Entrevista a Walter Mignolo e Catherine E. Walsh

Abstract

Catherine E. Walsh (1964) had her initial experiences as an activist at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), influencing her academic interests in pedagogy, decoloniality, and feminism. After completing her Ph.D. in Education in 1984, she worked at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Boston until the mid-1990s when she permanently relocated to Ecuador. Among her many activist contributions, she stands out for her work alongside Paulo Freire and the critical pedagogy network in the 1990s, bilingual education and consulting projects for indigenous communities in Ecuador, and the establishment of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino, jointly with Afro-Ecuadorian community leader and intellectual Juan García Salazar in 2002, with whom she co-authored To Think Sowing/To Sow Thinking with Grandfather Zenon (2017). Notable among her various works are the edited volumes Decolonial Pedagogies (2013), On Decoloniality (in collaboration with Walter Mignolo, 2018), and her latest work, Rising Up, Living Up. Re-Existances, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks (2023, Duke University Press). She recently retired as a professor and director of the Ph.D. program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador). Walter Mignolo (1941) specialized in Semiotics and Literary Theory and has made extensive contributions to the fields of modernity and coloniality. His work prominently explores the concepts of decoloniality, global colonialism, geopolitics of knowledge, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is a central figure in the Latin American decolonial thought school, with a profound impact on global academic discourse. The author of several books translated into other languages, notable among them, in addition to On Decoloniality, co-authored with Walsh, are The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1996), winner of the Katherine Singer Kovaks Award, The Idea of Latin America (2006), winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and his most recent work, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021). He has been working at Duke University since 1993, where he holds the distinguished title of «William H. Wannamaker» as a professor of Literature and Romance Studies. The works developed by Walsh and Mignolo are an extension of the concept of coloniality initiated by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, whom they consider disciples.