Wth Dr. Farid Alatas.
In recent years, decoloniality has become a powerful slogan calling to transform the humanities and social sciences and education at large. Scholars have denounced that the longstanding consequences of colonialism include the obliteration of diversity which ultimately impoverished our understanding of society, economics, or politics. In what concerns education, science and technology and the development of intellectual capacities, this move has been important for many reasons. First for recognizing that practices long established by modern European colonialism are silently entrenched within basic operations of knowledge production, including the formation of future scholars and scientists. The so-called decolonial turn has also helped us to understand that the obliteration of diversity – understood as the annihilation of representation of different racial, gender and sexual, class and caste identities – is part of a project reinforced by European imperialism which started in the 15th century and damaged society in its capacity to be inclusive and science in its capacity to be socially relevant.
Our course is developed as an open platform for discussing these issues observing histories, achievements, critiques, and limits of the decolonial turn, listening to possible developments for renewed liberatory projects and pathways of autonomous thinking in Social Sciences.
