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In The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being.

In The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being.

In 2023, fires raged across multiple continents, fuelled by the accelerating changes to the world's climate. Little Blue Marble's anthology of speculative climate fiction and poetry from an international slate of authors collects the magazine's year of works of activism and hope for the future into a call for action to reverse the climate crisis. It's not too late to change course to save lives and ecosystems.

This thesis analyzes how Peace Corps recruitment practices and materials construct narratives of Peace Corps experience in terms of nation, race, and gender. In addition to nine Peace Corps recruitment pamphlets and one book of returned volunteer stories, I collected data through ethnographic methods. Analysis of this data focuses on how these narratives relate to, serve to (re)present, and potentially (re)construct the volunteer, her work, and relationship to the 'Host Country National.' Using a postcolonial lens, I explore the degree to which these Peace Corps narratives serve a neo- or anti-colonial function. In addition, I analyze my own implication in the neocolonial process and discursive reinforcement of hegemony by engaging with postcolonial self-reflexivity in my writing.