Colin Anderson
- Biography
- Current Projects
Colin is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University.
Colin's work focuses on community- and people- led processes of
transformation for resilience, social justice and well-being. He is
involved with communities, networks and organisations who are contesting
the multitude of social, economic and cultural injustices we face today
and who are reimagining society and building alternatives.
His research, pedagogy and action focuses on a few particular areas including food + social justice, agroecology, food sovereignty, participatory practice, social movements, global governance, environmental justice, popular education and knowledge mobilisation.
The dominant knowledge system and economy privileges elite,
neoliberal and colonial knowledges and ways of knowing. It marginalizes
the knowledge systems of everyday peoples and especially indigenous
people, people of color, farmers, fishers, the poor and other
non-dominant and oppressed peoples. This condition of “knowledge
injustice” limits our collective potential to address the wicked
problems we face today as human beings living in trying times.
I co-convene the People’s Knowledge collective and community of practice, based out of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience. We believe that we can only tackle our most difficult problems by
acknowledging the importance of multiple knowledges and by building trust between people with different perspectives. Processes to develop knowledge, innovation and social change are most effective when based on dialogue and reflect democratic values.
We focus on participatory learning, action and research and decolonial perspectives in pursuit of knowledge justice. We spend time helping each other through the muddle that arises when one has a commitment to a subversive knowledge counter-paradigm but exists in an institutional and cultural context mired in knowledge injustice – we are all entangled in it. We believe in collectivizing and improving as much as possible our always imperfect and evolving work/practice. We seek to help each other as critical yet constructive and caring friends to share the challenges and joys of this work.
I’m also interested in working with others to transform
professionalization processes – particularly as they relate to young
people who are committed to pursuing social justice through their
‘professional’ knowledge work (e.g. graduate students and NGO workers).
I’m up for learning together with colleagues and collaborators who are
engaged in a process of re-professionalization which often includes
unlearning much of the training we received through professionalization
as our younger selves. Thus, teaching and collective learning using
critical pedagogy in and out of the formal institution is important to
me in this and other contexts.
I also love working with multi-media forms of knowledge production and mobilization, combining media forms in different ways that can lead to new thinking, enable learning and allow this work to engage many different audiences-participants.
I am always interested in new connections so please feel free to get in touch.
