Keynote speaker, Prof. Walter Mignolo (Duke University)
The Humanities (and I would say the Human Sciences in European vocabulary, including the Humanities and Social Sciences) have a short story but they are a crucial field of knowing and doing in Western Civilization and scholarship. The Humanities were and still are a powerful tool of coloniality of knowledge. Coloniality of knowledge refers to Western imposition and/or local non-Western collaboration to supplant non-Western knowledges and praxis of knowing, in the non-Western world. Since the European Re-naissance, the Humanities (theologically framed), and since the nineteenth century, the Social Sciences (that emerged in an already secular frame) were two pillars of the epis-temic coloniality and of colonial consciousness. In the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of decoloniality is bringing about decolonial consciousness and the call, in many venues (from South Africa to Amsterdam), to decolonize knowledge, the university, the curriculum. What may this decolonial conscious-ness mean?
The public lecture is organized by the Doctoral Program "Migration and Postcoloniality Meet Switzerland" and the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).
