O design é considerado, no artigo, como um instrumento ontológicocapaz de transformar a realidade social e cultural e modelar aexperiência humana, a subjetividade e o ambiente. Concentro-me nasinterseções entre a compreensão de Tony Fry a respeito do designontológico e a interpretação decolonial da modernidade/colonialidadecomo um design global que determina a relação entre o mundo, as coisase os humanos. O artigo tenta traçar uma divisão entre os designsontológicos positivo (re-existentes) e negativo (desfuturizantes).Aborda a colonialidade do design que controla e disciplina nossapercepção e interpretação do mundo, de outros seres e das coisas, deacordo com certos princípios legitimados. A colonialidade do designtem acompanhado as utopias universalistas modernas predominantes, comoo marxismo ou o liberalismo e tem sofrido resistência, internamentee externamente, através de várias manifestações do pensamentoe da existência fronteiriços. Eu analiso o conceito de Fry dedesfuturização em relação ao conceito decolonial de pluriversalidade.Isso permite abordar mais detalhadamente o princípio correlacionaldinâmico como central para o design ontológico decolonial. Entre asferramentas especificamente decoloniais de design ontológico positivo,eu me concentro no Sumak Kawsay, na Democracia Terrestre e em maisalgumas iniciativas especificamente originadas nos movimentos sociaisde povos originários das regiões fronteiriças da Eurásia. O artigotambém aborda a descolonização de uma esfera afetiva como fundamentopara um design ontológico positivo. Por fim, defendo a necessidadede provincializar o design ocidental/do norte e permitir que odesign decolonial no Sul Global desenvolva sua fronteira “tantoquanto” posicionalidade positiva, uma postura transcultural negociala partir da geopolítica local e corpo-política colocar em diálogoe disputa com o moderno/colonial desarmamento design premissas.

Postkolonialność powinna być postrzegana jako ludzka kondycja, sytuacja egzystencjalna, podczas gdy dekolonialność jest opcją, świadomie wybraną jako pozycja polityczna, etyczna i epistemiczna. Takie niekonwencjonalne rozumienie terminów „postkolonialny” i „dekolonialny” pozwala przekroczyć długotrwałą rywalizację i geopolityczne podziały między studiami postkolonialnymi a opcją dekolonialną za pośrednictwem optyki i dyskursów postsocjalistycznych i postzależnościowych. Postsocjalistyczna interwencja wprowadza szereg pojęć niezbędnych do analizy relacji postsocjalistycznych i postkolonialnych. Wśród nich można wymienić imperialną różnicę, geopolitykę i korpopolitykę wiedzy, bycia, płci i odczuwania, dekolonialną estetykę oraz odwrócenie kierunków czasowych w kontekście postsowieckim. Dyskurs postkolonialny musi zostać skontekstualizowany i zradykalizowany. Oznacza to przejście od wyjaśniania „innego” w języku zrozumiałym dla niego samego do oderwania się od retoryki nowoczesności z jej ukrytą logiką kolonialną i prześledzenia innych genealogii wiedzy i aktywizmu oraz innych sposobów interpretowania nowoczesności / kolonialności.

Starting from the premise that any childhood is existentially tragic, this fictionalised memory reflects on the last Soviet generation of children as a lost generation. This chapter is written as a memory stream based on free associations, and it dwells on the major leitmotifs and recurrent sensibilities that have shaped the author’s experience as a member of this generation. Following her personal trajectory, the memory stream refers to the symbol of the vertical, to the sense of being lost both literally and symbolically, to specific ways and strategies of hiding in her own world and rejecting the outside reality. These personal paths combine with more general patterns of double consciousness and redoubling of the world that generated a cynical framework in its late-Soviet children’s version: an urge to make their own escapist forms of alternative realities and internal emigration models in the decade just before perestroika. The chapter touches upon key late-Sovietoppositions that children of the 1970s learned to identify from early on in order to survive. It also considers the ethnic-racial and religious differences that affected the lost generation’s internalerosive processes.

This chapter problematizes methodologies as a Euromodern/colonial epistemic framework. It reflects upon alternative decolonial instruments of analysis and broader practices of knowing and making sense of the world, which escape conventional methodological definitions. Methodology is seen as a specific classifying operation that is rationally limited by default and distorting for those who are not part of the Euromodern sameness. Revisiting decolonial and Indigenous texts while claiming to do away with modern/colonial methodologies or entering into an intense debate with them, this chapter argues that there is a corpus of core decolonial feminist texts (by scholars such as Chela Sandoval, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, María Lugones, and Gloria Anzaldúa) that have engaged in dialogue with each other and, at different levels, with major methodological issues, and have come up with an open approach of relational experiential epistemic togetherness. The author addresses its main elements, including defamiliarization, decolonial hermeneutics, the corpopolitics and geopolitics of knowledge, being, sensing, the “Coatlicue state” and “la facultad” (as described in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands 1987). This chapter overall argues for emerging transversal decolonial agendas that advocate a shift towards imagining a redirected future that would come to life through the agency of changing communities and coalitions striving for re-existence.

A central concept of decolonial thought, “coloniality,” was coined by A. Quijano at an uneasy moment of the collapse of state socialism and discrediting of its utopia, and the arrival of neoliberal globalisation as the only legitimate narrative. Decoloniality is a reflection of disillusionment and a subsequent transference of decolonisation rhetoric from embodied anticolonial political struggles to the spheres of knowledge production and aesthesis. This meant at once a deeper critical delve into the modern/colonial mechanisms of the production of knowledge and subjectivities, but also a potential danger of depoliticisation. Whitewashed and sanitised “decolonial studies” or “decolonial theory” that fail to see the profound differences between postcolonial theory and decoloniality and often substitute decoloniality for deconstruction, yet keep the Euromodern epistemic framework intact, is what we find today in European and especially Nordic contexts. They are often marked by a blindness towards their own specific colonial trajectories and especially the imperial difference, and the struggles of indigenous peoples. A thorough decolonial revisiting of the Nordic colonial trajectories including the early suspended expansionist projects and specific forms of settler colonialism, could help enrich decolonial thought with additional critical optic and bring it more in tune with the current global challenges. These challenges go beyond the original decolonial focus on the intersection of race and capitalism incorporating the climate change, chronophobia, defuturing, and global unsettlement. They also urge decoloniality to move in the direction of relational agency unlimited to colonial difference alone and avoiding both the extreme of imagined indigeneity and a confinement to the ivory academic tower. Taking these nuances into account could help us come closer to an understanding of decolonial potentials in the future and its applicability in other places such as Nordic Europe.

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present époque.

The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement, and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites us to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing.

Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current époque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies, and posthumanities.

A transcript of the public discussion that took place on May 27, 2023 at Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw

A Skovorodian towards Shevchenko’s and Gogol’s Man 

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent”. Do those famous words spoken by Winston Churchill in 1946, which for years confirmed the simple dichotomy of Europe, still hold true? Did the breakthrough of 1989 really change the semantics of the concepts of East and West? In recent years, the metaphor of the “new Iron Curtain” has been reappearing more and more often. The still present inferiority complex of the periphery, populist governments based on nationalist and anti-European slogans, and, finally, the war in Ukraine and mass migrations strongly influence the creation of new divisions, but also provide an opportunity to create a new balance of power and a community far from right-wing populism and, at the same time, devoid of Western-centric hegemony. Today, the question of new European solidarity also becomes a question about the possibility of a new world and the values on which it is to be based”. A record of a debate held at the Powszechny Theatre as part of the Forum of the Future of Culture 2023.

Tradução de Vitor Gomes Lopes do artigo "On Pluritopic Hermeneutics, Trans-modern Thinking, and Decolonial Philosophy" de Madina Vladimirovna Tlostanova e Walter Mignolo.

Thinking with four non-EU academic migrants from the global South, andtheir experiences of working/studying or starting to work/study duringthe Covid-19 pandemic, we are unravelling the current geopolitics ofthe internationalised higher education in the global North. Our centralargument is that Covid-19 has not simply affected the national andglobal politics of migration, including international academic migration,but it has also worked as a magnifying glass of the historicallyestablished inequalities sustained and perpetuated by physical,biomedical and epistemic borders. Most importantly, we are notfollowing the rather obvious theoretical route of biopolitics whileanalysing the internationalisation of higher education in relation to theCovid-19 health crisis and migration politics. Instead, we are looking atthis geo-biopolitical and epistemic assemblage through a decoloniallens. In doing so, we want to contribute with our and our interviewees’reflections to the ongoing discussion on what currently counts as‘internationalisation’ in higher education, pointing out the colononialand neoliberal foundations of it, and the possibilities of aligning it withthe efforts of decolonising the university.