The StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series are back with an amazing line-up of speakers from across Europe and beyond! This year we will focus on struggles over urban property while drawing on empirical and theoretical accounts from cities across the globe.
What can we learn from ongoing social struggles resisting violent forms of power destroying land, women lives and hope across the world? In other words, what happens if we see social struggles as questioning our worldviews? This presentation seeks to advance answers to these questions as an alternative route of engagement to think social struggles not as objects, but rather to recognize the questions that they pose to our forms of understanding.
With this, we aim to instigate an engagement with social struggles that includes not only their relation to economic and political forms of domination (e.g. neoliberal globalization), but also their capacity to generate knowledges and reveal the limits of our academic frameworks.
We will be sharing small vignettes that aim to transmit how different social struggles for land, women lives and hope, which are place-temporally-based yet connected to global dynamics of violence and extermination, are happening across Abya Yala (Americas). This is followed by a brief introduction to decolonial thinking key concepts. In the third and final step, two questions are asked, and some initial reflections provided: what is decolonial feminism and what might happen to the way we make sense of social struggles in global politics when gender is understood from its underside, coloniality.
Part of the 2021/22 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'Cities for People, not for Profit. From private ownership to communal stewardship'.
Global Politics, Feminisms and Decoloniality
Rosalba's research lies at the intersection of global politics, feminisms and decoloniality. The field of global politics analyzes interactions between power and knowledge under conditions of globalization.
The field of feminisms investigates the gendered inequalities in such interactions. Feminisms in plural indicates my long-term interest in the plurality of approaches reflecting and acting upon gendered inequalities across the Global North/South divide.
The field of decoloniality is concerned with modern and colonial structures of power, knowledge, gender, and subject formation and proposes a turn to an epistemic or cognitive South in the reconstitution of a global political society.
Global Politics and Epistemic Justice in Development Studies
Interconnecting these strands, her academic work has generated rigorous societally engaged analyses of global politics and epistemic justice in development studies. Thematically, it reflects her long-term fascination for understanding the productive learning tensions that emerge when communities organize across borders to resist multiple intermeshed oppressions along lines of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age/generation, sexualities, and body capacities. Rosalba Icaza has conceptualized such responses as ‘social struggles as epistemic struggles’ (Icaza and Vazquez 2013).
Decolonial Feminism
In advancing this intellectual interest, Rosalba Icaza has contributed to feminist decolonial perspectives by accounting for an epistemic dimension of collective action across borders (Icaza 2010; Icaza and Vazquez 2013; Icaza 2013; Icaza 2015; Icaza 2017; Icaza 2018). Such a perspective was previously only marginally recognized in the fields of international relations (IR) and international development studies.
Her research on the epistemologies of affect and the corporeal in social struggles (Icaza 2017, Icaza 2018) has brought it to the forefront. Rosalba has identified how modes of knowing and being are produced through experiences of epistemic vulnerability and fragility when encountering and hosting radical difference.