Retrospective Autoethnographies: A Call for Decolonial Imaginings for the New University

Abstract

In this article, we present “retrospective autoethnographies” as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our present and our desire for a utopian future to begin to create an image of the New University. Together, as people raised in the postcolony and within coloniality, we begin at the negative affect as neoliberal universities invisibilize, surveil, audit, and discipline—but then, we strive to imagine a New University characterized by radical hope, doing so alongside student movements pushing for decolonizing the university. This article is envisioned as an exhortation for a decolonial intervention of radically dreaming the New University into place.