Not About U: Social Dissonance at a Land-Grab University

Abstract

Mattin's durational concert Social Dissonance and concept of social dissonance offer compelling devices to understand a central tension within institutions of higher education in settler colonial contexts. As faculty and students increasingly enact and experience forms of decolonial pedagogy in their classrooms, the settler colonial origins and structures of the university remain unchallenged. In the specific case of the ‘Land-Grant’ university system, created through the federal 1862 Morrill Act, the findings of a 2020 ‘Land-Grab Universities’ report describes the extent of their founding on the forced expropriation of Indigenous land and life. This article mixes the settler author's repeated experiences of Social Dissonance at documenta 14, in both Athens, Greece, and its traditional home of Kassel, Germany, and how its institutional and pedagogical contexts translate to a sequence of teaching experiments in his classrooms at a ‘Land-Grab’ university. These experiences and experiments are framed by two failures, both institutional and individual, that offer the author a concrete insight into the concept of social dissonance to understand how different levels of alienation operate through colonial intrusion into educational contexts by an exclusionary settler worldview. At the same time, the author attempts to harness this settler colonial noise-as-device by attuning to echoes of Social Dissonance in the vital work of living, Indigenous artists, and their alternative pedagogical initiatives.