This week, regular BILD member Yecid Ortega is joined by guest blogger Andrés Valencia, an assistant professor at the Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Universidad del Valle (Cali), Colombia. Andrés holds a MA in Language and Literacies Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto. As a language teacher educator, his interests lie in the intersections among anti-colonial theory and practices, critical pedagogy, queer pedagogies, multiliteracies pedagogy, gender, and ethnic-racial categories in language teacher education. 

Decoloniality is a fashion. Postcoloniality is a desire. Anti-coloniality is a daily and permanent struggle.

(Rivera Cusicanqui, October 15,  2018)

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Work along the lines of decolonization has been gaining ground in the last decade. In fact, a quick search on Proquest between January 1, 2010 – April 1, 2021, hit around 7000 academic papers worldwide with this topic in the contents or title. Yecid, one of the authors of this essay reflection, visited La Paz (Bolivia) in the summer of 2021 and had the chance to talk to community organizers and scholars, including the well-known Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Atawallpa Oviedo Freire. They shared their concerns about the recent trend in White(ned) Western(ized) universities of engaging decolonial thought and research. We were not surprised to learn this, as we have been very critical of this trend in the academic and non-academic world.

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