Our Collections

The Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education

By Enrique Dussel, translated by David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego bring to us Dussel’s The Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education, the first English translation of Dussel’s thinking on education, and also the first translation of any part of his landmark multi-volume work Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation. 

This groundbreaking translation makes possible a face-to-face encounter between an Anglo Philosophy of Education and Latin American Pedagogics. “Pedagogics” should be considered as a type of philosophical inquiry alongside ethics, economics, and politics. Dussel’s pedagogics is a decolonizing pedagogics, one rooted in the philosophy of liberation he has spent his epic career articulating. With an Introduction by renowned philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff, this book adds an essential voice to our conversations about teaching, learning, and studying, as well as critical theory in general.

Read more here.

Decolonial subversions

Decolonial subversions is a radically, innovative, multilingual, open-access, peer-reviewed platform for the expression of historically silenced knowledge systems. It is commited to decentring western epistemology in the humanities and social sciences.

The platform seeks to minimise the reproduction of publishing practices that perpetuate inequalities in the global production and distribution of knowledge. It is a platform for the creation and dissemination of written, acoustic and visual knowledge from the margins.

As another way of decentring western epistemology and diversifying knowledge-making, authors are encouraged to submit their contributions in local languages, where an English version can also be provided, or to translate contributions in English into local languages as pertinent to the communities of research.

Journey into their 2023 Special Issue here.

The Question of Palestine

By Edward Said

With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile’s passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied–as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the Gulf War, and the ongoing MIddle East peace initiative. For anyone interested in this region and its future, The Question of Palestine remains the most useful and authoritative account available.

Read more here.

Colonizing the Body

State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India

By David Arnold

In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.

Focusing on three major epidemic diseases—smallpox, cholera, and plague—Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.

By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.

Read more here.

The Wretched of the Earth

By Frantz Fanon

Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism.

Read more here.

CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers

Co-authorship by Devin G. Atallah, Caesar Hakim, Hana R. Masud, Yousef al-Ajarma, Aya Darwish, Abeer Musleh, Rayyan Alfatafta, Nihaya Abu-Rayyan

This workbook was designed to support community workers in Palestine towards deepening our understandings and our relationships for ongoing resistance and healing. There are five chapters, organized around a series of our beloved native trees and Indigenous knowledges rooted in our Palestinian lands and communities. 

The authors hope you can utilize this workbook to engage in any activities that feel meaningful and supportive as you build communities of care and co-resistance. In particular, they hope that Palestinian community health workers (CHWs), organizers, health care providers, counselors/therapists, educators, and grassroots activists in Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora will find their decolonial healing guide to be helpful in this time of impossible grief and colonial genocide by the Zionist settler nation-state. 

They offer this workbook to Palestinian communities as an enactment of hope and decolonial love. We, as Palestinians, face massacre, apartheid, segregation, persecution, mass incarceration, and are condemned to annihilation in so many ways. 

This current online version is NOT the final copy, but it is a draft that they wanted to share right now with the wider public because of the current situation of unspeakable settler colonial violence that our Palestinian people are facing.

Resource available in English and Arabic here.

From decolonizing knowledge to postimperialism A Latin American Perspective

By Gustavo Lins Ribeiro

To open new disciplinary imaginings, we must reinvigorate the relationship between utopian and anthropological thought. This is already underway in efforts to decolonize knowledge. Though such efforts have different emphases, they are located within a field of ideological and utopian struggles that must be understood in the context of imperialism-colonialism, of subalternized subject positions, and of the armed and cognitive struggles that imperialism-colonialism has entailed. Based on my Latin American positionality, I analyze the decolonization of anthropological knowledge as part of this wider field and of the discipline’s history of reexamining itself. In a critical dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial thought, I propose postimperialism as a framework that aims to deimperialize the world, overcoming the hierarchical positions between hegemonic and nonhegemonic anthropologies. Moreover, a postimperial research program would entail studying how global elites’ power affects those who struggle to end an unfair regime that is destroying the planet.

Read more here.

Critical Medical Anthropology: Perspectives in and from Latin America

Edited By Jennie Gamlin, Sahra Gibbon, Paola M. Sesia and Lina Berrio

Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring work from scholars doing and engaging with ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes that are central to contemporary Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of inequality, embodiment of history, indigeneity, non-communicable diseases, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and judicialisation, as these relate to health. The collection of ethnographically informed research, including original theoretical contributions, reconsiders the broader relevance of CMA perspectives for addressing current global healthcare challenges from and of Latin America. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices, it addresses challenges of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic diseases, the pharmaceutical industry and questions of agency, political economy, identity, ethnicity, and human rights.

Read more here.

Coloniality of Power and Coloniality of Gender: Sentipensar the Struggles of Indigenous Women in Abya Yala from Worlds in Relation

By Carmen Cariño and Alejandro Montelongo González

In this work I reflect, from the concepts of coloniality of power (Quijano 2007a) and coloniality of gender (Lugones 2008), key elements to sentipensar,2 the struggles of Indigenous women on the continent in defense of life in their territories. It is not new for Indigenous women to mobilize together with their peoples to defend the land-territory-life, but in recent years their participation has become more visible to the extent that the threat to the territories also involves fundamental elements for the reproduction of life that previously had not been of interest to capital. In this context my interest is focused on the ways in which the women of the territories create and resist from other ontologies in defense of life.

Thinking the reality of our countries from the coloniality of power and the coloniality of gender implies, among other things, taking as a baseline the existence of structures of domination, exploitation, and extermination that have been reproduced over the last five centuries in Abya Yala, and that have led to the imposition of a world classification that denies the existence of other worlds that inhabit these territories, and that have been persecuted, massacred, made invisible, but that exist and re-exist (Albán 2013).

Read more here.

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