Women and the Afghan peace and reintegration process

In 2010, as the Afghan government announced its intention to begin a formal peace process, there were numerous calls for women to have a seat at the table. Both mainstream and critical discourse on women and the peace process in Afghanistan, however, relied on the production of essentialized subjectivities which failed to recognize the political and social complexity of women's lives, diminished their intellectual contributions and silenced their voices. This article challenges the simultaneous hyper-visualization and silencing of Afghan women by both Afghan and international actors. Drawing on feminist and decolonial theory, we examine the ways in which the colonial mechanisms of intervention, patriarchy and the global hierarchies of knowledge production worked in tandem to marginalize Afghan women while upholding them as agents of peace. The article brings together findings from three participatory research projects on women and peace, which took place from 2010 to 2014 across eight provinces in Afghanistan. A prismed view of the participants' intersectional realities is constructed, which highlights diverse positionalities and articulations of peace, the social and political cleavages, and differentiated obstacles to their involvement in the peace and reintegration process. The concluding remarks emphasize the relevance of these findings for Afghanistan at the time of publication.

Poetic Operations

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monáe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

Introduction to the Special Issue Decolonizing Anthropology: Race, Emotions and Pedagogies in the European Classroom

Here we open up the special issue with an introduction to the topic of decolonizing anthropology through the consideration of the emotionality of race, racism, and whiteness within the classroom and the discipline. Focusing on the European Classroom as a construct, we reflect on what the implications of decolonizing anthropology are for teaching the discipline, particularly in regard to the positionality of “European Others” (El Tayeb, 2011) as students and educators. While demands for structural changes in the discipline and the restructuring of canons and curriculums have been widely proposed, the role of affect and emotions in relation to colonialism, race, and whiteness in the decolonizing process have been addressed only marginally. We offer a contribution to the conversation through the focus on emotions, taking these as a form of knowledge and political action. Bringing together literatures on postcolonial studies, decolonial theory with critiques of anthropology, we suggest a space for thinking about the emotional dimensions of decolonization within the university and across disciplines and describe the contribution of each article included herein that show the power that comes from thinking critically about the emotionality of the classroom, and the role of emotions in reproducing colonial epistemics.

“Witch doctors” or professionals? The graduates of Mexico´s first intercultural university and the struggle for legitimacy

Since 2003, the Mexican government has opened 11 intercultural universities serving a total of 15,000 students, a majority of whom are members of Mexico´s Indigenous minority. While there is a growing body of work analyzing the intercultural model from public policy and theoretical perspectives, few studies focus on the experiences of the students and graduates of these institutions. In this article, I share the findings of one such study of the Intercultural University of Mexico State, the pioneer of the intercultural universities. Through interviews with graduates, students, and deans of three undergraduate intercultural programs, I seek to answer a central question, which is rooted in critical and decolonial theory: To what degree does the intercultural model achieve its stated mission of empowering Indigenous students and to what degree does it contribute to the reproduction of inequality? In general, the findings are mixed. While many students share experiences of discrimination in the workplace, and even being derided as “witch-doctors,” they argue that attending an institution with a critical mass of Indigenous students has empowered them personally and professionally, transformed their cultural identities, and given them a new appreciation for their Indigenous roots.

Decolonizing Philosophy of Technology: Learning from Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches to Decolonial Technical Design

The decolonial theory understands that Western Modernity keeps imposing itself through a triple mutually reinforcing and shaping imprisonment: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being. Technical design has an essential role in either maintaining or overcoming coloniality. In this article, two main approaches to decolonizing the technical design are presented. First is Yuk Hui’s and Ahmed Ansari’s proposals that, revisiting or recovering the different histories and philosophies of technology produced by humankind, intend to decolonize the minds of philosophers and engineers/architects/designers as a pre-condition for such decolonial designs to take place. I call them top-down approaches. Second is some technical design initiatives that, being developed alongside marginalized/subalternate people, intend to co-construct decolonial sociotechnical solutions through a committed, decolonizing, and careful dialog of knowledge. I call them bottom-up approaches. Once that is done, the article’s second half derives ontological, epistemological, and political consequences from the conjugation of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Such consequences challenge some established or not yet entirely overcome understandings in the philosophy of technology (PT) and, in so doing, are meant to represent some steps in PT’s decolonization. Even though both top-down and bottom-up approaches are considered, the article’s main contributions are associated with (bottom-up) decolonial technical design practices, whose methodologies and outcomes are important study cases for PT and whose practitioners (i.e., decolonial designers) can be taken as inspiring examples for philosophers who want to decolonize/enlarge PT or make it decolonial (that is, a way of fostering decoloniality).

Enacting and Envisioning Decolonial Forces while Sustaining Indigenous Language

This book chronicles the experiences of Quechuan bilingual college students who strive to maintain their ethnolinguistic identity while succeeding in Spanish-centric curricula. The book presents visual and textual insights and merges decolonial theory and participatory action research in pursuit of mobilizing Indigenous languages.

Antiglobalismo e Colonialidade: Uma Abordagem Decolonial Sobre a Política Externa Brasileira no Governo Bolsonaro l Antiglobalism and Coloniality: A Decolonial Approach on Brazilian Foreign Policy Under Bolsonaro Government

Embora o Brasil tenha participado da chamada onda rosa na América Latina na primeira e em parte da segunda década dos anos 2000, o país passou a experimentar nos últimos anos um movimento crescente de agentes políticos ligados à Direita, que culminou na eleição de Jair Bolsonaro em 2018. A Política Externa do Governo Jair Bolsonaro apresenta algumas rupturas em relação à Política Externa Brasileira das últimas décadas, dentre elas um alinhamento automático aos Estados Unidos da América. Neste estudo, analisamos a forma como conceitos da teoria decolonial introduzidos por Aníbal Quijano e Walter Mignolo, como eurocentrismo e colonialidade do poder, podem auxiliar na compreensão do alinhamento automático com os Estados Unidos observado no Governo Bolsonaro.Palavras-Chave: Política Externa Brasileira; Governo Bolsonaro; Teoria Decolonial.ABSTRACTAlthough Brazil participated in the so-called pink wave, in Latin America, during the first and part of the second decade of the 2000s, the country has experienced, in the last years, a growing movement of political agents linked to the Right-Wing, which culminated in the Jair Bolsonaro´s election in 2018. The Foreign Policy of Jair Bolsonaro Government presents some ruptures in relation to the Brazilian Foreign Policy of the last decades, among them an automatic alignment to United States of America. In this study, we analyze how concepts of decolonial theory introduced by Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, such as Eurocentrism and coloniality of power, can help to understanding the automatic alignment to United States observed in Bolsonaro Government.Keywords: Foreign Policy; Bolsonaro Government; Decolonial Theory. Recebido em: 03/04/2021 | Aceito em: 05/07/2021.

Rethinking Polanyi’s Fictitious Commodities Based on the Brazilian Nuclear Segment

The purpose of this paper is to show evidence of the undetermined expansion of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities within the Brazilian nuclear context. The issue of the marketification of social agendas has drawn a lot of attention to the data, collected through in-depth interviews. The analytical process was guided by the decolonial theory approach and by critical discourse analysis. Among the analysis’ main findings, it is possible to point out the elaboration of a framework which reveals the mechanisms employed by the Brazilian nuclear segment as a way of exercising parallel power and silencing social agendas. The main contributions are the temporal and geopolitical updating of Polanyi’s thesis; and the definition of the mechanisms used by the company Eletronuclear and by institutions as a way of co-optation, naturalisation and marketification of social and political agendas.

Can We Co-Construct a Field of Management / Administration Engaged with the Majority?

Dynamics contrary to the life of the majority mobilized by neo-imperial neo-liberal capitalism evolving toward neo-fascist populism has become virtually invisible to the field of Management/Administration, which is driven by dynamics of appropriation-contention focused on alternatives and transmodern epistemes of the emerging South-East. We analyze this picture of radicalization of global coloniality within the context of counterrevolutionary neoliberalism facing dynamics of dewesternization and decoloniality from a South-North dialogue between Decolonial Theory/Option and Critical Realism. By proposing a critical/decolonial transmodern framework, we unveil dynamics of invisibilization/visibilization against the life of the majority, invisibilized by market sub-theorization and dominant discourse and by the liberal university and its business/management schools. In the end, we propose to recover the expanded relevance of “administration/management” engaged with the majority, through reappropriation dynamics based on de-subalternization of non-market and ‘de-celebration’ of free market.

Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy: Disrupting Feminist Complicity with Coloniality

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context.