On Decolonizing Curriculums: The Unethicality and Implications of Western Knowledge on Arab Subjectivity

Abstract

In this essay (originally delivered as a lecture at Alberta University of the Arts), my thoughts are centered around the question of the ethics of knowledge as an Arab racialized pedagogue and researcher in Western academia. Today, as I grapple with the notion of decolonization, I wish to think about the ways in which knowledge, or what is deemed as knowledge, is read and inscribed, interpreted, distorted, and even silenced in our epistemologies, and of its implications on my subjectivity as an Arab. I wish to think about how this knowledge also constitutes the ethics on which we knowingly, or unknowingly, participate in the everydayness of our lived realities; I suggest that we engage in “epistemic resistance” and “epistemic activism” as “practices of interrogation and resistance that unmask, disrupt, uproot biases and insensitivity.”