13 October 2023, 10:00-11:30 EDT / 15:00-16:30 BST

Watch above or on youtube.

This dialogue focuses on language in relation to extractivism as both a material and an epistemic problem. Considering languages proper (English, Portuguese, Kurdish, Turkish, Yoruba, pidgin, etc.) as well as the modes/genres in which language operates (fiction, poetry, nonfiction, stand-up comedy, oral history, agricultural terminology, etc.), it asks how language is implicated in but can also undo and move beyond extractivism. 

Some questions this dialogue engages are:

• Which audiences does scholarly knowledge production reach or fail to reach? What material impact does this success or failure (or anything in between) have on the communities and places involved? 

• In colonial contexts, what relationship does language have to the materialities it originates in, refers to, inhabits, and imagines?

• How might we think expansively about the role of the decolonial scholar in global, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and specific colonial contexts?

Dr. Comfort Azubuko-Udah is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the African Studies Program at the University of Toronto. She works primarily in African literature, eco-criticism, urbanity, and postcolonial theories. With a focus on environmental justice and the politics of storytelling, particularly in conversation with global politics in African locales, her teaching and scholarship is invested in the nature and politics of storytelling as it relates to landscapes and more-than-human agency in literature. She holds an MA and PhD in English from UCLA, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Assistant Professor Dr. Zeki Kanay is a veterinarian based in Amed/Diyarbakır (Turkey’s largest predominantly Kurdish-inhabited city), independent academic, and a signatory of the 2016 Academics for Peace petition alongside more than 2000 scholars who signed it to protest the war that had then erupted in Kurdish cities. In 2017 he was summarily dismissed from his position at Dicle University’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine for signing this petition. Following his dismissal, Kanay has dedicated most of his time to farming and especially growing vegetables and wheat using local seeds and without the use of chemicals. Kanay defines agricultural work as a communal experience based on mutual aid. He has also served as the President of the Diyarbakır Chamber of Veterinarians and Council Member for Bağlar Municipality (a district of Amed), and remains a member of Turkey’s Education and Science Workers’ Union. He describes himself as someone who strives to lead a life that respects nature and the land.

This event will open with position statements from each speaker, followed by a discussion moderated by Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (Queen’s University) and Eray Çaylı (University of Hamburg).

The Decolonial Cities Collective is an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in establishing a community of practice towards furthering our commitment to decoloniality, social justice, and care in cities. Founded in 2022 as an outcome of a workshop organised by the British Academy and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, we aim to create opportunities for a community of practice through organising a series of periodic conversations called Decolonial Cities Dialogues.

image credit:

Melanie Dennis Unrau, former site of Abasand tar sands plant, Fort McMurray, Canada.