Catherine WALSH (Ecuador)

Title of Speech: Pedagogies of the Decolonial: Political-Epistemic Insurgency, Critical Interculturality, and Cultural Studies in the Andes

Catherine Walsh is senior professor and director of the Latin American Cultural Studies Doctoral Program at the Universidad Andina Simˆun Bolˆqvar in Quito, Ecuador where she also directs the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino, a project dedicated to the recuperation of knowledge in Afro-Ecuadorian communities, and the Intercultural Workshop. She has been an invited professor and scholar throughout the Americas. Her current research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, decolonial thought and pedagogies, interculturality, and the political-epistemic force of present day Afro Andean and Indigenous movements, including with regard to the re-founding of State.

Her recent publications include, among others, Interculturalidad, Estado, Sociedad: Luchas (de)coloniales de nuestra ˆmpoca (Quito: Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar/Abya Yala, 2009); ¡§The (De)Coloniality of Knowledge, Life, and Nature: The N.A.-Andean FTA, Indigenous Movements, and Regional Alternatives,¡¨ in Shefner and Fernandez-Kelley (eds). Alternative Perspectives on Globalization: Status, Regions, and Movements, Pennsylvania State University Press, in press; ¡§(Post)Coloniality in Ecuador: The Indigenous Movement¡¦s Practices and Politics of (Re)signification and Decolonization,¡¨ in Moraña, Dussel, and  Jˆhuregui (eds.),  Coloniality at Large: The Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; ¡§Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies ¡§Others¡¨ in the Andes¡¨, Cultural Studies, 21, 2-3,  2007; and ¡§Afro-Andean Thought and Diasporic Ancestrality (with E. Leˆun), in Shifting the Geography of Reason: Gender, Science and Religion, Marina Banchetti and Clevis Headley (eds.), London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007..

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