The interview was conducted by undergraduate research assistant Fyza Azam.
Fyza Azam: Could you tell me about a course you teach that addresses racialized ecologies?
Zahra Tootonsab: Yes. I taught an undergraduate course called “Theories of Decolonization and Resistance” in 2025. I had worked as a TA before this, so I was very excited to teach my own course.
The course engaged with racialized ecologies by understanding how land, water, resource extraction, and the climate crisis are all shaped by empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Basically, I taught my students that the environment is never neutral. It is always politically and racially charged. The environment, including what we eat, how we live and work, and the places we call home, is shaped by militarism, colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the regulation of bodies through racial and gendered hierarchies.
The central focus of the course is then how theories of decolonization can help us resist colonial relationships to land and more-than-human life. My main objective for the course, what I really hoped for, was for students to understand that these theories are not just theories. They don’t start and end on paper, or they don’t end in the classroom; they’re a way of life, a praxis. For example, we can learn from Indigenous, Black, and decolonial ways of thinking how to critically question how we are positioned on Turtle Island, which can help us learn how to practice anti-colonial living. We then brought the decolonial theories into conversation with Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian creative works. We looked at how story, poetry, film, and visual art can show us the entanglement of race, land, and capitalism in ways that academic writing cannot. These creative works helped us further learn how decolonization is a practice.
Fyza Azam: What do you most hope students will get from the course?
Zahra Tootonsab: What I most hoped students would get from the course was an understanding of learning and unlearning as a decolonial practice.
On the first day of classes, I gave them a sense of how I wanted them to approach the course by doing it myself first: explaining who I am, my responsibilities as a teacher and student, my responsibilities as a guest on Indigenous lands, and my story because the course was basically about storytelling as a decolonial learning praxis. So I started off the course by introducing myself and telling them that this is my positionality: I am Bakhtiari Iranian, I was born here, but I am in this in-between space, this third positionality, where I am complicit in settler-colonial systems, but also resisting these systems. I especially wanted my students to know that, yes, I am teaching, but I am also learning with them.
So I really hoped my students would come to know why ethical learning and unlearning are actually important for practicing decolonization. What I mean by ethical learning is how we hold space for discomfort so that we can engage with materials we find difficult with care and critical thinking. I also mean how we respect each other and our different feelings and opinions within the decolonial values of the class. The class was a very tender place to be because of the topics and the goals of the course, which required students to unlearn and recognize that decolonization is not just a concept. Theory allows us to recognize, “Oh, something is wrong,” or, “Oh, this is how I can learn,” then practice enables us to embody that theory. By practicing, we then also attune, edit, and reshape the theory. Decolonization is never something that is completely done.
I was telling the students that there are countries that overthrew the colonial empire, which did, in a sense, become a post-colonial society, but governance systems with those inequalities are still present in the new post-colonial society. The reason for this is that although a place, a land, can be decolonized when the colonial empire leaves, or the administrator leaves, or is dismantled, if decolonization is not an ongoing process, then we could fall back into racial inequalities, hierarchies, and systems that again extract and create different forms of injustices. The end goal is that you just know that you always have to practice decolonization in different ways, because there will always be systems that want to govern you, who want to subjugate you, so then you would always need to decolonize your thinking so that the ways we create care, community, and resistance help us thrive and help us flourish against and outside of these systems.
I also hope my students leave the class thinking about decolonization not just in a North American context, but also in terms of creating transnational connections. In this way, they could understand how decolonization doesn’t start and end with Canada’s borders, or North American borders, and that decolonization is a global phenomenon, an ongoing ethical responsibility.
Fyza Azam: How have you organized the course? Is there a rhythm or a narrative that shapes it?
Zahra Tootonsab: Yes, so we first start by setting the foundation of what is colonialism and what is settler colonialism, so defining these terms, because in order to decolonize and understand theories of decolonization, we first have to know what is colonialism, and then the different formations of colonialism. Then we turn to theories of decolonization and how that becomes a praxis. We position ourselves in the structures of colonial and settler colonial power. We talk about how we are complicit in these systems, and we talk about the differences between these systems.
Then we move into land and water as pedagogy for learning. We focus on Indigenous futurisms, the climate crisis, Black geographies, and Black futurity. We learn that there are specificities in how we resist, how communities resist, what decolonization looks like for different communities, and the different obligations we have for decolonization, especially living on Indigenous lands. How can we ensure that our decolonial modes are responsible to Indigenous laws and governance and their practices? How are we building alliances and solidarities with Black movements? We also learned about Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, Palestinian solidarity, and Palestinian resistance. So, what can these different communities show us about the intersections of decolonial efforts and objectives? Then, how can we be accountable to these differences while understanding how we’re all connected in order to truly decolonize our ways of being and thinking?
Fyza Azam: Could you tell me about some of the readings or other texts you assign? How have students responded to them?
Zahra Tootonsab: Yes. My course paired theory with creative works. This way, whenever they read a theoretical work, it was paired with a painting, a movie, or something creative so that students could see how theory could be manifested into real-world practices and community building through creative work.
In the course, we read Leanne Simpson’s “Land as Pedagogy” and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Skywoman Falling.” “Land as Pedagogy” was assigned as a theory, and Kimmerer’s “Skywoman Falling” is a story. For both, the theory of how to connect with and live on the land comes from Indigenous stories of how the world, or Turtle Island, was created. The story then becomes the land, the land teaches practice, and the practice then goes back into story. We also read about extractive ecologies in South America. We read sections from Macarena Gómez-Barris’s book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives to learn how Indigenous women in Peru are fighting and resisting extractive economies, such as mining. I paired that theoretical work with a film called Uma, a creative documentary about how water is being polluted in Peru. It paired well with Gómez-Barris’s book because it showed the effects of mining and how the women are resisting through their knowledge and their mobilization in their communities.
The students responded with a high level of seriousness and curiosity, and I was very impressed by how they “stayed with the trouble” of trying to unpack the theory. Even though it was dense at moments, I think the creative works really helped them see the potential of theory as something that is lived and practiced, and not something that is just thought. You could see their enthusiasm and critical thinking, their learning and unlearning, through their weekly exploration posts. The exploration posts asked them to keep coming back to the question of unlearning and how they are unlearning each week with the new material.
One student, after class, came to me and was like, “I really appreciate this class. You know, solidarity is not a slogan.” This course was going on when students were participating in Palestinian protests and the encampment on campus, so it resonated with them. They told me how their understanding of decolonization changed, especially as they learned about decolonial movements outside of North America, and they gave me permission to quote their reflections in my own work where I am writing about that course.
I’m writing a paper called “Weaving Shelters: Kinship Struggle and Collective Education for Liberation.” When I asked students if they were willing to contribute, most of them were and gave me permission and said that they would love for me to use their reflections. They actively wanted to be part of the conversation and wanted to do more and learn more. Most of them came to me wanting more readings and more suggestions. It made me feel good that the readings are not something that they’re trying to get out of the way, but what they’re actually enjoying and thinking critically about.
Fyza Azam: What types of assignments do you have?
Zahra Tootonsab: I really thought hard about how to assign tasks and assignments, making sure that the learning is consistent, that students can return to their learning process every week, and that the assignments are also reflective.
The students had tutorial participation, but every week they also had exploration posts. These were very quick, 150-word posts that were marked for completion. Each week, I provided a prompt that asked the students to return to the readings and explain how they were connecting the old readings with the new ones to find connections or ways to show how their understanding had shifted.
The major assignment, which was worth 55%, was the “How to Unlearn” assignment. The “How to Unlearn” assignment was divided into three parts. Part one was a “Situating Ourselves” reflection. In this reflection, students reflected on where they live, how they interact with the place they live in, what traditions they uphold, what communities they are working with, and what they know or want to know about decolonization and resistance. It was essentially about how students were entering the class by acknowledging the stories that shape how they learn, move, build relationships, create, and understand their environments.
Part two of the assignment was a comparative analysis essay. This was the critical essay-writing component. It was 2,000 words, and students had to compare two creative works. It wasn’t about comparing theories because, again, theory always has to be paired with creative work. I wanted them to compare two creative works by two different artists or authors and use theory to explain how these creative works show us what decolonization and resistance look like. That comparative work was very helpful for students because it allowed them to see how a film can be different from a story, but also how both can function as ways of thinking about solidarity work.
The third part of the “How to Unlearn” assignment was a reflection on solidarity work. In this reflection, students could go back to their first reflection and reference their writing to discuss how they had now unlearned or added to their learning from that first reflective writing. They were asked to acknowledge: How were you thinking at the beginning? Has that changed? Has it not changed? Why or why not? They also reflected on how this learning was now helping them see themselves not just as living in a place, but as belonging through community and solidarity work.
The final assignment was a take-home exam about the theories of decolonization and resistance.
Fyza Azam: Those assignments sound pretty interesting. Is there anything else you would like to tell me about the course?
Zahra Tootonsab: Yes. This course is built around a pedagogy of care, because if you don’t care, then this course is not going to help you. How do you come to this course caring for the materials, caring for each other, and caring for your own unlearning and learning process? That was very important for me: to build that pedagogy of care as we progressed in the course.
The last thing I wanted students to know about this course was that it’s a contradiction. It’s a contradiction that I am teaching decolonization inside a colonial institution. So, while we read Indigenous stories and learn about decolonization, we are still operating inside the academic-industrial complex. We came back to this contradiction at the end of the course to think about ways in which we can address this contradiction. The students’ answers weren’t really solutions. They were mostly frustrated with academia. But they also confirmed that, in order to mobilize and actually decolonize academia, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the other ways we can learn. Maybe learning means that we are first situated in a community that allows us to foster care and educate outside these colonial-institutional spaces that we have declared as intellectual spaces. Students were also explaining how decolonial solidarity is an everyday practice of learning with community rather than a performance. That was key as well, like not performing decolonization or resistance, but embodying it as a quotidian practice.
Fyza Azam: That concludes the interview. Thank you for your time.