Faculty Speaker Series Talk
Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy - Caste, Queerness, Indigeneity, and South Indian Learning Spaces
The Indigenous Educational Research Centre (IERC) invites you to attend Caste, Queerness, Indigeneity, and South Indian Learning Spaces led by faculty speaker Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy.
The online talk will be recorded and uploaded to the . The event will begin with a presentation and then end with a live Q & A session.
Caste, Queerness, Indigeneity, and South Indian Learning Spaces
Hindu-nationalism has pervaded the Indian political domain for over a decade, with Hindu-nationalist (Hindutva) ideologies infiltrating the social and cultural milieu since the country won independence against colonial rule in 1947. Central to the Hindutva ideology, is a claim to India as an originally Hindu land, with Hindu ways of knowing and being as ‘Indigenous’ to the people. This movement not only makes invisible the histories of minoritized peoples living in the sub-continent but also co-opts decolonial movements towards (majoritarian) religious nationalist aims. In this talk, I examine the ways in which Hindutva ideologies pervaded everyday seemingly neutral interactions in a rural school in South India. I will share the ways in which the cultural practices of caste-privileged and straight Hindu Indian teachers were privileged in and shaped learning spaces. In doing so, I offer a space to collectively think thorough the nuances of engaging in decolonial movements in education when arriving at this work from a queer South Indian positionality.
Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the talk.
С»ÆÊéÊÓƵ the Speaker
Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy
Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy [They/Them] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning (CTL). Dr. Krishnamoorthy is a science educator and learning scientist and their scholarship broadly examines the sociopolitical dimensions of youths’ learning, as shaped by race, gender, sexuality, class, and caste, as well as how ideologies (e.g., post and settler colonialism, ethnonationalism, homophobia) shape knowledge creation in science education. Their research questions examine how we might decolonize science education from a diasporic South Asian positionality by considering the many precolonial histories that shape classroom science teaching and learning. This has involved collaboratively developing justice-oriented curricula with youth and teachers that desettles Eurocentric science and values multiple knowledge systems, and where science learning is aimed at our collective liberation.
