Debate: Let’s decolonise!

The debate on decoloniality is raging! But what does it mean to decolonise something? How can we decolonise our curriculum? When we debate diversity, it is inevitable to ask questions about the prevalent paradigms that surround us and have shaped our institutions, our curriculums, and our thoughts. In order to truly understand what we mean by diversity, we must have conversations about alternative ways of thinking and conceiving the world, as well as alternative views on architecture, planning and design. We must learn to decolonise our minds.

This is the first of a series of debates with scholars and practitioners on issues of diversity and inclusion organised by the BK Diversity Group.

In this talk, Rolando offers an option for thinking and doing beyond the dominant paradigms. Decoloniality provides a critical analysis of modernity understood broadly as the western project of civilization. Decolonial thought seeks to overcome the dominion of western epistemology and aesthetics and their embedded eurocentrism and anthropocentrism.

Rolando Vázquez is a teacher and decolonial thinker. Vázquez is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and Cluster Chair at the University College Utrecht. Since 2010, he co-directs with Walter Mignolo the annual Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School, now hosted by the Van Abbemuseum. In 2016, under the direction of Gloria Wekker, he co-authored the report "Let’s do Diversity" of the University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission. Vázquez's work places the question of the possibility of an ethical life at the core of decolonial thought and advocates for the decolonial transformation of cultural and educational institutions. His most recent publication is "Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary" (Mondriaan Fund 2020).

Registration and more information

• For registration, please send an email to the BK Diversity Group.
• Please contact the BK Diversity Group for more information.