Popular Education and Decolonial Political Praxis workshop

Denison University’s Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Cricket Keating presenting the Popular Education and Decolonial Political Praxis workshop.

This workshop aims to develop our capacity to intervene in everyday situations and interactions that consolidate and perpetuate the oppressive terms, conditions, and legacies of modernity and coloniality. In the workshop, we look for ways of collaborating with and supporting each other as we work to, in Rolando Vasquez’s words, “challenge the normativity of modernity and the erasures of coloniality” towards the cultivation of a resistant convivencia that is deeply attuned to each other and our possibilities for living otherwise. 

Keating is the Laura C. Harris Scholar-in-Residence for the fall ’24 and ’25 semesters at Denison University. Keating is an associate professor in the Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Washington-Seattle. Her research is in the areas of political theory, decolonial politics, popular education and critical pedagogy, and technofeminism. In her work, she explores ways in which people have both imagined and struggled to build more inclusive, egalitarian, and participatory models of political collectivity. She is the author of “Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India” (Penn State University Press, 2011). She is also a co-editor of “LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader” (NYU Press, 2017), which focuses on various aspects of the study of LGBTQ politics and theorizes future directions for the movement and of “The FemTechNet Handbook” (University of Illinois Press, under review), which documents a decade’s worth of collaborative efforts by FemTechNet, a collective that has linked scholars, artists, and critics working on topics related to feminism and technology. Her articles have been published in Signs, Political Theory, International Journal of Feminist Politics, Hypatia, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and New Political Science as well as in several edited volumes. 

Her current work highlights and theorizes practices of participatory engagement in a number of contexts and looks at contemporary sexual politics in transnational perspective. This work includes several collaborative projects. With María Lugones, Keating is working on a book, “Educating for Coalition: Popular Education and Contemporary Political Praxis,” which draws upon their twenty years of collaborative work in communities of color in the U.S. as fellow members of the popular education collective Escuela Popular Norteña. From these experiences, they elaborate a practice of popular education that addresses the complexity of multiple, intersecting forms of oppression and that takes up forms of everyday, often hard to recognize, resistance. Another book project, “From Nation to Plurination: Resignifying the State, Economy, and Family in Ecuador,” co-written with Amy Lind, examines key concepts in social, political, and economic life in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution.