Center for Global Studies and the Humanities

08Jul2009

Decolonizing Knowledge

Decolonizing Knowledges, is an undertaking that aims at enlarging the scope of the conversation (analysis and investigation) of the hidden agenda of modernity (that is, coloniality)in the sphere of knowledge and higher education. Who is producing knowledge? What institutions and disciplines legitimize it? What is knowledge for, who benefits from it? Decolonizing knowledge and de-colonial thinking starts by asking basic questions about the knowledge-making itself.
The increasing tendency of higher education to embrace corporate values and to train experts, is carried out under the assumption that better and more is the only viable horizon for the future of the human species and life in the planet. Recently, for example, a new graduate program to train experts to detect fashionable tendencies in the consumer society has been offered at several private European universities. While such doctorate program will train efficient experts to increase consumption and therefore production of fashionable commodities, and finally increase the profit of the corporations and the stock market, it won’t do much to improve inequities within regional and global society. Corporate values embrace the heart of modernity, progress and development. Our summer institute will question basic assumptions engrained in the idea of modernity, progress and development and will encourage thinking and living in search of non-corporate social and human values. Doubts about such horizons are growing within academic environment as well as in the public sphere at large. Doubts are not only expressed in critical comments and arguments with regard to the god-like figure of the expert, but are also generating distinct horizons of knowledge and understanding that the seminar will address as “decolonial horizon.”
We will arrive to this point by following three complementary and interrelated routes: a) addressing a set of crucial questions; b) locating
decolonial horizons
in contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity, the crisis of area studies and the limits of development; c) addressing the disorientation of science and technology (cfr., biotechnology and the pursuit of happiness) at the service of the market through the fictions of progress and development.

For more information, visit the course website.