience that combined seminars, workshops, student presentations, and sustained dialogue with land-based, cultural, and community-engaged learning in sites of memory, resistance, and resurgence, while centering Elders, Chiefs, and local knowledge holders as co-educators and theorists. Building on these collective insights, the plenary positions African ElderCrit as a critical and generative intervention for epistemic liberation, drawing on African Indigenous philosophies, oral traditions, spirituality, and communal governance to disrupt Euro-centric assumptions about knowledge, learning, authority, and development, and to engage African Indigeneity as living theory capable of confronting educational violence, anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigenous racism while opening pathways toward humanizing, decolonial futures.

Speakers: Nana George Dei, Prof. Vincent Adzahlie-Mensah, Prof. Hope Pius Nudzor, Dr. Paul Adjei

The African Elders Plenary honours African Indigenous knowledge systems as critical intellectual, cultural, and political resources for confronting anti-Black harm across education, child welfare, community, health care, and justice systems. Drawing on Elders’ cultural knowledges (ELDERCRITS), the session centers Elders as theorists, memory-keepers, and leaders whose teachings illuminate alternative pathways to care, governance, and collective responsibility, positioning them as key guides in understanding how communities resist harm and build transformative educational futures. Grounded in African worldviews, relational ethics, and intergenerational practices, the plenary brings Elders, scholars, and community members together to explore how philosophies such as Ubuntu and Sankofa, and approaches to communal care, storytelling, and Indigenous leadership structures support local resurgence, human dignity, while strengthening diasporic solidarities across Canada, the Caribbean, South America, and the African continent. The Plenary will lead discussion to offer powerful frameworks to challenge Western, carceral, and individualistic models of schooling, governance, and justice while articulating relational, restorative, and humanizing pathways for rebuilding educational and social systems rooted in dignity, care, accountability, and common/community purpose.

Speakers: Dr. Paul Adjei, Nana Kwabena Asamoah, Sylvia Parris, and Nana George Dei