Search Results (17)

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

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

This paper critically examines Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation through the lens of Watsuji Tetsurō’s theory of fūdo (climate and milieu), arguing that Watsuji’s insights help address some of the tensions and limitations in Glissant’s thought. While Glissant foregrounds relationality as a dynamic process of cultural creolization, his emphasis on fluidity and opacity at times risks obscuring the material and environmental conditions that shape human interactions. In contrast, Watsuji’s fūdo provides a framework for understanding relationality as always embedded in specific climatic and spatial conditions, grounding Glissant’s poetics of relation in a more concrete phenomenological and ecological perspective. By integrating Watsuji’s attention to the reciprocal formation of human subjectivity and milieu, this paper argues for a more nuanced articulation of relational identity—one that does not merely resist fixity but also acknowledges the formative role of an (interconnected) place (or places) and environment (or environments). Ultimately, this comparative approach highlights the potential for a deeper ecological and material grounding of Glissant’s thought, offering a corrective to its occasional indeterminacy while reaffirming its decolonial aspirations. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on the intersections of environmental philosophy, postcolonial thought, and theories of intersubjectivity. Full article

We, a group of native scholars based in the Himalayan region, co-author this article to propose an environmental humanities South—concurrently as an Asia-specific interdisciplinary field and a planetary human–nature epistemology of the Global South inextricably entwined with that of the Global North. Framed in the broader field of planetary health, this article begins with a perspectival shift by reconceptualizing the Global South and the Global North as the Planetary South and the Planetary North for the purpose of laying the epistemological groundwork for two interconnected arguments and subsequent discussions. First, the Planetary South is not merely epistemological, but is at once geographically epistemological and epistemologically geographical. Our debates with the currently dominant epistemologies of the South open up a decolonial conversation with what we call the Australian School of the environmental humanities, the initial seed bank of our interdisciplinary environmental work in Asia’s Planetary South. These multilayered epistemological debates and conversations lead to the second argument that the South and the North relate to one another simultaneously in symbiotic and paradoxical terms. Through these two arguments, the article addresses the conundrum of what we call the “postcolonial continuation of the colonial environmentality” and attempts to interweave the meaningful return of the eroding Himalayan native knowledges of nature with modern scientific findings in a way that appreciates the livingness of the earth and is inclusive of nonwestern environmental worldviews. Full article

Colonialism in Africa rewarded individuals who offered no resistance to its ideology and demonized those who did. An effect this continues to have on the African moral imagination is the tendency to idealize compliance over resistance, especially to Western hegemony. Given Africa’s sociopolitical struggles and the consequence of the continent’s ongoing entrapment in the colonial power matrix, I explore ways ethical discourses on the continent can contribute to the ongoing interdisciplinary process of decolonization. In engagement with African literature and decolonial studies on the one hand and liberation ethics on the other, this article proposes a Christian ethics for Africa, discussing resistance as both a moral imperative in postcolonial contexts and a constitutive of the Christian identity. Full article

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. Full article

In responding to the call for exploring and explicating aspects of the research process that remain unspoken about in most social science fields, this narrative asks deceptively simple questions: what does it mean to carry out research as an academic with a lived experience of displacement, loss and pain? What are the methodological choices available to me as a migrant scholar? What does it really mean to write (about) the displaced-turned-emplaced self from the margin—myself being a case in point—within contexts of loss and displacement? My aim is to present a personal narrative that is uniquely mine, a story that may work with or against what is thought to be the official story. I defend the use of fragments, theoretically and methodologically, to avoid the homogenisation of narratives and assumptions about how research is carried out, how knowledge(s) are produced and reproduced, and who has the power to produce them. Thus, building on established scholarship cutting across various fields and guided by postcolonial and postmodernist theories, I hope to unpack the tensions and possibilities inherent in thinking about borders and positionality in academia (when the researcher dwells at the margins), identity, its fragmentation, and its entanglement with questions of decoloniality, narrative and voice. Full article

Joel is one of the 12 minor prophets (dōdekaprophēton). His prophecy aims at calling the nation and people to repentance through emphasizing that the Day of the Lord (yōm ădȏnay) is at hand (3:1–5 [2:28–32]). The locust plague (ʾarbbeh) in Joel’s message—which recalls the insects that threaten to destroy crops and vegetation in Africa and beyond, but which can also be used as food and livestock feed and offer other benefits as well—could be interpreted as Joel’s prophetic sign that the great Day of the Lord is near (1:2–2:17). Throughout history, scholars, theologians, and exegetes of differing schools of thought and from numerous locations have offered various interpretations for Joel’s prophecy and subjected it to diverse Eurocentric and Americo-centric hermeneutical methods. This work, however, with its focus on Africa, takes a different approach. Drawing from the work of many African hermeneuticians, it reads Joel’s prophecy using the tools of African Biblical Hermeneutics (ABH), a post-colonial enterprise, in light of the decolonial turn. The article exegetes and theologically analyzes the narrative of the locust plague (ʾarbbeh) in Joel 1:2–7, within the context of Joel 1–3, with the hopes that it will be transformational and beneficial for African readers within their faith context. Full article

The future of colonial pasts still haunts Christian imagination and theology. This is especially true in the field of eschatology, which is dedicated to Christian ways of conceiving the future. This article examines the manifold entanglements that collude in the fabrication of Christian imaginaries of time, future, and global community within (post)colonial conditions. At the center of the article resides the case study of a lithograph distributed by missionary networks in the second half of the 19th century and passed down over three generations in a German Swabian craftsman’s family. The first part of the article offers a detailed image analysis of the lithograph, paying special attention to its ways of religious and colonial worlding. The second examines the social milieu of the addressees of the lithograph and analyzes its embeddedness in intersectional webs of religious, aesthetic, and social disciplining. It draws attention to the complex, often ambiguous dynamics involved in producing colonial inferiority. Against this background, the third part explores, in the form of a provisional thought experiment, ways of a decolonial revision of the lithograph, which bring the aforementioned ambivalences “into view” and interrupt its temporal hierarchization. Full article

This study introduces a comparative framework to understand patriarchal genealogies and technologies, with reference to an anthropological commentary concerning the broader forms of coloniality of power between dominant male and dominated female bodies in Greece, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. It argues that the patterns of patrilineality, practices and representations of male honor, and female exclusion from the native family are literally and symbolically feeding on the matrix of patriarchal coloniality in the regions. The analysis is based on representative ethnographic research and historical approaches. Patrilineal kin structures, customs of captivity (i.e., bride kidnapping, sworn virgins, and honor crimes), and generalized practices of young virgin exogamy seem responsible for women’s minor status in the social stratification. Traditional hierarchies and modern social inequalities seem to motivate dispositions and regulate behaviors for female, minor, subordinate, and dispossessed bodies, as well as dominant male protectors and patriarchs. The text adopts a postcolonial and decolonial black feminist critique. It argues that in a longue durée process, a palimpsest pattern of patriarchy emerges, made upon the habitus of gendered ideology. Shaped by patriarchalism, paternalism, and patronage, patriarchy motivates a generalized pattern of coloniality within post-Ottoman geographies, thus regulating multiple material and symbolic inequalities, and even multiplying antagonistic hierarchies among family units, communities, central nation/state, periphery, and borders. Full article

The paper sheds light on the transatlantic theological discourse during the emergence of liberation theology. It conceptualizes this discourse as a transatlantic communication process reframing it as a transfer and translation of ideas and concepts. Starting from this perspective, I prove the assumption that the transatlantic theological discourse reflected a Latin American claim to academic equity and I show that European reactions to liberation theology implied answers to that claim. As the focus is on the relationship between Latin America and Europe, the article illustrates the significant role of relationships marked by different forms of dependency (economic, political, intellectual) in the development of liberation theology. Furthermore, the paper argues that for a deeper understanding, it is misleading to speak about Latin American theologians on the one hand and European theologians on the other hand, as if it was about clear-cut groups with homogenous motivations, positions, and goals. On the contrary, there were advocates and opponents of liberation theology on both sides of the Atlantic who moreover formed transatlantic alliances. The paper calls those theologians cultural brokers, since they communicated and mediated across the Atlantic. Full article

At the core of this study of spiritual empowerment and Black Atlantic Sufism lies the pre-occupation of understanding precisely the manner by which particular Muslim subjectivities are fashioned within the bounds of the Mustafawi Sufi tradition of religious cultivation through charitable giving and community service in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. This article examines Black Atlantic Muslim religiosities and argues that West African Sufism in diasporic context—which draws upon nonwestern theories of the body and theories of the soul—can be theorized as a philosophy of freedom and decoloniality. In the American South, spiritual empowerment becomes possible through varying forms of care and bodily practice that take place in a mosque that is situated on a former slave plantation. Meanwhile, that empowerment takes place through discourses on Islamic piety and heightened religiosity in a postcolonial Senegal. Spiritual empowerment occurs, as I show, through attending to the body and spirit as students connect themselves, via West African Sufism, to a tradition of inward mastery and bodily discipline through philanthropic efforts. Full article

Over the centuries, the dynamic and fluid charism labeled “Franciscanism” has evolved, changed and morphed well beyond the vision of St. Francis and St. Clare. There is ample evidence to suggest that, after Vatican II and its mandate for religious communities to renew themselves (Perfectae caritatis, nn. 2 et passim), Franciscans of various stripes have done just that. On the other hand, the majority of First Order friars in the world are yet clerics, often minister in diocesan settings (e.g., parishes), and frequently self-identify more as “Fr”. than “Br”. Recent developments in postcolonial and decolonial theory provide valuable lenses for discerning to what extent First Order Franciscans have actually recovered the founding charisms. While distinguished by genealogy, chronology and priorities—some argue that decolonization is about reasserting control of land and resources, while decolonialization is concerned with the epistemic control that continues long after foreign administrations have receded—these two frames are yet intimately linked. Together, they provide welcomed tools for discerning to what extent monasticized, clericalized and “diocesanized” stands of ministry, administration and thinking persist among First Order friars in the 21st century. This engagement with unexpected dialogue partners from critical theories, rather than with the more comfortable and traditional arenas of history and spirituality, promises fresh and maybe even unsettling insights about our enacted spirituality. Full article

Indigenous peoples are easily classified as either dangerously vulnerable or inherently resilient to climate risks. There are elements of truth in both categorical statements. Yet neither is completely true. Indigenous vulnerability and resilience, and Indigenous groups’ adaptive responses to climate change, need to be understood in the messy contexts of lived experience, rather than either elegant social theories or didactic ideological politics. Climate change action and research needs to acknowledge and engage with the knowledges, ontologies and experiences of diverse Indigenous groups, along with the specific histories, geographies and impacts of colonization, and their consequences for both the colonized and colonizers. Climate change action and research needs to be integrated into wider de-colonial projects as the transformative impacts of anthropogenic climate change are inadequately addressed within both colonial and post-colonial frames. Negotiating respectful modes of belonging-together-in-Country to reshape people-to-people, people-to-environment and people-to-cosmos relationships in Indigenous domains is essential in responding to planetary scale changes in coupled human and natural systems. This paper outlines an approach that nurtures Indigenous self-determination and inter-generational healing to rethink the geopolitics of Indigenous resilience, vulnerability and adaptation in an era of climate change and the resurgence of Great Power geopolitics. Full article