Shameless ethics, honourable dissent: curious encounters as a decolonial strategy in contemporary educational praxis

Curiosity is studied, by an interdisciplinary body of work, as a pursuit or the motivation for the pursuit of knowledge. According to Pam Grossman and John L Jackson Jr in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), the social currency that avows innovation as critical over curiosity, places curiosity as merely a personal pursuit, a wilful enquiry to satiate personal desires. But they claim that certain cultivated forms of curiosity are ‘would-be-elixirs’ without which innovation wouldn’t reach the potential it claims to have (Grossman and Jackson Jr, viii). Without attempting to focus too much on the ontological interrogation of – What is Curiosity, this thesis attempts to understand how curiosity is practised by examining contemporary educational praxis. To do so, I ask – How do practices of curiosity in contemporary educational praxis contribute to decolonial work? By answering this question, I hope to support my claim that the decolonial value of contemporary educational praxis is related to how knowledge and by consequence curiosity, is done by performing for and at encounters.