Tag: decoloniality

Ecocentric pedagogies and green scholarships: Towards green academia

by Sayan Dey

In 2006, the Ministry of Education in Bhutan launched what is officially known as the Green School System. One of the many purposes of introducing this green education system was to counter the mainstream modern/colonial knowledge systems that are anti-ecological, self-profiting and capitalistic in nature, and to build knowledge systems that are centered on the existential and functional values of the natural environment.

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Diaspora Humanitarianism- A Poetic Expression

by Jeevika Vivekananthan

I have been scribbling words and calling them poems since I was a kid. It is my preferred method to communicate complicated topics and complex emotions that I cannot express or explain otherwise. These days I also create poetry on a mode of reflexivity when I get frustrated by the content I interact with as part of my academic reading and research. In the creative space of poetry, I can position myself in relation to my lived and living experience and reflect on the knowledge I come to interact with, mostly essentialised or reductive, in the form of a concept, theory or evidence. Unlike the nature of typical academic writing, poetry gives me the freedom to interact, relate, reflect, contest and imagine the phenomena of my interest.

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POLYLOGUES AT THE INTERSECTION(S) SERIES: Political genealogies (m)otherwise: on how we talk in pluridiverse decolonial ways, with threads of our own making and held in/as our own territories

by Sara C. Motta

Whiteness is the sea not the shark: it is the very onto-epistemological embodied and aesthetic grounds of (im)possibility of our becoming human as racialised and feminised peoples in the current matrix of Power and Institutions/ality. As Sara Ahmed (2007, 150) foregrounds ‘it is what coheres the [modern/colonial]world’.

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To crash or not to crash the canon? Seeking to address coloniality in a one-year social science programme in Norway

by Maren Seehawer

The decolonising academia movement came to Norway not in form of student protests, but as a – pretty heated – feuilleton debate between academics. During summer 2018, there was strong disagreement between those for whom the inclusion of multiple voices violates the principle of professionalism and is contrary to the whole idea of ​​academia and those who argue that decolonisation, will bring about more complex and nuanced perspectives about the world and thereby, in fact, lead to more robust knowledge generation. Last year, I was asked by a colleague to teach two classes on this debate in one of my institution’s social science bachelor programmes. As part of my classes, the students discussed whether and, if so, how, coloniality found expression in the courses they attended. From this exercise, it was a short way to reflecting on, and introducing some first tentative changes to, the courses which I am responsible for myself.

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Weaving Solidarity – Decolonial Perspectives on Transnational Advocacy of and with the Mapuche

by Sebastian Garbe

When thinking about international solidarity from a perspective in the Global North, contemporary struggles or revolutionary movements in the Global South of stateless groups like the ones of the Zapatistas, the Kurds, or the Palestinians come to our mind. Going back to the 20th century, we might connect international solidarity with socialist and national liberation movements of the Tricont from Cuba and Nicaragua, over Algeria and Angola, to Vietnam. But the historical struggle of the Indigenous Mapuche for autonomy, self-determination and territory in today’s Chile and Argentina do not play a major role as a frame of reference.

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Spaces of Confused In-Betweenness: The Paradoxes of Life and Decoloniality

by Aftab Nasir

Any traditional wisdom, be it Vedic, Aztec, Buddhist, Sufi, etc., while withstanding their key differences, seem to converge in a message, i.e., all of us are different from each other and from mother nature; yet one with each other and with her in the same instance. By definition, a paradox is a a statement or proposition which, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems logically unacceptable or self-contradictory. The paradox is at full play around us. In our own little worlds, we want to support climate change while enjoying the “luxuries” of a comfortable life that comes at the expense of injustice done to the environment. We detest war but trade with those waging them even when we know that territorial claims of the past century produced nothing but unprecedented scale of violence, and we witness yet another unfolding of war on the horizons. Though the current injustice received justified media coverage, we see many such wars happening in many parts of the world that go unnoticed as they don’t produce the click bits of a scale of the current crisis happening in Ukraine.

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The Lamps in our House: Reflections on Postcolonial Pedagogy

by Arudra Burra

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I teach philosophy at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi. My teaching reflects my training, which is in the Western philosophical tradition: I teach PhD seminars on Plato and Rawls, while Bentham and Mill often figure in my undergraduate courses.

What does it mean to teach these canonical figures of the Western philosophical tradition to students in India? I have often asked myself this question. Similar questions are now being asked by philosophers situated in the West: Anglophone philosophy, at least in the analytic tradition, seems to have arrived at a late moment of post-colonial reckoning.

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Decolonial Praxis, Education and COVID-19: Perspectives from India

An Interview with Sayan Dey

by Hadje Cresencio Sadje

Background: Since the global outbreak of COVID-19 on December 2019, there have been 271.963.258 confirmed cases, including 5.331.019 deaths, reported to World Health Organisation (WHO, 2021). To address the ongoing challenges of the global pandemic, various governments and non-governmental organisations agreed to continue and strengthen cooperation to address the devastating ripple effects of the COVID-19 (Amaya, 2021). Despite these efforts, the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic have posed unprecedented challenges, especially to the poorest, most vulnerable, and marginalized groups. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected racial, ethnic minority, and marginalized groups (Tai et. Al, 2020). According to recent studies, the poorest, most vulnerable, and marginalized groups are left far behind (IFRC, 2021; Economic Policy Institute, 2020).

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The Zapatistas’ “Journey for Life” and its Implications for a Global Solidarity

by Franca Marquardt

Meeting the Zapatistas

“We have given you the seeds of rebellion against colonialism and capitalism” – this is what the group of Zapatistas that visited us here in Leipzig announced on our last night together. I am still processing this important moment, one that now seems like a dream. But it was quite the opposite, something very real: a coming-together of worlds for the prospect of a global solidarity. The Zapatistas and their resistance against colonial capitalism have been an inspiration to me and to many fellow students and activists. I have never been to Chiapas or studied their political organisation in depth. But when I heard about this “journey for life” and the Zapatistas’ plan to travel to Europe and meet local movements, I was intrigued. As an anthropology student and social activist, I am constantly confronted with the impasse we face in our actions and reflections that are still contained within a limited, Eurocentric framework. Ultimately, a just transition cannot be advanced unless we take into account all voices and perspectives and form alliances between actors across the world. The journey of the Zapatistas, I thought, could be a chance to put these ideas into practice while dealing with socio-ecological issues in a way that considers local fights in a global context and provides the global movement with the most important tool: hope.

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