- Convenor:
-
Srimoyee Biswas
(Trinity College Dublin)
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- Chair:
-
Naveen Gautam
(Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent and Major Group of Children and Youth)
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Stream:
- Decolonising knowledge, power & practice
Short Abstract
This roundtable reimagines decolonisation beyond minority framings of race and gender, centring the global majority through the UN-endorsed principles advanced by the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent.
Description
The roundtable aims to bring together scholars and practitioners to rethink what decolonisation means when anchored in the experiences of the global majority. Too often, decolonial debates in academic and policy spaces remain confined to polarised questions of race and gender rooted in minority contexts, overlooking how caste, descent-based discrimination, and structural exclusions shape the lives of billions.
This discussion for this particular roundtable will foreground the work of the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (GFoD), which has been instrumental in articulating a truly global and inclusive vision of justice. Building on the UN-endorsed principles advanced by GFoD, the discussion will examine how decolonisation must reckon with entrenched hierarchies of caste, forced labour, and descent-based exclusion if it is to move beyond the narrow frames that currently dominate.
Participants will engage with questions such as: What does it mean to speak of decolonisation from the standpoint of the global majority, rather than through minority lenses? How might global policy frameworks draw on grassroots struggles against caste, untouchability, slavery, and analogous systems of oppression? And how can we ensure that discourses of decolonisation neither reproduce exclusions nor remain tethered to Euro-American preoccupations?
By weaving together perspectives from across regions and struggles, this roundtable aims to unsettle the existing frames of decolonial thought and practice, offering instead a wider horizon that recognises and centres the voices, labour, and visions of the global majority.
Accepted contributions
Contribution short abstract
Community-led archive that reimagines Delhi’s villages as living sites of caste, land, and labour struggles, showing how urban development reproduces colonial erasures while restoring agency to those long denied authorship of their own stories.
Contribution long abstract
This contribution draws on my ongoing work with the Dilli Dehat Project, an online archive that reimagines Delhi as a living landscape of more than 300 villages. As someone born and raised in a village of delhi and engaged in community-centred activism for over seven years, I situate this work within the everyday realities of our villages.
Delhi’s villages offer a stark illustration: communities whose ancestral presence predates the modern state now find their cultural geographies buried under urbanisation, their livelihoods disrupted by exclusionary planning, and their knowledge systems made invisible in policy frameworks.
Through the Dilli Dehat archive, I document oral histories, photographs, local deities, rituals, dried johads, ridge commons, and everyday cultural practices that reveal how caste, labour, land, and nature intersect to shape lived experience. These fragments help illicit deeper questions about whose heritage is preserved, whose suffering is normalised, and whose futures are foreclosed in the name of progress.
My intervention will explore three interconnected arguments.
First, decolonisation must account for descent‑based exclusions, caste, occupational hierarchies, landlessness, and the structural neglect of rural peripheries that continue to shape the lives of millions in South Asia.
Second, urban development in Delhi has reproduced colonial logics of extraction, enclosure, and erasure, creating new internal refugees whose cultural memory is dismissed as “obsolete.”
Third, community‑led archives like the Dilli Dehat Project can contribute to reimagining development by restoring agency to the communities who have historically been denied authorship of their own stories.
Contribution short abstract
The purpose of this proposal is to discuss the concept of privileged vulnerability in the context of climate-related disasters. It highlights matters of agency, unequal distribution of risk, and calls for a critical review of environmental and social policies.
Contribution long abstract
Some of the points to be brought forward in this discussion regard:
- Sustainable welfare in theory and practice;
- Green Growth and its impact on the less privileged;
- Overview of mainstream climatic policies in the EU;
- Affluent communities as ‘environmentally privileged’, but also as ‘polluter elites’;
- Power imbalances in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of current environmental/public policies;
- Need for decolonisation of disaster management.
The proposed topic aims to expand analyses on disaster management and environmental/public policies through a critical lens. In this light, the specific discussion is expected to address the existence of power imbalances in the process of risk prevention and mitigation, which contribute not only to the acceleration of climate change but also to an ever-growing global inequality that leaves lower-income communities disproportionately affected. It is, then, considered important to orient future public policy analyses to the deconstruction of the neo-colonial norms embedded in disaster/climate change management, while pointing to the need for a socially and environmentally just model of evaluation.