Our Collections

Pluriverse A Post-Development Dictionary

Edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary contains over one hundred essays on transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values. It offers critical essays on mainstream solutions that ‘greenwash’ development and presents radically different worldviews and practices from around the world that point to an ecologically wise and socially just world.

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‘When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion´

Anti-racism, decolonial options and theories from the South

By Amber Murrey

This chapter focuses on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, Murrey argues that assertions of the need to focus more centrally on Southern theory are not equivalent with assertions of the need to end, unequivocally, the coloniality of knowledge. Some of the critical and celebrated scholarship critiquing the (ongoing) hegemony of Eurocentric theory and knowing – broadly, theories from the South – has failed to systematically engage with the racialisation of actors within the university and racial inequality in knowledge making. In such paradigms, Southern theories are importantly recognised as valuable for shifting the gaze while, at the same time, there remains a certain blindness to the colonial racial hierarchies that create and sustain the invisibilisation(s) and destructions of them. Situated in the context of coloniality, such projects risk reiterating the global knowledge hierarchy. Murrey sketches an alternative: a feminist decolonial orientation founded on an open assessment of racial and geographical inequalities within the university along with a critical feminist attention to the politics of the mundane in the academy (authorship, citation, language, promotion and impromptu encounters in classrooms and corridors).

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Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality

Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial studies

By Ramón Grosfoguel

Postmodernism as an epistemological project still reproduces a particular form of coloniality. A decolonial perspective requires a broader canon of thought that would require taking seriously the epistemic insights of critical thinkers from the global South. How can a “critical border thinking” that envisages a “transmodern world” moves us beyond Eurocentrism?

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Is it possible to decolonise global health institutions?

By Lioba A Hirsch

In the past year, decolonising global health has gained prominence. Much of this movement has come from students of global health in high-income countries and preceded the recurrence of Black Lives Matter movements after the violent murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter and Decolonising Global Health movements have managed to shake schools of global health if not to their core then at least awake. As a reaction schools of global health have made statements about racial equality and have avowed to address racism, increase staff and student diversity, and to train their staff in the art of decolonisation. I have been involved in these processes of decolonisation at my own institution. Yet I also view such efforts critically.

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Tequiologies: Indigenous Solutions Against Climate Catastrophe

Berkeley Center for New Media: History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

with Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
Linguist, writer, translator, language rights activist, and researcher ayuujk (mixe)
Introduced and moderated by Natalia Brizuela and Alex Saum-Pascual
Presented in partnership with the Center for Latin American Studies. Co-sponsored by Alianza UCMX, Spanish & Portuguese, the Arts Research Center, and The American Indian Graduate Program.

It is a myth of the West’s choosing: perpetual economic growth, advancing through a digestive system of sorts, one that uses technology as one of its core components. In its churn, ecosystems became goods; people, mere consumers. The myth turned the world into a place increasingly inhospitable to human life. An alternative, offered by Abya Yala, lies in separating economic development and the development of new technologies from consumerism. This would place technological creation and ingenuity once again at the service of the common good, not of the market. Technology as tequio; technological creation and innovation as a common good.

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Decolonial Dialogues

Decolonial Dialogues was established by a small group of researchers primarily based in the United Kingdom. However, many of them also have additional research affiliations, diaspora connections, ancestral ties and other cultural links to Algeria, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA.

It is their hope that the embryonic shared space will be shaped by a much broader network of creative ideas and critical perspectives, expressed and advanced via a growing group of new contributors and co-moderators.

A shared space for exchanging and advancing ideas and information about decolonising [decolonizing] knowledge – through activism, research, inclusive teaching and learning and creativity...

Journey into the site here.

The Anti-Racist Curriculum Project Guide

By working group members of the Anti-Racist Curriculum (ARC) project

The content ranges from briefings and overviews, provocation pieces with self-reflection, short films and visual sketches, outlines for workshops, and templates for planning to offer varying ways for colleagues to engage. Taken as a whole the ‘Guide’ resources have been built in sequential order for individuals/organisations to progress through their own personal and collective development via three levels: Foundations, Learning & reflecting, and planning & doing.

The Guide resources can be found here.

Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies

Edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith

    The Handbook of Critical Methodologies covers everything from the history of critical and indigenous theory and how it came to inform and impact qualitative research and indigenous peoples to the critical constructs themselves, including race/diversity, gender representation (queer theory, feminism), culture, and politics to the meaning of “critical” concepts within specific disciplines (critical psychology, critical communication/mass communication, media studies, cultural studies, political economy, education, sociology, anthropology, history, etc. – all in an effort to define emancipatory research and explore what critical qualitative research can do for social change and social justice.

    Read more here.

    Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea

    Edited by Rosalind Morris

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s original essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism’s “worlding” of the world. Spivak’s essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn.

    Eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak’s work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak’s essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates “Can the Subaltern Speak?” within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico.

    Read more here.

    Orientalism

    By Edward W. Said

    In this highly-acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism.

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