GlobalPDX Lunch & Learn: Building and Sustaining Anti-Colonial Development Practices

GlobalPDX welcomes Dr. Padini Nirmal, the expert leader of February’s Lunch & Learn focused on Anti-Colonial tools, practices, and outcomes.

Drawing on 15+ years of scholar-practitioner learning from and with Indigenous and ethnic communities, Dr. Nirmal works with development and community health organizations to create sustainable and equitable anticolonial practices, systems and policies that support the creation of a better, more just world for all.

She does this by creating a uniquely customized and comprehensive learning  program for organizations to better understand the ideas, histories and continued operations  of colonialism and the opportunity to convert such learning into actionable anticolonial outcomes. 

• This is an hour-long introductory session (40-minute  presentation + 20-minutes Q & A) on February 10, 2021.  
• In this session, we will be talking about the critical importance of using an anticolonial framework,  addressing how most of our current social systems, practices and ideas continue to rely on and  reinforce colonialism in complex ways. Whether we carry histories of colonial oppression or  colonization, we are all embedded together in a colonial world and we are colonized differently.  And, so, Dr. Nirmal focuses on the links, relations and affinities between colonized and colonial populations,  and the ways in which we each experience and contribute to coloniality, both, unwittingly and  through our direct participation in colonial systems and practices.  

Given this context, Dr. Nirmal will discuss how anticolonialism can serve as an intersectional framework:

• • a)  to understand how power and injustice operate both at the informal, everyday level and at the systemic level;
  • b) as a mechanism that can be strategically employed to enhance justice at the  individual, collective and societal levels.

Importantly, anticolonialism can serve as a constructive strategy for those who have experienced colonization and who continue to experience it in newer  forms today. Likewise, anticolonialism can also serve as a constructive strategy for those who want  to build anti-oppressive, equitable relationships between people, and between humans and the  natural world.

Through this session, we will focus on these critical impacts of using an anticolonial framework, and take a peek into the process of how we can each come to understand it, and more  importantly, how we can each employ it in our work and daily lives—while acting and engaging as  whole persons.  

Dr. Nirmal will offer key insights into the overall process—how she structures each learning program, what one  can expect in terms of time commitments, shared responsibilities and outcomes, and how she orients each process to suit a specific organization’s needs.  

RSVP is required for this event.

This event is free for GlobalPDX Members (find this month’s member discount code in the GlobalPDX Member’s Portal).