Memories of the Poisoned River

 Memories of the Poisoned River The river remembers the arrival of extractivism. One day many years ago, she feels the wake of huge ships against her current and became uneasy. Over time, she comes to share shivers with felled forests, to balk at the blanched palette of monocrop agriculture, to recoil at the sharp poisonous taste of chemical waste, and to deeply mourn the disappearance of her people: people sold into slavery, killed by disease, worked to death in mines, and severed from her nurturing flows by the breaking of their cultures. Oh, what she has seen. Oh, what she has endured.

24.12.2023 | by Imani Jacqueline Brown

Ain’t I a child? Racial Discrimination in Childhood in Portugal

Ain’t I a child? Racial Discrimination in Childhood in Portugal   We demand that the Portuguese state, particularly the justice system, recognize the racial motivation behind this assault. We demand that, once and for all, it abandons a "minimalist" legal understanding of racism. We demand that it breaks away from the harmful pattern of denying racism, which endangers the lives of our children, our youth and the democratic life of this country.

04.10.2023 | by vários

Public Statement

Public Statement Without prejudice to the investigation currently undertaken by the Independent Commission of the Center for Social Studies - whose findings are not yet known - with this statement, we want to express our solidarity and support with all the victims of sexual violence and moral harassment, as well as our support for denouncing these forms of violence anywhere, including at the Centre for Social Studies. We stand against any form of abuse of power

25.09.2023 | by várias

Open Letter to Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group

Open Letter to Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group This controversy raises many questions, two of which we want to bring to the attention of the international academic community: Can we, as an academic community, allow a private publisher to intervene in and even censor such an important, urgent and necessary debate in our professional field? Academic writing is still the core tool of academic knowledge production worldwide, but when we as researchers are no longer allowed to reflect critically about how to transform our field from within, what are the implications for critical reflection on academia from within?

20.09.2023 | by várias

Without taking responsibility for concrete acts of abuse committed, there is no self-criticism

Without taking responsibility for concrete acts of abuse committed, there is no self-criticism We present ourselves as a collective of women who have suffered different types of violence as a result of the pattern of abuse of power that was naturalized in the work teams led by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and considered inevitable by the people who occupied positions of authority in the Centre for Social Studies (CES) for many years. Our initial letter is attached below. Since we started to share our reflections, the number of people has increased. We have been in contact with other women who have experienced stories similar to ours. The abuse experienced is not limited to inconvenient moments promoted by a man incapable of understanding that the world has changed. It is very difficult to believe that a professional sociologist, internationally recognized as one of the greatest left-wing intellectuals, cannot understand the changes in society and adapt to them.

19.09.2023 | by várias

Subject: Book temporarily unavailable as it is under review.

Subject: Book temporarily unavailable as it is under review. We address your Publisher as a collective of victims of harassment involving Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bruno Sena Martins in the context of Boaventura de Sousa Santos' academic teams. Our collective is currently formed of seven women, of Brazilian, Portuguese, Peruvian and Mexican nationality. Our lived experiences allow us to confirm the abusive pattern described in chapter 12 of the book Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in the University. The publication of the book was decisive for our mobilization as a collective and for our decision to gather testimonial and documentary evidence that corroborate the various types of violence described in the mentioned chapter. In this sense, we note with great concern the unavailability for sale of the book.

19.09.2023 | by várias

Dear Routledge Editorial Team

Dear Routledge Editorial Team We demand that the editorial immediately republishes the entire book, article included. We demand that the scholars put in the spotlight by the article cease all persecution of the researchers and the other victims that have come forward. We demand that those scholars start walking the talk, and be consequent with their writings. This includes making themselves available for a real process of restorative justice. We demand that academic institutions, including academic presses, seriously commission diverse and unbiased task forces to bring about reparations for the practices of abuse fostered by the racist, capitalist and patriarchal system of which they are part - in a historical and immediate sense. We all know.

04.09.2023 | by várias

Public letter from Moira Millán to Boaventura Sousa Santos

Public letter from Moira Millán to Boaventura Sousa Santos As a result of the painful and humiliating situation caused by your abuse and the realization that my institutional isolation and helplessness at the time were a response to machismo and racism, I channeled my anger and wounds like a guiding force. I embarked on a journey to the ends of the vast territories of Indigenous peoples in Argentina to establish the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living. Today, I can say that I walked to heal. The academic indifference I endured was replaced by the love and strength of thousands of Indigenous women who experience the violence you embody and represent daily. Regardless of your concerns that the Right is using these complaints, you know you benefit from the system. The Right needs hypocrites like you.

25.06.2023 | by Moira Ivana Millán

Statement for depatriarchal and non-hierarchical worlds

Statement for depatriarchal and non-hierarchical worlds The Academy (with a capital A and in singular) is for us a field of contestation. And, without a doubt, we are all positioned in it once we dare to enter it, dialogue with it, challenge it, inhabit it and/or co-construct it. Many of us have occupied this space by choice and with conviction. We face this reality every minute of our lives. That is why the manifesto “We all know” resonates and challenges us when it states that epistemic extractivism is structural and not just an isolated event in the Academy. When it affirms that the Academy is hierarchical and hierarchizing and that it promotes the accumulation of power of those at the top.

28.04.2023 | by várias

WE ALL KNOW

WE ALL KNOW In light of current public debates sparked by the publication of the chapter "The walls spoke when no one else would: Autoethnographic notes on sexual-power gatekeeping within avant-garde academia," included in the edited volume Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in the University (Routledge 2023), we express our full solidarity with the authors. We extend the same solidarity to other voices that came out publicly, as well as to all those subjected to abuses of power and other forms of violence both in academic contexts and beyond. This document is a collective and unfinished contribution to an ongoing debate.

18.04.2023 | by várias

Art has no immunity

Art has no immunity In Portugal we have no racial-ethnic categorization legally approved. That means we are not legally able to identify social inequalities in terms of race. This is an important warning of how Portuguese society works and how this social silence from politics informs us that they are not interested in identifying this problem. But we can do this visually. Just look who are the people that are leading art institutions and curatorship to understand this gap. I created a blog - an informal exercise - where I put some information about this gap.

13.03.2023 | by Rodrigo Ribeiro Saturnino (ROD)

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, by Ariella Aisha Azoulay (2019)

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, by Ariella Aisha Azoulay (2019) Institutionalized violence shapes who people are—victims and perpetrators alike—to an extent that only the recovery of the condition of plurality can undo it. This points to the most basic right immanent to the human condition, which imperialism constantly compromises: the right not to act against others; in its positive formulation: the right to act alongside and with one another. “Accepting this right in its two forms as fundamental is necessary in order to imagine reparations, so the bliss of being active and repairing what was broken can be attained.

11.08.2022 | by Ariella Aisha Azoulay

Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation

Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation The focus of the Paris conference was on Glissant’s key concepts of relation, opacity, creolization, and disaffiliation. The Martinique-born writer and thinker was, of course, the first philosopher of post-filiation, by which I refer not only to his rebellious thesis of dis­­affiliation, in the sense of breaking with a genealogy and tradition of Western and non-Western philosophies concerned with binary opposition and contradiction, but also to him as a self-­engendered philosopher. By this I mean that he re-created himself in order to surpass a pathological inextricability, which he associated with our contemporary human condition. Indeed, to say that Glissant is a post-filiation philosopher is mostly to recognize his role as a theorizer of the concept of relation, which moves beyond the oppositional discourse of the same and the other, operating instead with a new vision of difference as an assembler of the “dissimilars.”

06.07.2022 | by Manthia Diawara

Superintensiva

Superintensiva When our grandmother beheaded chicken, my brother begged: "don't kill the animals, let's go buy food at the supermarket". When did this happen? Ignoring the death of other beings in order to live. Wishing we didn't know about the destruction around our bubble. Was it when our parents moved from the countryside to the city? Was it when our thumb started to touch the screen more often? Animals? Only pets. Jungles? Only urban ones. In our houses, we clean up everything that reminds us of the dust from where we came from. Little pigs go to school, cats wear boots, play the piano and speak French, crickets are our consciousness, Elsa is the name of a depression, Katrina of a hurricane, Bárbara of a storm. Savagery instead of a country. Elements of land and sea as resources. People as users. Identities as consumption objects. Consuming, consuming to stabilise this fucked up disruption.

07.01.2022 | by Marta Lança

“PERPETUAL CYCLE”: (RE)APPEARING MEMORIES AND DECOLONIAL PRACTICES IN TARRAFAL, CAPE VERDE

“PERPETUAL CYCLE”: (RE)APPEARING MEMORIES AND DECOLONIAL PRACTICES IN TARRAFAL, CAPE VERDE Hoje o Tarrafal é um museu e monumento nacional e, desde 2004, integra a lista indicativa de Património Mundial da UNESCO. Portugal, para além de ter ajudado com a criação e desenvolvimento deste museu, anunciou em 2019 que iria apoiar Cabo Verde com a sua candidatura do Tarrafal à UNESCO. Recentemente, foram levadas a cabo obras de restauro do espaço, por uma empresa portuguesa, e no próximo 5 de Julho, os governos de Cabo Verde e Portugal vão assinar um memorando de entendimento para a candidatura deste espaço à UNESCO.

24.06.2021 | by Sofia Lovegrove

The fall of the houses of Atafona

The fall of the houses of Atafona In her first solo exhibition at Simone Cadinelli Art Gallery, Jeane Terra shows works that are related, directly or indirectly, to the events in Atafona, that are about the ruins produced by the clash between the sea and the city; such events point to the fact that everything that was, is or will be built is going to turn into rubble.

16.05.2021 | by Agnaldo Farias

On the Life and Work of Audre Lorde

On the Life and Work of Audre Lorde Audre Lorde asks, “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Lorde’s critique of hierarchies within what is then a predominantly white, middle-class, heteronormative, able-bodied second-wave feminism invites reevaluation of the chalk circles of individual identity that fix structural inequality and prevent viable liberation from taking shape. An existentialism disconnected from dynamic modes of praxis grounded in “the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences” fortifies oppression.

03.03.2021 | by Keelyn Bradley

Black in the USSR: the children of the Soviet Africa search for their own identity

Black in the USSR: the children of the Soviet Africa search for their own identity “The amount we know about our African heritage varies from individual to individual,” says Johnson Artur. What they do have in common however, is a history of struggle against a commonly encountered resistance to the presence of black people in Russia. “Those who grew up and live in Russia still have to justify on a daily basis the fact that they are Russians too.” Johnson Artur hopes her project will go some to connecting and making visible the generation of black Russians that have grown up calling the country home.

17.02.2021 | by Red Africa

Nikkolas Smith: Art Can Help Show That Black Lives Matter. It Can Also Lead to Activism

Nikkolas Smith: Art Can Help Show That Black Lives Matter. It Can Also Lead to Activism A lot of my pieces are social experiments to say, “What do you feel when you see this human life?” If your first reaction is to say, “They deserved to die because …,” that says a lot about who you are. I hope my art will speak to those people who are so quick to justify the taking of a human life, so that they think: “Wait. This person should still be on this earth. They deserved better.” Up until now, I’ve been creating art and advocating for Black lives from my perspective, of not wanting me to be pulled over and killed by the police.

14.12.2020 | by Nikkolas Smith

Under Our Skin - A Journey

Under Our Skin - A Journey So what does being tropical mean? Being less concrete and assertive in our ideas and convictions? There’s certainly an art to filling the arid hours and empty nights here. The bad news comes, here as everywhere, first thing in the morning. I retreat to the intimacy of my bookshelves and flick through a few tomes, while outside, the day quickly passes from fresh to mild to heat wave. It’s absurd to try and fit the news of someone’s death into the context of whatever story you have at hand, some false, pseudo-writerly notion of anguish. It’s as if a ghost has settled in between the lines and started hopping from noun to pronoun, though verbs would doubtless take it further.

29.10.2020 | by Joaquim Arena