Search Results (222)

This essay argues that Holiday Powers’ s Moroccan Modernism (2025) offers a compelling case study for rethinking global modernist art from a decolonial perspective, highlighting Morocco’s unique creative, esthetic, and philosophical forces. The questions and issues this book raises, and this essay addresses, revolve around the problematic of non-European modernism as both a phenomenon of decolonial politics of esthetics, in the Jacques Rancière sense, and an artistic movement born out of the history of Western art through the colonial imposition of the European conception of modernity and system of education. I take particular issue with the dominance of political history, identity discourse, and redundant postcolonial rhetoric that characterizes not only Powers’ narrative but also the account of other area modernisms. This dominance generates a tendency to misestimate art agency and to neglect the investigation of the complex creative, esthetic, and philosophical underpinnings of the modernist construct. A lucid revisiting of Orientalism is mandatory for tackling this understudied aspect of modernism. Yet, I also demonstrate the accomplishments of Moroccan Modernism as a cogent historical exposition of this construct in Morocco, upon the basis of which future studies can be undertaken. Full article

This article addresses agroforestry knowledge and practices of peasant and quilombola women. It draws from research using ethnographic methods, conducted in two different Brazilian communities: with peasant women in the municipality of Pinhão, Paraná, Brazil, and with quilombola women in the Quilombo Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca in the municipality of Barra do Turvo, in the Ribeira Valley, São Paulo, Brazil. This investigation demonstrates the connection between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women, and it identifies counter-practices that value cooperation and mutual care. It highlights the importance of recovering ancestral knowledge and resisting the rupture with nature imposed by colonialism. The conclusion indicates that these agroforestry practices play a crucial role in the lives of women and in their resistance to the monocultural model and the market economy in both communities studied. In both communities, women play a central role in sustaining agroforestry practices as forms of resistance, care, and cultural preservation. In Pinhão, peasant women uphold biodiversity and traditional knowledge through everyday practices like seed exchange and in the Quilombo Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca, quilombola women link agroforestry to identity, territorial defense, and Black resistance. Full article

This study analyzed the intersection between Afrodescendant ethnoeducation and the school-to-work transition in three marginalized communities of the Colombian Caribbean: La Boquilla, Tierra Bomba, and Libertad-Sucre. Using a qualitative methodology, the research reconstructed, on the one hand, the institutional framework of Afro-Colombian ethnoeducation since the 1991 Constitution, highlighting public policies implemented and their impacts. On the other hand, it examined the educational dynamics in these localities and their link (or lack thereof) to local labor markets, identifying innovations, limitations, and structural barriers affecting young people’s transition from school to work. The findings show that the Colombian ethnoeducational model has introduced curricular and participatory innovations aimed at enhancing cultural relevance and preparing students for productive life. However, its implementation faces persistent barriers including inadequate infrastructure, the legacies of internal armed conflict, structural racism, limited employment opportunities, and chronic public disinvestment. Despite valuable local initiatives—such as technical training in collaboration with the SENA (National Learning Service, Colombia’s public technical education system) in sectors like fishing and tourism—Afrodescendant youth continue to experience limited labor market integration. Finally, the article offers policy and practical recommendations from a decolonial ethnoeducational perspective, inspired by the pedagogy for liberation, to strengthen the school-to-work transition in contexts of vulnerability. Full article

This paper critically explores the intersection of neurodivergence, disability, decoloniality, and lived religion through the praxis of organizing a day conference: BSA SocRel Chair’s Response Day on Religion, Neurodiversity, and Disability. It argues that neuroqueering and radical inclusivity offer transformative possibilities beyond tokenistic EDI frameworks, especially when grounded in collaborative, community-led organizing. Drawing on ethnographic reflection and activist theology, the paper highlights how structural ableism persists within academic and religious institutions, while also revealing spaces of resistance, care, and political imagination. It calls for abolitionist approaches that center neurodivergent experience, not as a deficit but as a generative force, for reshaping both scholarly and spiritual life. Full article

Drawing on in-depth interviews and thematic analysis, this study explores the therapeutic benefits of outdoor experiences through the lived experiences of 24 outdoor practitioners, including educators, environmentalists, therapists, and program leaders. Three core themes emerged: (a) nature as an emotional regulator and reflective space; (b) therapeutic benefits of human–nature relationships; and (c) decolonial, bioregional, and cultural healing. Although practitioners facilitated physical challenges and skill-building for their participants, they primarily described outdoor experiences as relational, somatic, and culturally rooted practices that foster emotional regulation, grief processing, identity integration, and social inclusion. Healing emerged through solitude, silence, ancestral connections, sacred landscapes, inclusive dynamics, and the restoration of cultural knowledge. This study’s results challenge Western-centric outdoor education models by foregrounding Indigenous and postcolonial perspectives embedded in Indian ecological traditions. The results contribute to global discussions on decolonizing outdoor fields and offer implications for culturally responsive, emotionally safe, and ecologically grounded practices. Full article

Eurocentric portrayals of Africa remain entrenched in European educational systems, perpetuating stereotypes of poverty, primitiveness, and exoticism. This study investigates how such representations are mirrored in German students’ mental conceptions and how they are interpreted by future educators. Using an interpretivist qualitative design, the study analyzes open-ended responses from 41 Grade 5 and 7 pupils at a lower secondary school in Münster, Germany, and written reflections from 17 teacher trainees enrolled in a master’s course in geography education. Thematic analysis reveals five dominant pupil schemas: poverty and deprivation, environmental determinism, racialization and othering, infrastructural deficit, and the wildlife-tourism gaze, rooted in media, textbooks, teachers, and social networks. Teacher trainees’ reflections ranged from emotional discomfort to critical awareness, with many advocating pedagogical pluralism, the normalization of African modernity, and the cultivation of critical consciousness. However, most proposals remained reformist, lacking a deep epistemological critique. The findings highlight the urgency of integrating decolonial theory, postcolonial critique, and epistemic justice into teacher education. Without such structural reorientation, schools will risk reproducing the very global hierarchies they purport to challenge. Full article

Higher education has long been subject to feminist critique, contesting traditional practices, with calls for transformative pedagogies that empower marginalised students, address social injustices and promote gender equality. Despite this, most classrooms in Western European universities remain largely unchanged, with educators facing the difficulty of imagining and/or enacting decolonial futures within their curricula. However, some progress has been made, particularly the inclusion of transnational scholarship in syllabi and a turn to transformative pedagogies, which allow for alternative ways of interdisciplinary knowing to enter academia. In this paper, we examine this coming together of approaches which promote dialogue and personal reflection to restructure discussions on equality, gender and knowledge production in the ‘classroom’. Using a creative critical account of feminist ethnography conducted at a Western European university, we present and discuss two illustrative vignettes about cultural mapping and critical fabulation, considering how dissonant voices have challenged Western concepts, exemplifying transformative pedagogy working in tandem with transnational thought. Key insights from the study identify approaches for facilitation of more open and richer discussions to reshape staff and student perspectives of gender, equality and knowledge production. Full article

This article examines the persistent conceptual and structural obstacles that pluralism faces within the Euro-United-Statesian art system, particularly in the fields of criticism, art history, and aesthetics. The study situates its inquiry within broader debates around the politics of difference and the decolonization of knowledge, aiming to understand how theoretical frameworks historically incorporated plurality in ways that ultimately neutralize its disruptive potential. Methodologically, the article combines philosophical analysis with a critical rereading of canonical texts by figures such as Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto, juxtaposed with insights from Indigenous, Black, and decolonial thinkers. The findings suggest that pluralism, while rhetorically embraced, is frequently rendered compatible with a teleological and universalizing narrative that privileges Western aesthetic trajectories. As a result, forms of difference are tolerated only insofar as they can be translated into hegemonic terms. The article concludes by advocating for critical practices that sustain rather than resolve difference, calling for frameworks capable of embracing dissonance, incommensurability, and multiple ontologies without collapsing them into sameness. In doing so, it repositions the contemporary struggle over meaning in art not as a problem to be overcome, but as a necessary symptom of epistemic plurality. Full article

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sustainably move our human inheritances forward on this increasingly uninhabitable planet. Reflecting on the work of transnational poets, specifically South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon translated through Korean American poet Don Mee Choi and Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, we are reminded of the myriad ways in which humans can move and survive in a foreign yet familiar world. This paper finds its support in the confluence of transnational contemporary feminist poetics, formalism, environmentalism, and posthumanism. Through the use of various critical discourses, this paper considers how movement and its hybrid capacities offer a new understanding of contemporary North American poetics. In this sense, a poem should be viewed as a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life. Full article

This article examines the struggles for water justice led by women in the Aconcagua River Basin (Valparaíso, Chile) through a hydrofeminist perspective. Chile’s water crisis, rooted in a colonial extractivist model and exacerbated by neoliberal policies of water privatization, reflects a deeper crisis of socio-environmental injustice. Rather than understanding water merely as a resource, this research adopts a relational epistemology that conceives water as a living entity shaped by and shaping social, cultural, and ecological relations. Drawing on life-history interviews and the construction of a hydrofeminist cartography with women river defenders, this article explores how gendered and racialized bodies experience the crisis, resist extractive practices, and articulate alternative modes of co-existence with water. The hydrofeminist framework offers critical insights into the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation, emphasizing how women’s embodied experiences are central to envisioning new water governance paradigms. This study reveals how women’s affective, spiritual, and territorial ties to water foster strategies of resilience, recovery, and re-existence that challenge the dominant extractivist logics. By centering these hydrofeminist life histories, this article contributes to broader debates on environmental justice, decolonial feminisms, and the urgent need to rethink human–water relationships within the current climate crisis. Full article

The call to decolonize South African university curricula continues to shape academic discourse, highlighting the urgency of integrating African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKSs) into theological education. While Western epistemologies have long dominated theology in Africa, this article argues for a paradigm shift by positioning public theology as a viable framework for engaging AIKS in meaningful and transformative ways. The article examines how AIKSs—expressed through oral traditions, communal spiritualities, and indigenous ethics—can enrich theological discourse, enhance contextual relevance, and address issues such as social justice, identity, and community cohesion. Drawing on the decoloniality discourse, this study critically explores the epistemological, institutional, and pedagogical challenges hindering integration and proposes concrete strategies including curriculum reform, faculty training, and community-based theological formation. The article contributes to the decolonization of theological education by offering a context-specific framework that repositions AIKSs as legitimate theological resources. In doing so, it advances a model of public theology that is inclusive, rooted in African realities, and responsive to the transformative needs of Southern African societies. Full article

The text analyzes interreligious organizations and movements in Brazil based on the concept of the pluralist principle. It aims to systematize, based on observations of practices and studies of documents from prominent inter-religious experiences in Brazil, the degree of incidence of efforts to deepen democracy; defend human rights and the rights of nature; provide citizenship; appreciate ethnic, sexual, and gender diversity; and other effective decolonial forms of counter-hegemonic social articulation in these groups. Among the results, we present theoretical bases that show that it is necessary, for social analyses, to pay special attention to the articulation of the intersection between religious groups’ capacity for dialogue and the challenges surrounding social agendas that reinforce decolonial socio-religious perspectives. The profile of some inter-religious experiences within the scope of the research is also indicated. Full article

The transition from school to university and subsequently into the workforce is increasingly non-linear, shaped by diverse socio-economic realities and interrupted learning pathways. This study examines the effectiveness of Readiness Programs in preparing students for higher education and explores the potential of integrating the African Ubuntu philosophy to enhance these programs. Using a quantitative research design, a structured survey was administered to 1132 participants enrolled in the University of Namibia’s 2024 Readiness Program. Descriptive statistics and ordered logistic regression were employed to analyse key predictors of readiness, including program structure, delivery, academic skills, and resilience to challenges. The findings indicate that program delivery, improved academic skills, and academic performance significantly influence students’ readiness to pursue university studies, while resilience to personal challenges shows a weaker correlation. The results suggest that structured interventions play a more pivotal role than individual perseverance in ensuring academic preparedness. The study concludes that integrating Ubuntu principles, such as communal support, ethical leadership, and collaborative learning into readiness programs can strengthen student engagement and institutional inclusivity. This integration aligns with decolonial imperatives in African higher education and contributes to more contextually relevant, supportive, and transformative readiness initiatives. Full article

Proclaiming Our Roots (POR) began as an academic community-based research initiative documenting Afro-Indigenous identities and lived experiences through digital oral storytelling. Since its inception, Proclaiming Our Roots has grown into a grassroots social movement focused on self-determination, cultural reclamation, and resistance to colonial erasure. This paper explores Proclaiming Our Root’s evolution, from a research project to a grassroots social movement, analyzing how storytelling, relational accountability, and Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous governance have shaped its development. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and grounded in Afro-Indigenous worldviews, we examine how POR mobilizes digital storytelling, community gatherings, and intergenerational dialog to give voice to Afro-Indigenous identity, build collective consciousness, and challenge dominant narratives that erase or marginalize Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous presence. Through a sharing circle involving Proclaiming Our Roots community members, advisory council members, and the research team, in this paper we identify key themes that reflect the movement’s transformative impact: Identity and Belonging, Storytelling as Decolonial Praxis, Healing, Spirituality and Collective Consciousness, and Resistance and Social Movement Building. We discuss how these themes illustrate Proclaiming Our Roots’ dual role as a site of knowledge production and political action, navigating tensions between institutional affiliation and community autonomy. By prioritizing Afro-Indigenous epistemologies and centering lived experience, POR demonstrates how academic research can be a foundation for long-term, relational, and community-led movement-building. In this paper, we want to contribute to broader discussions around the sustainability of grassroots movements, the role of storytelling in social change for Indigenous and Black Peoples, and the possibilities of decolonial knowledge production as epistemic justice. We offer a model for how academic research-initiated projects can remain accountable to the communities with whom we work, while actively participating in liberatory re-imaginings. Full article