Strategic vulnerability and decolonial pedagogy: rethinking literary and epistemic authority in the transnational Gulf classroom

Abstract

This article theorises the classroom as a contested site of epistemic authority and the politics of knowledge, with a focus on international branch campuses in the Gulf. It argues that decoloniality, when reduced to content diversification, risks reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to undo. Taking literary study and world literature classrooms as the primary site of analysis, it examines how interpretive authority is shaped through reading practices, translation, and curricular framing. Building on the work of Mignolo, Walsh, and Freire, the article advances strategic vulnerability as a pedagogical mode of epistemic disobedience and ethical unknowing. Drawing from classroom practices in Education City, Qatar, the article engages translation exercises, Islamic traditions and perspectives, and institutional critique to foreground the affective, linguistic, and curricular labour required to reorient authority and reconfigure what counts as knowledge. It contributes to postcolonial debates by foregrounding the uneven terrain of transnational pedagogy and offering a praxis of refusal within the neoliberal university. Decolonial pedagogy is framed not as an institutional checklist but as a structural and ontological challenge to colonial modernity. This approach reframes teaching as a dialogical and ethically situated practice that resists both colonial universality and neoliberal performativity.