Kathleen Martin and Linda Murray (back row, ,2nd & 3rd from left) with Alice Feldman and students from the Critical Race & Decolonial Theories course.
To listen to their podcast click on the image on the right ->
Roskilde University Intercultural Studies,
Open seminar and Postcolonial Europe
book launch :
“(Anti)Racism in the University”
December 4, 2017, 1-4 pm
Although racism is being increasingly discussed in Danish universities, these discussions seldom take into account how the university itself is part of racism, among others by operating with — or leaving unquestioned — issues pertaining scientific validity, objectivity and universality. However, the recent public interest in the problem of the white curriculum, and the amount of positive and/or curious reactions to it, suggest that more reflection, in-depth discussion and debate are needed.
This public seminar invited such a discussion based on presentations by scholars whose work emphasizes problems of epistemic racism and its close connection to other structural expressions of racism. The presenters addresses questions as:
• What is the connection between epistemic racism and other structural expressions of racism?
• What are the alternative understandings of scientific validity, objectivity, and universality that continue being marginalized and/or ignored in white academia?
• How to understand and address the racial hierarchies and their operation in academia?
• What is meant by ‘decolonizing the university’?
Presenters:
Alice Feldman, Masters Programme in Race, Migration & Decolonial Studies, School of Sociology, University College Dublin.
José Arce, MA student, Global Refugee Studies. Coordinator of the reading group on Postcolonial Perspectives on Borders, Migration and Asylum
Yannick Nehemiah Antonio Harrison –Marronage
Tara Skadegaard Thorsen) and Christopher Macias Escalona. -FRONT
Discussant/moderator: Julia Suárez-Krabbe
Students from SOC40930 Critical Race & Decolonial Theories and the UCD Decolonising the Curriculum Platform following their interview with Ms Naledi Pandor South African Minister for Science & Technology (4th from left) and her delegation;
in association with staff from the School of Sociology MSocSc in Race, Migration and Decolonial Studies, the School of Physics/Space Science Group, and UCD Parity Studios.
UCD awarded the Minister an Honorary Doctorate of Science 6 December 2017
PODCAST (forthcoming)
VIDEO (forthcoming) - 'Astronomy for Development'
As Minister of Science & Technology in South Africa (2009-2012, 2014-to date), Ms. Naledi Pandor has been a tireless champion for the cause of science and scientific research. She and her team successfully won a competitive bid for the siting of part of the future Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope in South Africa. This will be a transformative piece of global astronomy infrastructure into the next decade and one of the largest scientific endeavours in history. Ms. Pandor is a powerful and enduring advocate for the importance of education and science in moving Africa forward, empowering its citizens and inspiring its children.
Decolonising the
Curiculum Platform
UCD
First Reflection Session:
Identity & Curriculum
13 February 2018, 1pm
Contemplation Space, Quinn Bldg
The Decolonising the Curriculum Platform is a network of students and staff that was established to create a space for us to cultivate a community of practice in which to collectively discuss and develop ideas, activities, projects and practices that realise the transformative and mutually edifying potentials of our different ways of being, thinking, and doing.
We had our first open discussion about how our identities and curriculum interact, in order to get thinking towards how who we are relates to our curricula and the university space we inhabit at UCD.
Decolonial Dialogues:
Knowledge, Control & Access
Tuesday, 10 April 2018
O'Brien Science Centre West B154A
This event is the second hosted by the Platform, following a group reflection held in February on Identity and the Curriculum.
It is intended to be a day of discussion and dialogue focused around our two speakers. The two sessions are scheduled to leave time after each for further discussion and networking.
Videos of talks forthcoming
11-12 Dr. Chamindra Weerawardhana (SIBEAL, Irish Feminist and Gender Studies Network)
‘Decolonial Dialogues, North to South: Towards an Intelligible Conversation’
Dr. Weerawardhana will critically engage with the idea of how we have to view 'decolonial epistemologies' and 'decolonising the curriculum' as processes that are in dialogue with each other and not ends within themselves in order to make decoloniality intelligible to wider global audiences
1-2 Dr. Marta Bustillo (UCD Librarian, College of Social Science and Law)
‘Information Access & the Decolonised Curriculum’
Dr. Bustillo will discuss the politics of the scholarly publications cycle, how they affect scholarship in the Global South, and how to use open scholarship to bridge the knowledge gap.
For further information contact: jimmy.billings@ucdconnect.ie, dyuti.chakravarty@ucdconnect.ie alice.feldman@ucd.ie
This event is supported by the UCD School of Sociology & the MSocSc Race, Migration & Decolonial Studies
Podcast & Video
Forthcoming!
Decoloniality: ‘There could never be only one centre from which to view the world but that different people in the world had their culture and environment at the centre. The relevant question [is] therefore how one centre relate[s] to other centres...’ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
As is immediately legible within the term itself, decoloniality arises from contexts of colonial subjugation and resistance to it. In academic, education and activist circles, we see the ‘term’ being used more and more frequently. Its significance and value is that it actively centres and implicates legacies of western Anglo-European projects of colonial subjugations and empire-building in the here and now – in the current landscapes of our political, social and economic organising.
This session of Decolonial Dialogues with Rolando Vasquez (University College Roosevelt) is a collaboration between Alice Feldman, Sive Bresnihan and David Nyaluke, and our respective organisational affiliations (UCD Sociology MA Race, Migration & Decolonial Studies, Comhlamh and UCD Proudly Made In Africa).
For us, decoloniality differs from other perspectives that foreground issues such as ‘voice’, ‘representation’ and ‘standpoint’. What makes it distinct is its recognition of the impossible reach of the western colonial mindset, the extent of the ‘coloniality of [our] being[s]’ (Sylvia Wynter) and the consequent limitations of the strategies we use to create change. There are no easy answers here.
The terms: colonial, anti-colonial, postcolonial, decolonial – what are the differences and why are they important?
As people engaged in social justice organising and education, what does the decolonial frame invite us to consider that is new?
How about decoloniality as a practice (embodied, ethical, political, creative, and committed to global justice)? What could that look like?
How to be cultivating a pluriverse through our work - arising through multiple knowledges, ways of knowing and being from a multitude of centres – rather than the universalising of particular worldviews?
Rolando Vázquez is associate professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and affiliated researcher at the Gender Studies Department and at the Research institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Utrecht. He coordinates the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School together with Walter Mignolo for the last nine Years. He has been engaged with the movement of Decolonial Aesthesis. He curated the workshop: 'Staging the End of the Contemporary' for MaerzMusik at the Berliner Festspiele in 2017. He co-authored the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam in 2016. Through his work he seeks to develop practices of thinking and learning that transgress the dominant frameworks of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and coloniality. His research on the question of precedence and relational temporalities seeks to overcome the western critique of modernity and contribute to the ongoing efforts to decolonize knowledge, aesthetics and subjectivity.
Drawing on the notion of “multiple Europes” developed elsewhere, the paper refers to the EU’s overseas territories as “forgotten Europe” in order to reveal the coloniality of geopolitical knowledge that actively produces them as absent from and unthinkable within EU discourse. The paper subsequently focuses on Europe’s remaining colonial possessions in the Caribbean and their corresponding geographical referent, Caribbean Europe, in order to argue that the unthinkable concept as well as reality of Caribbean Europe fundamentally challenges established understandings of Europe, a white European identity and the European Union.
Podcast & Video
Forthcoming!
Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology with a focus on macrosociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany. Her work on world-systems analysis, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, gender in modernity/coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe and Latin America has appeared in the Journal of World-Systems Research, Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Political Power and Social Theory, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, Theory, Culture and Society, and Current Sociology. She is author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism, Ashgate 2015 and co-editor (with E. Gutiérrez Rodríguez and S. Costa) of Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches, Ashgate 2010 and of the Current Sociology monograph issue Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective (with V. Bashi Treitler), 2016.
Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge,
speaking on
'Black Self-Representation & Organising in London'
from her forthcoming book
Insurgent Empire:
Anticolonialism and the Making of British Dissent
21 February, 1pm
D418 Newman Building
In her book, Insurgent Empire, Priyamvada Gopal deftly excavates the ways in which Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience, but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. Gopal critically examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. This talk will focus on the pivotal role in fomenting dissent played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.
Diversity Week 2021
Paula Carolina Martinez Pavon, Diversity Officer, UCD Student Union
