Nandi Bhatia 

Decolonial Conversations: A Panel on Decolonizing Learning  

Our panel on Decolonizing Learning will draw on the twelve-year Experiential Learning Course on and in Rwanda. This Interdisciplinary Experiential Learning course gives participants opportunities and tools to connect their education to the outside world and to become global citizens who will, through intercultural competence and sustainable critical and ethical engagement, build bridges between people, communities and cultures, between the Global South and the Global North. The panel will be an extension of The Rwanda Course Exhibition which is an integral part of the Decolonial Conversations conference. The panelists will share their research and reflection on how the course itself developed into an intellectual and intercultural journey towards new ways of learning and unlearning. Such a journey can help students, colleagues, academic leaders, and community partners to reimagine decolonial approaches which can foster true and relevant education for today’s world challenges through a broader and inclusive understanding of Knowledge (s).   

Biography 

Nandi Bhatia is a Professor in the Department of English and Writings Studies at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in Canada. Her research interests include Postcolonial Literature and theory, literature of the 1947 Partition of India, diasporic literature, and theatre.   She is the author of Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (University of Michigan Press and OUP, 2004) and Performing Women/Performing Womanhood: Theatre, Politics and Dissent in North India (OUP, 2010). With Anjali Gera-Roy, she co-edited Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement (Pearson-Longman, 2008) and Regional Perspectives on India’s Partition: Shifting the Vantage Points (Routledge, 2023).  She has served on the editorial/advisory boards of the Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Feminist Review, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, and The Forest City Film Festival. For her research, she was awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature and was named UWO Faculty Scholar.