Unsettling Narratives, Learning from Lived Experiences: Displacement, Borders and Explorations with Embodied Art and (Counter)Maps

There are increasing calls for attention to “decolonising” education curricula—as well as critiques of superficial decolonising endeavours at universities. Thinking around decolonisation, much like thinking around displacement, routinely suffers from the politics of abstraction, simplification and co-optation. Indeed, Edward Said cautioned long ago that colonial logics replicate and perpetuate because of how abstractions are used. In Said’s case, explorations in worlds of literature attended to a myriad of knowledge production problems and injustices, cultural stereotypes and forms of cultural hegemony. In this chapter, consideration is given to what it might mean to unsettle abstract narratives that lurk in educational fields, classrooms and policy discourses, through teaching activities that sought to challenge violent state power while exploring stories, visual art and maps. One set of reflections relates to the possibilities of using visual art alongside engagement with lived experiences of UK refugee policy—especially the experiences of Afghan women; navigating a realm of pedagogic possibilities, it suggests scope for experimentation and situated learning through body mapping. Another set of teaching reflections addresses border politics through attention to bordering aesthetics and maps/counter-maps in the curriculum; here the recent proliferation of mapping literatures and strategies is explored to invite attention on mapping creatively, counter-hegemonically and through acts of reflection and listening. Some final analyses then follow.