13th Decolonizing Conference

The ongoing legacies of colonialism continue to shape our world and our experiences within it—manifesting in racial hierarchies, health disparities, economic inequities, cultural erasures, and Land struggles and reclamations, all of which fuel ongoing geopolitical tensions. This conference offers a space for meaningful dialogue, critical reflection, and collective action, bringing together emerging and established scholars, artists, activists, community members and leaders, and other radical thinkers from around the world who are engaged in anti-colonial, anti-racist, and inclusive education work. Let us collectively address and confront ongoing global challenges and imagine possibilities for profound, sustainable change and regeneration.

Join us in-person at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto in Canada.

About the Logo

The CIARS Decolonizing Conference logo visually embodies the conference’s commitment to exposing, disrupting ongoing coloniality while advancing resistance and liberatory futures. The two masks symbolize the unmasking of Eurocentric settlerhood and colonial power, alongside enduring practices of resistance, reclamation, and restoration. Together they signify both rupture and continuity. Set against a global backdrop, the image highlights the worldwide reach of coloniality and its entanglement across peoples, and histories. It emphasizes Land as a living source of knowledge, reciprocity, connection, and sovereignty. The global framing underscores the necessity of transnational solidarities and collective efforts to “live well for new futures.” Accompanying symbols—the Medicine Wheel, Sankofa, and the Rising Sun—represent ways of knowing, being, and relating. Together, they gesture toward renewal, possibility, ancestral wisdom, relational and holistic worldviews that challenge dominant epistemologies and ground scholarship and advocacy in community, collectivity, and futurity.

About the Conference

Anchored in de/anti-colonial thinking, the conference encourages dialectical and conjunctural analyses that connect the histories, ideas, and practices shaping human experience and growth. It seeks to advance critical anti-colonial knowledge, critique the present, and reimagine new futures of living well together—futures that resist continuing global capital extractivism and supremacist thinking, and instead, build alternative ways of knowing, being, and relating to one another.

The conference thus calls for ethical and transformative scholarship that bridges divides, nurtures community, and aligns theory with activism to move beyond mere awakening of critical consciousness. This involves the rejection of performative intellectualism and politics, advocating instead for the cultivation of communities grounded in academic mentorship and collective care. It is urgent for us to reject colonial binaries that promote “thinking in hierarchies,” eradicate toxicity and dehumanization and see education and social justice work as foundational to human liberation. Together, we aim to resist hate, violence, oppression, and all forms of genocide within the corollary of colonialism by bridging the gaps between scholarship, activism and social politics.

Guiding Questions

How can we build anti-colonial solidarities rooted in radical hope and futurity?
How might teachings of Land—sharing, reciprocity, connection, mutual interdependence, and community building, as well as shared responsibilities—subvert colonial hierarchies in education?
How do we resist subjectivities and continue ancestral struggles for liberation?
What epistemic and political practices can release us from colonizing relations?
How can we reclaim control over our stories and identities to upend intellectual enslavement?

Participants

More information about presenters, keynotes, and plenary speakers coming soon.

Keynote

Dr. Bettina L. Love

Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the acclaimed author of Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal, a New York Times bestseller. The book has received numerous honors, including the Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, the National Council for Black Studies' Anna Julia Cooper & C.L.R. James Book Award, and long-listing for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize.

In recognition of her transformative work, Dr. Love was named a 2022 Next 50 Leader by the Kennedy Center for her commitment to fostering inspiration, inclusion, and compassion. In 2024, she was honored with the Truth Award for Excellence in Education from Better Brothers Los Angeles and The Diva Foundation, as well as the Black Girl Magic Award at Lincoln Center in New York City.

Dr. Love was instrumental in the creation of the "In Her Hands" initiative, which distributed over $13 million in financial support to Black women throughout Georgia. A sought-after public speaker, she addresses issues including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and the power of art-based education in civic engagement. Her commentary and work have been featured in NPR, PBS, The Daily Beast, Time, Education Week, The Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In 2018, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring Dr. Love's significant contributions to education. As a public scholar, she is a regular contributor to Education Week Opinion, writing on race and education in the United States. Her 2019 book, We Want To Do More Than Survive, has sold nearly 200,000 copies and is a foundational classroom text, cementing her as one of today's most influential voices in education. Dr. Love is also the co-founder of the research project Freedom Dreams and Educational Repair: Black Communities' Visions for Transformative Education in the Face of Systemic Inequity—for short, DREAMS. This national study investigates Black educational freedom dreams emerging from the most racialized spaces of educational resistance, with the goal of advancing educational repair. She is the author of the forthcoming children's book, Bettina and the Ball, published by Candlewick Press.

Plenary Sessions

Plenary: Transnational and Local Struggles and Strategies

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.

Plenary: Cross Racial Dialogue

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.

Plenary: Global Indigeneities

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.

Plenary: CIARS Summer (Ghana) Institute

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.

Plenary: African Elders Plenary

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.