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At San Diego State University (SDSU), ethnic studies students are learning to approach their internships from a “decolonial perspective” and to challenge the “colonizer logic of work.” Thanks to funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the university now offers a course called “Ethnic and Gender Studies in the Workplace,” part of a broader project to apply the principles of ethnic studies beyond the campus.
The “Building Decolonized Internship Pipelines” project, which SDSU launched last year, seeks to address a problem endemic to women’s, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies (area studies) departments: their students are routinely underemployed.
“Our alumni are slower to receive promotions and many graduates remain underemployed, working part-time positions,” notes the project’s grant proposal, which I acquired via a public records request. These former students’ failures supposedly stem from a “deficit model,” whereby employers see area-studies students “as inherently unwilling or uncapable [sic] of participating in the hegemonic workforce.”
To address this perception—and presumably, to improve students’ chances at gainful employment—the project proposes an unconventional approach: applying decolonial ideology. “To counter deficit models of [area studies] students,” the project aims to create a navigating-the-workplace course and internship program “from a decolonial perspective,” the grant proposal said.
In practice, this means teaching students to be skeptical of the “colonizer logic of work.” That logic, the proposal noted, “seeks to indoctrinate and police students into uncritical, non-self-reflecting citizens who do not interrogate the relationship between capitalism and minoritized cultural practices, values, and traditions.”
