Social movements, civil society actors, indigenous peoples, critical, and activist scholars are increasingly calling to decolonize research and universities. To decolonize, or to adopt a decolonial praxis, means to engage with colonial continuities and the consequences of these throughout our social world. A decolonial approach offers a framework of thinking and acting that aims to dismantle these prevailing structures, to question and challenge naturalized hierarchies and dichotomies opening space for new approaches and other knowledge systems.
There is not one approach to ‘decolonizing’, neither is it an activity or a project to be completed. Rather it is “a way of being, thinking, doing and becoming in the world” (Mignolo, 2014).
A group of students and employees of BOKU have started to engage with decolonial theories and decolonial practice with the aim of discussing and initiating decoloniality at BOKU. The first outcome is a guide and collection of resources on decolonization at universities and colleges in Austria. The guide serves as a collection of different opportunities for change and presents a diversity of approaches from different contexts.
You can download the guide here.
[currently only in German, we are working on a translation]
Mignolo, Walter D. (2014) “Further Thoughts on (De) Coloniality.” In PostcolonialityDecoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker, 10-51. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.