Contribution short abstract:

This paper analyzes DGSKA congresses (2014-2024) revealing trends and exclusions in knowledge production. It argues that German academia's institutionalization of decolonial theory neutralizes its transformative potential, reproducing hierarchies. A shift toward anti-colonial praxis is proposed.

Contribution long abstract:

Academic congresses function as resonance forums that allow us to empirically analyze trends, legitimations and exclusions in the production of knowledge. In particular, the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) represents a privileged space to examine how German academia has processed, incorporated, and transformed the decolonial perspective. The period 2014-2024 is particularly significant, since 2014 marks the turning point when decolonial academic production reaches its historical maximum in publications and citations, paradoxically initiating its process of institutionalization and consequent depotentialization.

This paper proposes a critical analysis of a decade of DGSKA congresses as devices that reveal the limits and contradictions of the institutional appropriation of decolonial theory. My central argument is that while these academic spaces rhetorically embrace decolonial discourse, they simultaneously neutralize its transformative potential through mechanisms of selection, translation, and legitimation that reproduce geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge.

First, a critical mapping of how the “decolonial turn” has been incorporated into DGSKA conference agendas, panels and presentations during this decade is presented, revealing patterns of selection and exclusion. It then examines the tensions and paradoxes that arise as academic institutions in the Global North attempt to “decolonize” without substantially changing their power structures. Finally, a turn towards an anti-colonial praxis is proposed. In order to transcend the prevailing institutionalization of critical thinking within the European academic milieu

Contribution short abstract:

How to decolonize universities while working in this colonial, neoliberal institution shaped by intersectional inequalities? This contribution focuses on the resistant (everyday) practices of scholar activists within contradictory and precarious academic working conditions.

Contribution long abstract:

Universities play a central role in the legitimization, production and circulation of knowledge. These processes are political and involved in various forms of (re)production of intersectional inequalities and colonial continuities. Moreover, the ongoing economization of universities worldwide, further reinforce these power asymmetries despite a supposed institutional commitment to social justice and diversity.

Decolonial and feminist social movements and (academic) activists have been demanding and shaping a transformation of the higher education system for decades. But how is it possible to advocate for a more just transformation of society and science within an institution whose foundations, logics and practices repeatedly contradict this concern?

In my doctoral project, I approach this paradox from the perspective of marginalized early career academics at German universities who try to advocate for a Decolonization of science and higher education as “scholar activist” (Collins 2017) while "deal[ing] with the dialectics of un/doing epistemic violence" (Brunner 2023) in their academic work. More specifically, the focus of the research lies on the resistant strategies and (everyday) practices that these actors develop in the conflicting academic field of ethical contradictions, (colonial) power asymmetries and unequal working conditions. The role that un/communalizing decoloniality can play in this context will be discussed for this workshop.

The project is based on a qualitative intersectional approach that includes problem-centered interviews and participatory workshops. The aim is to collect and jointly develop limits and possibilities for political interventions as well as everyday resistant thinking and action strategies within, outside and against the neoliberal university.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper examines how Indigenous Universities in Mexico challenge epistemic oppression and transform decolonial knowledge. By centering Indigenous knowledge systems, communal learning, and anticolonial resistance, they disrupt Western academia, foster epistemic humility and dialogues of knowledge.

Contribution long abstract:

Indigenous knowledge systems have historically been erased through processes of epistemicides. While decolonial theories aim at incorporating Indigenous and marginalised knowledge in their modes of production, they often lack reflexion on mechanisms of epistemic oppression. Within this context, Indigenous Universities represent a critical step towards autonomous knowledge production through anticolonial resistance.

This paper explores how two Indigenous Universities in Mexico challenge these silences and propose a transformative approach to decolonial knowledge production. Through anticolonial epistemic resistance, these universities disrupt Western systems of knowledge by foregrounding local histories and alternative epistemologies.

Firstly, it examines how the Universidad Autónoma Comunal de Oaxaca and Universidad Campesina Indígena en Red in Mexico navigate silenced histories, disrupt hegemonic academic practices and centre Indigenous knowledge systems. They offer a critique of the predominant academic model through their horizontal organizational structures, communal learning, and research grounded in local fights for indigenous rights, territory and the recognition of ancestral and oral knowledge.

Secondly, it draws on pluritopic hermeneutics to reveal how Indigenous Universities challenge traditional academic knowledge production, advocating for deprofessionalised and anticolonial approaches to decolonial thought.

Lastly, it shows how they offer a new perspective on epistemic decolonialisation to decolonial discourses within Western academia by centring marginalised voices, highlighting the necessity of epistemic humility and recognising the practices of anticolonial movements as theories in their own right in order to engage with historically silenced and invisible forms of knowledge.

Contribution short abstract:

Using scholarship on East European informal food practices, this paper uncovers the marginalization of voices from epistemic peripheries within Europe along the East-West axis. It argues that the East should be read as a place producing novel knowledge on alternative food sustainabilities.

Contribution long abstract:

Using scholarship on East European informal food practices as a case study, this paper proposes that the processes of the exclusion and marginalization of academic voices from epistemic peripheries by the epistemic centre are not necessarily confined to interactions between the Global North and South but can also be uncovered much ‘closer to home’ - within Europe and along the East-West axis. At the same time, the centrality of the food system in damaging planetary ecosystems demands diversification of thinking about the concept of sustainability including knowledge from spaces outside the epistemic core. Deploying J. K. Gibson-Graham’s (2008) concept of reading for difference the paper reframes East European informal food practices (growing, sharing, foraging) as everyday sustainability and highlights this scholarship’s contribution to the efforts to reimagine a more inclusive and sustainable global food system. Epistemologically, this agenda is inspired by the calls to ‘decentre the West’ and ‘put the European East back on the map of knowledge production’ (Müller 2018). To support this goal empirically, the paper opens with a string of headline figures demonstrating the extent, stability and - largely unintended but actual - sustainability of East European everyday food practices. The paper then considers the reasons for the marginalization of this knowledge in international debates before making a case for the need to reverse the trend proposing that the European East should be read as a place producing novel and internationally relevant knowledge on alternative food sustainabilities.

Contribution short abstract:

Weaving together my lived experiences with theoretical frameworks as Latina scholar in the UK, I argue that the issue is not that marginalised scholars like myself aren't "enough" for Western academia; rather, European institutions themselves are "not enough" in embracing decolonial practices

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores the complexities of my migrant and academic journey, where dichotomies, power relationships, positionalities, vulnerabilities, and hopes intertwine. As an early career researcher and a Latina scholar working on decolonisation, I grapple with the inherent contradiction of pursuing decolonial work within Western academic institutions. Through a series of letters to myself, autoethnographic and autotheoretical accounts, I reflect on my journey as a Latin American scholar in UK higher education, weaving together my lived experiences with theoretical frameworks from sociology, decoloniality, feminism, and development studies.

The letter format enables a dialogue between multiple theoretical frameworks and deeply personal experiences of academic transition, serving not only as personal testimony but as theoretical interventions that challenge traditional academic ways of knowing, exploring the emotional landscape of existing between institutional and geographical borders – one marked by fear, isolation, and a persistent feeling of "not being enough" that haunts ECR, migrant and racialised scholars.

By acknowledging privilege and vulnerability within academia, I suggest that discussing these aspects, while uncomfortable, can create shared spaces to acknowledge collective pain and work towards healing and care. I advocate a shift from a language of power and victimhood around vulnerability to minimising our collective burdens through constructive anger, care and support, contributing to the dismantling of hierarchical systems of knowledge production and collective care. Ultimately, I argue that it's not that racialised migrant scholars are not 'enough' for Western academia, but rather that European institutions themselves are failing to truly embrace and realise their decolonial aspirations.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper examines how student-led liberation movements in Dutch universities challenge narratives of institutional crisis and reform. It explores how strategies of generative refusal challenge institutional co-optation, creating “pockets of possibility” for alternative ways of being and relating.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper examines how student-led liberation movements in Dutch universities challenge dominant narratives of institutional crisis and reform amidst a period of sweeping austerity measures and increasing campus securitization. Drawing on Savannah Shange’s (2019) concept of "carceral progressivism,” I explore how critiques of systemic injustice are absorbed by the university, repurposed as tools for institutional self-preservation, and weaponized against radical demands for structural change under the guise of inclusion. Far from conservative, the university turns out to be a "continuously complexly mutating entity” (Mbembe 2016, 32) where reforms succeed not despite, but through their collusion with disciplinary logics.

Drawing on ethnographic research with student-led liberation movements on campus, however, I highlight how carceral progressivism will always be "a formation on the move, vulnerable to encounter with its radical Other” (Shange 2019, 143). I explore how strategies of "generative refusal" (Simpson 2014) challenge the university’s co-optation of critical frameworks, advocating instead for a reimagining of knowledge- and subject-formation that transcends the academy’s onto-epistemological limits. Rather than repairing existing institutions as part of a linear, inevitable evolution toward ever greater forms of inclusion and universalism, these student movements invite us into what Harney and Moten (2013) would describe as the Undercommons—a fugitive space of relationality and world-making that exists beneath and beyond the institution’s reach. Ethnographically tracing these "pockets of possibility” within-against-beyond the university, I argue for a decoloniality that moves beyond reformist approaches, instead embracing abolitionist practices that dismantle harmful structures while nurturing possibilities for alternative ways of being and relating.