decolonialism
Ramón Grosfoguel
In this podcast, Puerto Rican sociologist and activist Ramón Grosfoguel guides us through centuries of obscurantism in Europe: from Christopher Columbus’s meeting with Queen Isabella in Granada on 11 January 1492 to the debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepulveda that laid the groundwork for the biological and culturalist racism that persists to this day. In doing so, he dismantles the Doctrine of Discovery and the universalist and ahistorical assumptions of Eurocentrism and modernity that still abound in academia.
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez
David Yubraham Sánchez
In this podcast, cultural manger and mediator David Yubraham Sánchez expands on critical thoughts formulated in educational spaces, in constant conversation with others—an exercise in examining racist and colonial patterns in order to dismantle fictitious equivalences in the name of diversity. Thinking-by-doing—with collective work as his main methodology—gives rise to a profusion of tips, strategies and objectives to guide the work of anti-racist mediation, education, and cultural programming. This involves problematising the hollowing out of rights and cultural policies, identifying absences and erasures in democratic memory and national heritage, and implementing the political practice of listening.
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.