Colonial forms, decolonial transformations:Lessons on decoloniality from secondary schools in urban Bolivia
Wednesday 16 October 13:00 until 15:00
Arts C333
Speaker: Marcin Stanek
Part of the series: Geography Research Seminars: Beyond the Fringe
Abstract
The vast majority of recent decolonial scholarship that circulates in westernized academia focuses either on critiques of coloniality, or visions of decolonial alternatives. Broadly speaking, such work is by large concerned with form, understood as a ‘particular character, nature, structure, or constitution; mode of existence or manifestation’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2019). However important, the focus on form often ignores the question of transformation, or the process of changing form in order to arrive at an alternative. Through this seminar, I invite the audience to consider a processual reading of decoloniality, which shows the latter as a particular kind of transformation. Such reading is rooted in a year-long, ethnographic research on decolonial education in urban Bolivian secondary schools. Based on an analysis of numerous conversations with Bolivian students, teachers, activists and scholars, I argue that decoloniality in Bolivia is not challenged per se, but through competing meanings of transformation. In order to do so, I divide the paper into two main parts. First, I present a reading of the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality research programme, which is attentive to the relation between decoloniality and transformation. Second, I analyse ethnographic materials, which show how different actors within the Bolivian eduscape negotiate decoloniality through competing meanings of transformation. I conclude with a brief discussion of what processual thinking of decoloniality as transformation might mean for geography and geographers working at westernized universities.
Convenor and Chair: Prof. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly
All welcome. Coffee, tea and cake is provided.
By: Martin Wingfield
Last updated: Friday, 13 September 2019