As part of the UBC Exercise, Kinesiology and Health Seminar Series, the UBC Centre for Sport and Sustainability and UBC Kinesiology hosted the following talk by Dr. Jason Laurendeau:
“I don’t want to do this half-assed”: Unsettling teaching in a colonial context
Abstract:
Drawing on interviews with kinesiology faculty members at three different institutions, I reflect on numerous layers, challenges, and tensions faculty members share when they consider whether and how they engage with Indigenous authors, materials, and/or ways of knowing in their teaching practices. Together, these narratives point to the importance faculty members attach to this work as well as the barriers – institutional, interpersonal, disciplinary, etc. – they encounter in meaningfully engaging with these ideas in (and beyond) the classroom. Participants also draw attention to the institutional contexts within which they do this labour, highlighting the ways the university seems to value this kind of reflective pedagogy while often falling short of providing the supports and guidance that would make it more thinkable in the context of faculty members’ professional practice. In analyzing these interviews, I interrogate both the white, colonial, and ableist underpinnings of kinesiology as a discipline and the university as an “arm of the settler state” (Grande, 2018). Building on these reflections, I meditate on some possibilities for transformative change in the classroom.
Bio:
Dr. Jason (Jay) Laurendeau is a cishet abled white settler scholar occupying lands of Siksikáí’tsitapi (Blackfoot peoples). He is a Professor of Sociology and Affiliate Professor of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Lethbridge, and President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.
Related reading: Laurendeau, J. J. (2024). Settler colonialism, sport, and recreation (Vol. 7). Common Ground Research Networks.