Uprooting the Coloniser Within Us: Composting Narratives, Stewarding Possibilities
Colonialism not only mapped lands and disciplined bodies, it also constrained our imaginations. Join us on a 6-week journey where we confront the narratives and practices we've inherited, and dare to dream possibilities otherwise.
Course Overview
We are often taught to recognise colonial legacies in how borders are carved, maps drawn, territories seized, and resources extracted. But rarely do we question how colonial influence seeps into the intimate spaces of our lives: the behaviours we learn to perform, the cultural norms encoded across generations, the standards we strive toward, and the ways we measure belonging and worth.
Colonial power does not disappear when empires disintegrate. It shape-shifts into our identities, our bodies, our relationships, our sense of place, and our imaginations. It teaches us to shrink, comply, and translate ourselves for dominant systems. To be legible. To be palatable. To be safe.
This course is an invitation to confront the coloniser within. Not as moral indictment, but in recognition of our attachment to colonial systems and our collective capacity to uproot them.
Together, we move through five territories of reclamation:
- Identity: Whose gaze have you learned to see yourself through? What parts of you exist outside of it?
- Body: What have you been conditioned to carry that was never yours to hold? What does your body know that you've been taught to ignore?
- Place: Whose maps have defined where you belong and where you don't? What would it mean to re-trace your own lineages?
- Relationships: What dynamics do we reproduce with each other? How do we tend to each other differently?
- Imagination: What have you stopped daring to dream? What futures are you being called toward?
Through creative exploration, embodied reflection, and relational dialogue, we uproot what we have internalised and rehearse the freedom we were taught to abandon. Because liberation cannot only be demanded outward. It must also be cultivated inward — relationally, imperfectly, together.
Who Is This Course For?
This course is for the alchemists and the dreamers. the builders and the weavers. those daring to imagine worlds otherwise, yet feeling called to turn inward. to let go of the narratives you've inherited. to reconnect with the lineages and places you come from. to reach toward something more liberating.
If you've been feeling depleted by the churn of extractive systems that wear us down or overwhelmed by the collapsing, dominant social order, this space is for you. consider this an invitation to breathe. a calling to listen deeper and attune to the rhythms that set us free.
You do not need to be an "expert" in decolonial theory or a seasoned practitioner. but if you're longing for a gentle and spacious container to grow in community and replenish your capacity to shape transformative change, you belong here.
What You'll Learn
- A deeper recognition of how colonial power lives within you: in the stories you tell about yourself, in the roles you perform, and the desires you've learned to contain
- A more intimate relationship with your body as a site of knowledge, memory, and resistance
- A renewed capacity to trace the lineages that shape your sense of place and belonging, and begin to reclaim them on your own terms
- A rekindled relationship with your imagination as a radical act of refusal and possibility
- A shifting understanding of solidarity as a relational practice that begins within and ripples outward through the courage of uprooting and re-membering ourselves together
What's Included
Live Sessions
Interactive classes with your instructor
Session Recordings
Lifetime access to all recordings
Community Access
Connect with fellow learners
Certificate
Proof of course completion
Real-World Project
This experience will culminate with the creation of a speculative archive. Throughout this journey, you will be invited to document your journey through a series of creative media. At the end of each week, you will create an "artifact" rooted in our collective exploration moving from identity, body, and place to relationships and imagination. This could be a piece of writing, a movement score, a collage, a map, a recording, an object, a zine, or any other form that feels true to your process. You will have the agency to choose what form this takes and how you bring it to life.
By the final week, these fragments we have individually gathered will become part of something larger, woven together to create a blueprint of what liberating ourselves could look like. Our culminating gathering will be a space to celebrate, share, and witness what we have created together. And to remind ourselves that these archives are not only about where we have been but also what we are gesturing toward. They are acts of futuring, preserving possibilities for those who come after us.
I also want to highlight the intention behind choosing to create a counter-archive as an act of resistance itself. Artifacts are never neutral. They carry within them histories of who gets to be remembered and how their memories are recorded. Colonial power has long determined whose stories are erased, whose lineages are scattered, and whose cultures are stolen and displayed in museums. To create our own archives is to insist on our stories being preserved with dignity and to deliberately reclaim our imaginations.
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25 students max
6 sessions
120 min each
