Toward a Decolonial Path A Lunchtime Discussion with Rolando Vázquez - Thursday 15 November, 1pm.

Toward a Decolonial Path

A Lunchtime Discussion with Rolando Vázquez

University College Roosevelt

Thursday, 15 November, 1pm

Comlamh, 12 Parliament St Dublin

Registration required, tickets free

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/toward-a-decolonial-path-tickets-52090856153

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.