Abstract This article explores the ways in which physical scientists, especially in the geosciences, are responding to calls to decolonise university curricula in current conjunctural conditions. It ...asserts that it is crucial not to strip decolonisation of its radical political potential and reduce it to an instrumental Equity, Diversion and Inclusion (EDI) initiative. Geoscientists in higher education who wish to decolonise their curricula must also pay attention to epistemological pluralism, politics, and colonial violence and free themselves from Eurocentric legacies of positivism, universality and objectivity. They must also make the turn to social theory, in ways that address the politics of geologic matter and the modes of violence that geoscientific practice and knowledge reproduce. Engaging with curricular decolonisation has potential not only to arrest the decline being experienced by the geosciences, but to make the forced neoliberal mergers between geography and geology less painful and more intellectually productive.
Short Abstract This article explores the ways in which physical scientists, especially in the geosciences, are responding to calls to decolonise university curricula in current conjunctural conditions. It asserts that geoscientists who wish to decolonise their curricula must pay attention to epistemological pluralism, politics, and colonial violence and free themselves from Eurocentric legacies of positivism, universality and objectivity. Engaging with curricular decolonisation has potential not only to arrest the decline being experienced by the geosciences, but to make the forced neoliberal mergers between geography and geology less painful and more intellectually productive.
Abstract This article constitutes a response to Matthew Gandy’s article ‘Books under threat: Open access publishing and the neo‐liberal academy in the form of a conjunctural analysis’. It discusses ...the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) open‐access proposal for book publications in the context of broader and chilling attacks on academic freedom driven in large part by the current government and supported by UKRI. It argues that there is a lot at stake, not just our ability as academics to publish in university and activist presses, but also our ability to express our solidarity with Palestine, to defend the rights of transgender people, to withdraw our labour and engage in other political actions and forms of expression in the face of oppression.
Short Abstract This article responds to Matthew Gandy’s contention thatacademic book publications are currently under threat as a result of UKRI policies.It provides a conjunctural analysis of these trends to analyse the threats toacademic labour and expression more broadly.
Stories of decolonial resilience Glynn, Kevin; Cupples, Julie
Cultural studies (London, England),
07/2024, Volume:
38, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Many scholars, analysts and commentators have noted that the neoliberal conjuncture has seen the rise of a veritable explosion of discourses and theories of resilience. Some regard this discursive ...and narrative profusion as integral to the ongoing project of a neoliberal 'worlding' that seeks to reconfigure all aspects of human subjectivities and social relations. Meanwhile, the ongoing outpouring of neoliberal discourses and narratives of resilience is accompanied by the expansion of disasterscapes across the planet as we speed apparently toward what the Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter calls an 'unparalleled catastrophe for our species'. Some of these expanding disasterscapes are emerging across the terrain of a five-hundred-year history of genocidal and appropriative colonial practices. The people and communities inhabiting these disasterscapes have been struggling to develop counter-praxes of collective cultural resilience and survival in the face of the many catastrophes wrought over the centuries by coloniality. We turn to Wynter's concept of homo narrans to examine Indigenous praxes for the performative enactment of alternative genres of the human that contest the worlding of neoliberal discourses and apparatuses of resilience. Wynter's contributions to the de-universalization and thus relativization of Eurocentric 'Man' aim to make the present proliferation of the genres of humanity, our storytelling species, culturally intelligible in ways that might not only undercut the work done by neoliberal discourses of resilience toward the production of disastrous consequences in places like Guatemala and the obliteration of our capacities to imagine the world otherwise, but perhaps even ward off the potentially impending 'unparalleled catastrophe for our species'. This paper draws on our ongoing research in Guatemala, which involves Indigenous and poor ladino survivors of the 2018 eruption of the Fuego Volcano, as well as survivors of the 2005 landslide that followed Hurricane Stan.
Love in the Time of Covid-19 Cupples, Julie
Journal of Latin American geography,
10/2020, Volume:
19, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The Nicaraguan government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been nothing short of absurd. Rather than implementing measures advised by the public health experts, the government has been ...organizing mass gatherings and hiding the scale of infection. This essay argues that current governmental behavior is both consistent with and a continuation of the crimes against humanity committed in 2018 and 2019.
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