This workshop provides a space for conversations and collaborations around the theme of ‘Decolonial Transformations’. The world we currently inhabit has been structured significantly by imperial and colonial rule. While colonization was resisted over the longer durée, the decolonization movements of the last seventy years consolidated and institutionalised these efforts. This has led to the beginning of a fracturing of the colonial world order. This fracturing remains incomplete.

Coloniality continues to be pervasive as a structuring force in the world, often manifesting as the modernist control of nature and civil society, racialised divisions of labour, Eurocentric social theories, global governance regimes that institutionalise asymmetric relations (in trade, natural resources and capital), racialised migration regimes, disqualification of ‘non-Western’ modes of knowing, demonization of specific identities and xenophobia, and the silencing and erasure of subaltern histories. While struggling against these forms of coloniality, there is an urgent need for imagining and realising transformations that can help build alternate decolonial worlds and sustainable futures.

A key aim of the workshop is to think about and discuss how to move recent conversations around coloniality and decolonial transformations forward, linking academic scholarship with art, activism, and everyday life. This workshop brings together scholars, artists, students and activists to collaboratively imagine and reflect upon decolonial processes. It aims to further cooperative engagement in and among movements aimed at decolonial transformations, for realising educational justice, ecological regeneration and pluriversal futures.

The workshop will include a variety of different events and forums over two and a half days, including panel discussions, interviews, interactive and participatory workshops, and creative spaces and performances. The afternoon workshops will be streamed to bring together work in Scholarship, Art, and Activism.

This workshop is a collaboration between SOAS and the University of Sussex. We welcome you to join us in 3 days of conversations and collaborations on ‘decolonial transformations’.