Decolonial Studies Research Articles

Decolonizing the Academic Study of Science and Religion? Engaging Wynter’s Epistemic Disobedience

With roots in the early 1960s, decoloniality as a sub-sect of postcolonial studies made successful attempts at redefining and unearthing essentially Western conceptualizations of knowledge and knowledge formation across different fields of endeavor. Many academic disciplines have benefited from decolonial studies’ self-reflective theories and deconstructive approaches, and religion and science should not be an exception. Within religion and science as an academic field, Western and European intellectual frames have been overwhelmingly presented as definitive of globalized perspectives and knowledge, especially the definition of “religion” and “science” within the academic field. The subtle but evident impact of adopting Western epistemology as ‘the’ definitive reference frame for all peoples and cultures is the transposition of colonial and overtly Eurocentric conceptualizations and definitions of what religion and science mean as perfunctory for what religion and science should mean within non-Western frames as well as a disregard for the latter. This has led to the presentation (or overrepresentation, according to Sylvia Wynter) of a single homogenized perspective for meaning-making and interpretation of topics and themes within the field, a decision which has not only significantly impacted the field, in terms of ongoing dialectics about the relationship between religion and science, but which has also seen the exclusion of other forms of beneficial epistemic reference frames, which have been viewed as subaltern. Drawing from Wynter’s epistemic disobedience, this paper highlights decolonial approaches for engaging in the academic study of science and religion, and which will advance the path towards delinking the field from Euro-Western conceptualizations. This will unravel the rich epistemic formation within non-Western knowledge frames and the inclusion of which will greatly enrich and redefine the academic study of religion and science in the days ahead.

Unlocking the Potential of the Decolonial Approach in Migration Studies

ABSTRACTBased on a bibliometric analysis of Scopus‐indexed articles on decolonial research on migration from Social Science disciplines this article outlines the main topics covered by the sampled literature, namely: (1) the academic migration as framed by the internationalization discourse in higher education; (2) migrants' social movements and their transnational dimension; (3) gender and age in decolonial studies of migration; (4) the ways in which intersectionality shapes migrants' experiences through their class, race, gender and sexual orientation; and (5) critique of humanitarian discourse regarding refugees and asylum seekers. The article shows that type of literature first emerged in 2010 and significantly increased after 2020. Likewise, the geographic distribution of the knowledge production in this field highlights the uneven contributions by various countries and regions. Moreover, this picture is further complicated by the biographies of authors who, in many instances, are academic migrants coming from different national backgrounds in the Global South to work in higher education institutions in the Global North. The article ends with suggestions for further developments of the decolonial approach in the study of migration.

Decolonising intercultural theology and research: What role for cultural outsiders?

This article addresses some reasons and requirements for intercultural theologising as boundary-crossing interaction to be decolonised and hold decolonising potential itself. Decolonialism being concerned with both those in ‘marginalised’ and in ‘privileged’ positions, this article focusses on some of the latter’s challenges, responsibilities and opportunities. Grounding the argument in writings of scholars from disciplines like linguistics, cultural anthropology, decolonial studies and various strands of theology both from the Global South and the Global West, epistemological motivators for a decolonising theology will be sketched in the first step. The second step involves a consideration of an appropriate methodology called ‘chosen vulnerability’. Central to it would be the learning and using of vernacular languages in order to move towards cross-cultural understanding from emic perspectives. In step three, an attempt at implementing such will be portrayed that was a core component of a recently completed interdisciplinary PhD project. Based on contextual learning of isiXhosa, several church-related concepts in English and isiXhosa were investigated and compared in a subsidiary study. The findings are used to illustrate how chosen vulnerability can enable humble contributions to decolonising theologies. This is achieved through emic approaches and perspectivism.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article raises awareness for sometimes hidden epistemic inequalities and suggests ways in which those in relative cultural-linguistic power can reduce the imbalance. This is of relevance primarily to intercultural theology. In turn, such insights from intercultural theology can benefit academic research in cross-cultural contexts in general.

Black Marxism, Racial Capitalism, and Greek and Balkan Coloniality Studies: Toward an Abolitionist Perspective

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of the Balkan and Greek postcolonial and de-colonial studies. The Yugoslav ethnic wars, the Greek “financial crisis,” and the European migration crisis generated a body of critical studies on regional nationalism, coloniality, and racialism and the Balkans and Greece's ambiguous relation to Europe. Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition was missing from the large spectrum of postcolonial literature. This absence is surprising given that the book historicizes the simultaneous occurrence of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and modernity in the Balkan and the East Mediterranean during the late feudalism. The absence of this history from the Balkan's post and de-colonial studies deprives these studies of an abolitionist perspective; rather than opting for “provincializing Europe” empowered by this history of the native enslavements and colonization, these studies, much as Black radicalism should mobilize the region for the political culture for the abolition of “Europe.”

Critical Theory and the Global Civic Imagination: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Citizenship in Decolonial Thought

Abstract: In this essay, I show how critical projects of decoloniality might help build a new humanity. I focus on the intellectual output of Chielozona Eze, arguing that, as public-service scholarship, it bears witness to the shifts occurring in contemporary decolonial thought and thus exemplifies the role the humanities can play to midwife an inclusive and empathetic global democratic culture so central to decolonial studies. My analysis aims to demonstrate how the humanities can be a tool in meeting civic needs and interests and thereby help rehabilitate modern society.

Decolonial option in Mathematics Education

This article aims to present reflections on the constitution of the decolonial option in Mathematics Education. As theoretical assumptions, it is based on references based on the Ethnomathematics Program, decolonial studies, discussions woven in the interface between Mathematics Education and Decoloniality, in addition to reflections arising from the dialogue between Mathematics Education and affirmative actions. It is understood that Mathematics, in its historical process of constitution, participated in several colonization processes and still reproduces several of its effects via coloniality(ies), making invisible, silencing and denying various forms of knowledge(s), as well as its connoisseurs. In this way, it is proposed that the decolonial option in Mathematics Education enables dialogical spaces between the different ways of reading and interpreting the world from the very world in which we live.

Wonder as a New Starting Point for Theological Anthropology, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in Religion and Theology by José Francisco Morales Torres (review)

Wonder as a New Starting Point for Theological Anthropology, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in Religion and Theology by José Francisco Morales Torres (review)

Perspectives on research: an analysis of the textbook Ápis (3rd year of elementary school)

This work aims to discursively analyze the use of the term “research” in Portuguese language textbooks from the first years of elementary school. Thus, as a corpus of analysis, we chose volume three of the collection for teaching Portuguese Language named Ápis, which was approved in the PNLD's 2019-2022. In addition to theoretically substantiating this work from authors of decolonial studies such as Mignolo (2020), Quijano (2007), among others, we are guided by Bakhtinian discourse studies to discuss the concept of language, as well as support the analysis of the material selected.

Waste Frontiers/War Enclosures: Decolonial Geosocial Analysis of Contaminated Military Land Conversions

Military-industrial practices have left widespread contamination affecting land, water, air, and human and nonhuman bodies. This article uses decolonial analysis to examine the racial-colonial foundations that underlie contemporary efforts to reuse former U.S. military land for development projects. Interrelating scholarship on security and development with that of militarization and political ecology, I use “geosocial spectacle” to probe the material and pedagogical governance, frontier logics, and colonial aesthetics that emerge through land remediation and redevelopment. Featuring two military sites within U.S. base closure and realignment—the U.S. Front Range area of Colorado and former U.S. unincorporated territory of the Panama Canal Zone—the article delineates and expounds on two types of U.S. military land conversions: brownfields and biodiversity recreation. The article interrelates the conversion of contaminated land in both cases as waste frontier that facilitates ongoing cycles of land repossession as a form of dispossession and containment or denial of war. The article concludes by advocating for decolonial studies of the global color line entrenched by the U.S. Pentagon’s ongoing climate colonialism, to subvert the compartmentalized harms of war and capitalist extraction, and to galvanize explicitly anticolonial, antiracist land reuse and governance.

Listen, Tell, Show: Recreation and the Black and Decolonial Storytelling in Sport and Physical Culture Research

Stories are always grounded in personal, collective, and ancestral experiences and come in a variety of visual, performance, textile, and text-based forms. Physical culture participation and politics can be better understood by engaging with the stories of people facing ongoing colonial and epistemic injustices, intersectional oppressions, as well as structural and cultural racism. In contrast to dominant trends in the cultural politics of sport, this article offers an ontological, epistemological, and methodological alternative. Following Black and decolonial scholars, we must honor non-Western storytelling modalities to listen to, tell, show, and center many experiences to resist Western colonial culture's binary structures and hierarchies, introduce alternate theorizations, and inject other ways of knowing and being into the sport and physical cultures and into physical cultural studies. This article highlights several areas of Black and decolonial studies that will be essential to efforts at transformative justice in sport and sports scholarship: interdisciplinarity, the bios–mythoi relationship, counter-storytelling, and creation stories.

On (In-)Secure Grounds: How Military Forces Interact with Global Environmental Change

Abstract Military forces contribute to, struggle with, and respond to global environmental change. This entangles them ambiguously with their ecological environment. This article reviews these entanglements in two steps. First, it develops a three-dimensional typology of ecologically relevant military activities by drawing on the environmental peace and conflict research streams of political ecology, decolonial studies, environmental conflicts, environmental peacebuilding, securitization, and climate human security. In a second step, this typology then guides the first literature review of studies on military –environment interactions. The review finds four different military roles: (1) Military forces are complicit in causing environmental harms through military conduct; (2) they are involved in Anthropocene geopolitics, for instance, in a melting Arctic; (3) they alleviate impacts through a range of mitigation and adaptation measures, including military disaster response; and, finally, (4) some military forces have been found involved in obstructing climate policy. The study argues that these different roles are indicative of the challenges that conventional security policies face when addressing the increasingly multipolar Anthropocene’s global security challenges.

On Decolonization and its Correlates

This essay offers a critical analysis of the literature on decolonization (and its correlates), from the studies carried out by colonial agents and administrators to the recent vogue for postcolonial and decolonial studies. It highlights the limitations of the top-down approach of most studies up to the 1970s, the binarism that has characterized contemporary studies, and the conceptual ambivalence as well as marketing perspective that distinguish the decolonial approach. Lastly, it considers the idea of using the conceptual framework of creolization studies and the ideas of Oswald de Andrade on anthropophagy to get a better understanding of decolonization.

The Disintegration of “Power/Knowledge”. Post-Socialist Studies as Decolonial Studies? A Personal Point of View. Part 3: Soft and Hard Variants of Post-Colonial Studies

The relationship between post-colonial and post-socialist studies is extraordinarily complex. Post-colonialists might argue that it can be approached from different perspectives as well as different power positions of knowledge production. As a result, I have chosen a specific trajectory that intersects and challenges the static power positions and is able to trace the debates and the unfolding of the complex problem over time. As a long-time scholar in this area, and moreover one who has taken many different roads in both fields, I will describe this relationship from the perspective of my own scholarly biography. However, my professional career has spanned several decades and surpassed the transient trends and fashions within this scholarly field. As such, it can only be depicted as an extensive narrative comprising multiple episodes, published in sequence across the double issue of the journal Studia Litteraria, devoted to forms of engagement in contemporary Southern and Western Slavic literatures. Part 3 discusses soft and hard variants of the complex “powers/knowledge”.

The Disintegration of “Power/Knowledge”: Post-Socialist Studies as Decolonial Studies? A Personal Point of View. Part 2: The Socialist Expansion of Post-Colonial Studies

The relationship between post-colonial and post-socialist studies is extraordinarily complex. Post-colonialists might argue that it can be approached from different perspectives as well as different power positions of knowledge production. As a result, I have chosen a specific trajectory that intersects and challenges the static power positions and is able to trace the debates and the unfolding of the complex problem over time. As a long-time scholar in this area, and moreover one who has taken many different roads in both fields, I will describe this relationship from the perspective of my own scholarly biography. However, my professional career has spanned several decades and surpassed the transient trends and fashions within this scholarly field. As such, it can only be depicted as an extensive narrative comprising multiple episodes, published in sequence across the double issue of the journal Studia Litteraria, devoted to forms of engagement in contemporary Southern and Western Slavic literatures. Part 2 focuses on the socialist expansion of Post-Colonial Studies.

The Disintegration of “Power/Knowledge”: Post-Socialist Studies as Decolonial Studies? A Personal Point of View. Part 1: Post-Colonialism, Balkanism and Self-Colonization

The relationship between post-colonial and post-socialist studies is extraordinarily complex. Post-colonialists might argue that it can be approached from different perspectives as well as different power positions of knowledge production. As a result, I have chosen a specific trajectory that intersects and challenges the static power positions and is able to trace the debates and the unfolding of the complex problem over time. As a long-time scholar in this area, and moreover, one who has taken many different roads in both fields, I will describe this relationship from the perspective of my own scholarly biography. However, my professional career has spanned several decades and surpassed the transient trends and fashions within this scholarly field. As such, it can only be depicted as an extensive narrative comprising multiple episodes. Each episode showcases its unique scientific intrigue and unravels its own methodological peripeteia, all of which contribute to the overarching story I wish to share. Such complex material required a specific structure and organization, leading to the formation of three distinct parts of the story. These parts are published in sequence across the double issue of the journal Studia Litteraria, devoted to forms of engagement in contemporary Southern and Western Slavic literatures.

Editorial - N.º 11 / 2-2023

The thematic dossier of this year-end edition pays homage to two geniuses of Surrealism, Mário-Henrique Leiria (1923-1980) and Mário Cesariny (1923-2006), who reached the milestone of 100 years in 2023. Both multifaceted artists dedicated themselves passionately to artistic and literary expression in the pursuit of freedom. In the multi-themed section, diversity reigns: from the artistic expression of epidemics to heritage and an essay on the expropriation process of master craftsmen in contemporary Portugal. The interview constitutes a dialogue with the renowned professors, researchers, and activists Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo, both indispensable figures in the field of decolonial studies. In the Critical Readings section, two works and a cinematographic diptych are discussed. And, as usual, the magazine looks to the future with the presentation of a project, the Global History of Economy and Management in Portugal.

Beyond the epistemological debates about the time in history, the relativity of historical time: decolonial theory facing the Western historiographical hegemony

This article is a theoretical reflection on the epistemological debate about the time in history. The aim here is to put the temporality of the Western historiographical hegemony into orbit in order to highlight its limitations. Based on the axiological principles of the decolonial studies theory, we put the emphasis on the philosophy of the “New History” (Nouvelle Histoire) born in the historiographical extension of the Ecole des Annales, french History school founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. The result is that the hegemony of Western historiography has shown its limits across the classical divisions of history. The existence of multiple conceptions of time throughout the world requires the construction of a complex epistemology of temporality in historical research.

Teaching about colonialism, nationalism, and neoliberal patriarchy during the Chilean social outbreak

While Chile currently commemorates 50 years since the 1973 coup, it is also immersed in the process of writing a new Constitution to replace that of 1980, which is responsible for the all over present neoliberalism, including the education system. The constituent process is a direct consequence of the social outburst of 2019. In this context, this article informs Other Sociologies of Education by describing the experience of a course inspired by decolonial studies and offered at a community higher education initiative that emerged from a local government, aiming to democratize education. To reconstruct the course experience, we used documents, our own memories and some participants written thoughts, and we wrote this article following the methodology of narrative productions. The article suggests that there is great potential in transmitting decolonial studies – for their capacity to explain and transform ethnic-racial relations in Latin American societies – in community education.

Decolonizing western science education and knowledge in early childhood: Rethinking natural hazards and disasters framework through indigenous ‘ecology of knowledges’ in Kenya

This article presents the epistemological complexity inherent in the roll out of an international project on Disaster and Risk Reduction, and consequently about science education in the Indigenous context of Turkana County in Kenya. After an introduction that explains the current state of Disaster and Risk Reduction, the paper focuses on the ‘Paper Volcanoes Laboratory’ program and toolkit for children and teachers, which aims to spread awareness about natural hazards among children. The paper argues that the geographical, social and educational context where the project is carried out is critical to consider, and decolonial studies provide a conceptual and theoretical framework for this project. This allows to recognize reproduction of infantilization of Indigenous people and children through Western knowledge and science if implemented without consideration for local contexts, and demonstrates how Western educational projects have been a tool of discrimination and colonization. However, at the same time, it opens up the possibility for a dialogue and an encounter between the different epistemologies present in a project that was conceptualized within the Western context, but is to be carried out in Turkana County in Kenya.

Vozes do Sul: conversações pós-coloniais e decoloniais

Abstract Over the last ten years, although a certain amount of critical effort has gone into bringing the debates around Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies closer together, these two areas still remain on opposite or different sides of a debate that is often heated and irreconcilable. Particularly at the beginning of the current century, following the publication of Walter Mignolo's (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs, much of the postcolonial criticism found itself on a collision course with decolonial discourse. In the same way, the main authors of the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality group became critics of Postcolonial Studies by formulating the bases of Decolonial thought under the concept of the “Decolonial Turn”, which demands a disconnection and break with the Western structures of thought, under which Postcolonialism built its responses to the literature of the former colonialist empires. In this sense, this text intends to investigate the theoretical path that culminates in the break between Decolonial and Postcolonial studies, and our aim is to open up questions that can favor dialogue between the two theoretical fields and also open up possibilities for a South-South dialogue based on a new understanding of the new and old epistemologies.