Between 2018 and 2020, when I was working alongside student activists in Honduras, I often reflected upon the importance of situating decolonial thought in sites of struggle. I critiqued the textualism that seemed to be taking prominence in decolonial scholarship in the United States. I was also seeing a tendency in the Global North, particularly the scholarship that had little to say about social movements and the knowledges, educational experiences, and pedagogical practices created/constructed in the process of resisting, organizing, and building collectives and relational political subjectivities. I did not know then that my future work would primarily focus on situating decolonial thought in entangled sites of struggle. Without a doubt, the student movement's collective project to radically democratize the university taught me how to see more clearly the entangled global/local forces student activists and other movements were up against. In other words, there were global-local frictions that were made more visible as students took direct action, confronted the police, and took over the university for months at a time, reclaiming university space and thus making it possible to transform the university plaza into a space in which popular and political education could take place. Students held public assemblies and political workshops to not only talk about neocolonial/neoliberal higher education reforms. Most importantly, they discussed the broader sociopolitical context that saw the emergence of social and territorial movements after the US-backed coup of 2009. The dictatorial regime imposed by the US created the material conditions of possibility for campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Inidgenous communities to organize and reclaim the territories the authoritarian government intended to sell to the highest bidders (e.g., ZEDES).
Insurgent Decolonial Thought
Insurgent Decolonial Thought
Insurgent Decolonial Thought
Between 2018 and 2020, when I was working alongside student activists in Honduras, I often reflected upon the importance of situating decolonial thought in sites of struggle. I critiqued the textualism that seemed to be taking prominence in decolonial scholarship in the United States. I was also seeing a tendency in the Global North, particularly the scholarship that had little to say about social movements and the knowledges, educational experiences, and pedagogical practices created/constructed in the process of resisting, organizing, and building collectives and relational political subjectivities. I did not know then that my future work would primarily focus on situating decolonial thought in entangled sites of struggle. Without a doubt, the student movement's collective project to radically democratize the university taught me how to see more clearly the entangled global/local forces student activists and other movements were up against. In other words, there were global-local frictions that were made more visible as students took direct action, confronted the police, and took over the university for months at a time, reclaiming university space and thus making it possible to transform the university plaza into a space in which popular and political education could take place. Students held public assemblies and political workshops to not only talk about neocolonial/neoliberal higher education reforms. Most importantly, they discussed the broader sociopolitical context that saw the emergence of social and territorial movements after the US-backed coup of 2009. The dictatorial regime imposed by the US created the material conditions of possibility for campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Inidgenous communities to organize and reclaim the territories the authoritarian government intended to sell to the highest bidders (e.g., ZEDES).