oa Decolonising the public university

This article examines the postgraduate Gender and Visual Culture seminar that we have been co-teaching as a team of two (and occasionally three) professors over a four-year period at the public National Autonomous University of Mexico. Throughout this seminar, we have embraced personal and collective experiences in the process of (un)teaching and (un)learning to explore the possibilities of a pedagogy of ‘contagion by contact’, both feminist and critical, encouraging creative formats.

Drawing from a range and diverse reflections, we seek to critically explore an amplified challenge of, and the need for, a collaborative and de(s)colon/ial/ising approach towards (un)teaching and (un)learning in the context of the public university as a contentious space of political engagement. This space requires a constant questioning of where to teach from (a politics of location), what to teach (culturally diverse and conflicting worldviews), and how to teach (critical and decolonising methodologies).