Presented by the Latinx Research Center at UC Berkeley this event was held in Honor of Maria Lugones
The Decolonial Knowledges Research Initiative Presented “Decolonizing Epistemologies: A Conversation with Latinx Philosophers.” The round table discussed the politics of epistemological decolonization, particularly with respect to philosophical and/or spiritual thought. The dialogue will engage a deeper understanding of how the project of multiple/plural philosophies/worldviews/ways of knowing directly contribute to a campus and classroom (and more broadly, social/national) climate of knowledge and respect for POC cultures/being
Speakers included:
PJ DiPietro works at the intersection of decolonial feminisms, women of color thinking, Latinx studies, and trans* studies. They are Assistant Professor and graduate studies director in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University, New York. With a transdisciplinary approach, they engage anthropology, human geography, and philosophy. They are co-editor of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones (2019) and their single-author manuscript will be published under the title “Sideways Selves, The Decolonizing Politics of Trans* Matter Across the Américas.” They collaborate with various organizations committed to social justice, including the Democratizing Knowledge Collective, the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), the decolonial philosophy collaborative REC-Latinoamérica, and the travesti collectives Damas de Hierro and Futuro TransGenérico.
Mariana Ortega works on Latina/x feminisms, phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, and aesthetics. She is the author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016). She is co-editor with Andrea Pitts and José Medina of Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance (2020); and co-editor with Linda Martín-Alcoff of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (2009). She is the founder and director of the Latina/x Feminisms Roundtable.
Chela Sandoval is a Xican* Genizara feminist philosopher and liberationist. Sandoval teaches liberation aesthetics, critical cultural theory, and US Third World feminism for the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.Sandoval defines SWAPA as “StoryTelling-Witnessing Wor(l)d Art Performance Activism.” SWAPA enacted within a “nahuala-witness-nahuala” ceremony concretize the principles of a Metodología de la Emancipación—a methodology of emancipation (2018, UNAM Press.)
Gabriela Veronelli is affiliated with the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina). She is Visiting Researcher at the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. Her research explores the relationship between language and power in colonial situations from a decolonial lens that advocates the radically different perspective of colonized traditions regarding language, understanding, expressivity, and meaning-making at the point of colonial encounter. Her work has been published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Polifonia, Wagadu: Journal of Translation, Women and Gender Studies, among others.
Event was co-sponsered by:
The Center for Latin American Studies
The Chicana/o Studies Program
Ivonne del Valle, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Department of Rhetoric
Social Science Matrix