DECOLONIZING DECOLONIALITY:
A VIEW FROM DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD
We hear calls from around the world to decolonize, diversify, and decenter knowledge production and dissemination. But what does this really mean in different contexts, who is participating, and whose interests are served? For the last two years, the GDC has been hosting a series of community-wide conversations about Decolonizing Decoloniality. So far, scholars from Mexico, Indonesia, Taiwan, Mozambique and Angola, and Argentina have shared their experiences and practices. See the playlist of our previous conversations.
Upcoming conversation: Perspectives from Ukraine and Georgia
April 4th, 12pm UTC/ 4pm in Tbilissi / 2pm Paris and Basel / 8am in Boston
Link to every time zone + calendar event attached
Though not the first space to come to mind when discussing colonialism, the “post-Soviet” space, which is just as diverse as the “post-British” or “post-French” imperial space, has been the scene of rising debates on decolonization. Ukraine and Georgia are two countries where these discussions are not purely scientific, but strongly (geo)political and topical, as they both face on-going neo-imperial aggression. The intellectual debates, starting from how colonial the Russian and Soviet empires were, are lively, within national and transnational academic communities, and draw both on long traditions of anti-imperial thought in these regions and on intensive exchange with contemporary decolonial thought. After sketching these diverse intellectual spaces, we will explore the political uses of “decolonization” by various actors in both countries, including the state itself and civil society actors. We will focus on decolonization as practice – decolonizing public space, rethinking citizens of both countries as colonial subjects, questioning the “metropole mindset” and internalized hierarchies, changing research practices, rejecting extractivism, creating rebel archives.
Olena Palko is a historian of Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on minority history in Ukraine and the Soviet Union. She is an assistant professor at the University of Basel. She studied political science and philosophy at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv and obtained her doctorate in political science at the Institute of Political Science and Ethnology at the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev. She then finished her PhD in history at the University of East Anglia in 2017. She is the author of Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and a co-editor of Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth Century (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2022), and Ukraine’s Many Faces. Land, People, and Culture Revisited (transcript Verlag, 2023). Her latest publications also include “Away from Russia? History Writing Before, During, and After the War”, Revolutionary Russia (2024); “To Whom the Past Belongs: The History of Ukraine and the Limits of Area Studies”, in Volodymyr Kravchenko (ed.) The Unpredictable Past? Reshaping Russian, Ukrainian, and East European Studies. (CIUS Press, 2024); with Kateryna Botanova “From the Decolonial à la Russe to the Colonial à la Ukrainienne”, Forum for Modern Language Studies (2024).
Ketevan Gurchiani is a professor of anthropology and the head of the Research Center for Anthropology at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. She did her graduate studies in Classics at Tbilissi State University and at the University of Freiburg (Germany), where she was awarded her PhD. Originally focusing on religion, she became an anthropologist, through post-doctoral work at Oxford, UCLA, Columbia and NYU. Her primary research areas currently include the exploration of everyday religion, urban anthropology with a focus on urban nature and human – non-human relations, and informal resistance practices. In addition, she investigates themes such as migration and peace practices. Since 2020, Gurchiani has led the project titled “Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage” (https://urbanassemblage.iliauni.edu.ge). Her latest publications include “Nested Liminalities: Death, Migration and Pandemic among Georgians in Russia” (with Mariam Darchiashvili), Revue Européenne des Migrations internationales (2023), “On the Hidden Power of Trees: Urban Resistance in Tbilisi” in Verdeckter Widerstand in demokratischen Gesellschaften. Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (2022), and “A gallery of ghosts: death and burial in lands marked by trauma” (with Catherine Wanner, Zuzanna Bogumil, Sergei Shtyrkov) in Material Religion. The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (2023).
The conversation will be facilitated by Masha Cerovic. A French historian of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, she focuses on experiences of war and violence in the borderlands, specifically Belarus and Ukraine under Nazi occupation, and Russian imperial expansion in the Southern Caucasus in the late 19th century. She currently heads the Center for Russian, Eastern-European, Caucasian and Central Asian Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris.
It will take place online (Zoom) in English with automated translation available:
Previous conversations
Mexico – Federico Besserer (Professor of Anthropology, Autonomous Metropolitan University) and Dahil Melgar (Chief Curator, National Museum of Cultures of the World), facilitated by Peggy Levitt (Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology, Wellesley College). Recording available in Spanish (with English subtitles).
Indonesia – Sita Hidaya (Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta) and Judith Schlehe (Professor in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Freiburg), facilitated by Sanderien Verstappen (University of Vienna, Austria). Recording available in English.
Taiwan – Prof. Hongzen Wang (Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Director of the Austronesian Studies Center, and the Dean of Si Wang College at National Sun Yat-Sen University) facilitated by Ken Chih-Yan Sun, (Associate Professor at Villanova University). Recording unavailable. In English.
Mozambique and Angola – Ines Raimundo (Eduardo Mondiane University in Mozambique), Prof. Higino Lombe (Auxiliary Prof at the University of Culto Cuanavale In Angola), and Prof. Isaías Falau (Assistant Professor at the Superior Institute of Social Sciences and International Relations in Angola), facilitated by Alvaro Lima, Research Director at the Boston Planning and Development Agency. Recording available in Portuguese and English (with subtitles).
Argentina – Máximo Badaró and Silvina Merenson (EIDAES UNSAM/CONICET), facilitated by Patricia Lepratti (IDES-UNGS), Luciana Denardi (UNSAM/CONICET), and Ezequiel Saferstein (UNSAM/CONICET). Recording available in Spanish (with English subtitles)
In the Archives – François Dansereau (Director of The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada and a Course Lecturer at the McGill University School of Information Studies) and Bérengère Piret (professor of contemporary history and archival science at the UCLouvain and archivist at the Archives de l’Etat in Belgium), facilitated by Nora El Qadim (University Paris 8 and Institut universitaire de France). Recording unavailable.