Goals & Objectives
As community-engaged critical practitioners, professionals, and scholars, members of the Siinqee Institute have struggled against injustices in solidarity with marginalized grassroots groups locally and internationally. We have struggled against forms of systemic violence, including gender-based violence, poverty, racism, and coloniality. And we learned the hard way that all forms of oppression and marginalization are so interwoven locally and globally that isolating one and redressing it is untenable.
Moreover, we also learned that oppositional struggles serve more to perpetuate systemic injustice than to bring us closer to justice. We experienced endeavors like antipoverty, antienvironmental racism, antiracist, and anticolonial struggles perpetuate coloniality, poverty, and racism respectively, when solidarity movements focus on calling out to the detriment of calling in. We learned how we end up exacerbating the hurt rather than alleviating the pain of injustice.
We founded the Siinqee Institute as a reflexive intersectional space where we can start to redress the harms done. We created it as a prefigurative space where we can imagine a world free of all forms of injustice and live that world in the moment as we also strive to realize it. We created an emergent space of co-learning where we experiment becoming the change we wish to see in the world. In this intersectional emergent space, we envision changes that happen by affirmation and invitation and not by opposition and confrontation.
The goals and objectives we outline below are crafted to nurture such spaces of affirmation and invitation:
To develop siinqee-inspired reflexive and decolonizing conceptual, methodological, and ethical approaches to praxes and research
To produce and mobilize knowledges that bring research into communities, workplaces, schools, and neighbourhoods where marginalized people can grab and bend it and make it speak their truths and voice their concerns.
To engage grassroots communities in creating accessible local and Indigenous knowledges for everyday living and environmental sustainability
To provide accessible transformative resources for community practitioners and researchers through training, placements, and internships
To produce accessible resources in diverse formats like stories, songs, artworks, spoken words, digital storytelling, podcasts, skits, social dramas, video documentaries, etc.
To engage grassroots communities, practitioners, professionals, academics, and policymakers and offer transformative knowledges through webinars, workshops, consultations, policy briefs, blogs, Siinqee Learning Series, conferences, and publications.
To foster virtual communities of praxes through social media presence and engagement