Search Results (19)

Marriage remains a central social institution among the Vatsonga, functioning not merely as a union between individuals but as a cultural institution through which gender identities, kinship relations, ritual obligations, and communal belonging are constructed and transmitted across generations. While scholarship has extensively explored marriage and gender in African societies, limited attention has been paid to the genealogical processes through which Vatsonga marriage rituals have historically shaped gender identities within changing social, political, and religious contexts. This article examines marriage as a site of gender construction by analysing the relationship between ritual practices, identity formation, and social belonging among the Vatsonga of Southern Africa. Using the genealogical approach of Michel Foucault and the theories of African feminists and decolonials, this study employs interpretive qualitative methodology, which entails the analysis of interdisciplinary literature in African philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, theology, and ritual studies. As a result of this analysis, it becomes evident that marriage rituals continue to play a great role in constructing masculinity and femininity, as well as kinship and community. At the same time, however, these rituals are dynamic and have undergone changes in light of colonialism, Christianity, urbanization, migrations, constitutional democracy, and modern concerns regarding gender equality. This article does not present marriage rituals of Vatsonga as static and monolithic practices, but rather shows their historical contingency, cultural dynamism, and continuous negotiation amid social change. Therefore, this study calls for critical engagement with marriage rituals in order to protect culture as well as to ensure gender equality and the dignity of all parties involved. With regard to the application of genealogy to marriage practices of Vatsonga, this article brings new perspectives to current debates on ritual, gender construction, African epistemologies and the decolonisation of marriage studies. Full article

This article develops a symbolic hermeneutic framework for interpreting contemporary socio-educational phenomena within the horizon of decolonial thought and Liberation Theology. It begins from the assumption that symbols are not merely decorative forms of representation but fundamental structures of meaning that shape both individual experience and collective life, especially through their educational effects. From this perspective, the article examines how the symbols circulating in social communication reveal the ideological underpinnings of imagination, authority, exclusion, and resistance. The essay then places this symbolic analysis in dialog with decolonial theory, arguing that the enduring epistemological legacy of colonialism continues to organize hegemonic forms of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. Particular attention is devoted to the concept of the frontier, first understood as a modern device of exclusion and then reinterpreted as a space of epistemic resistance, ethical encounter, and democratic confrontation among differences. The discussion further engages key authors of Liberation Theology and the philosophy of liberation—especially Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Enrique Dussel, and Paulo Freire—in order to show how religious discourse and pedagogical practice intersect in processes of emancipation. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretative approach grounded in philosophical hermeneutics and critical conceptual analysis. It reconstructs and compares major theoretical positions rather than presenting empirical data. The article argues that the integration of symbolic hermeneutics, decolonial thought, and liberationist theology offers an original framework for rethinking education as a transformative practice grounded in ethical responsibility toward the Other. By bringing the concepts of frontier, sentipensamiento, communality, and pluriverse into a single analytical constellation, the paper contributes to current debates in religious studies, critical pedagogy, and epistemic justice. In the context of contemporary global crises—migration, ecological devastation, social fragmentation, and the weakening of democratic participation—it proposes a renewed role for religion as a critical and generative force capable of opening new educational spaces for dialogue, liberation, and the reconfiguration of knowledge. Full article

This paper argues that the colonial introduction of Christianity in Africa must be understood as a reordering of personhood, moral feeling, and the conditions under which lived experience becomes intelligible, rather than as a change in formal religious affiliation alone. Drawing on scholarship in African philosophy, religious history, European intellectual history, and African psychology, the paper traces how missionary Christianity reclassified African spiritual worlds, recoded suffering and misfortune, and disrupted the transmission of spiritual knowledge across generations. Crucially, it situates this encounter within the longer history of Christianity’s own disenchantment: the suppression, within dominant Protestant and Enlightenment traditions, of enchanted practices that had characterised European Christianity for over a millennium. The missionary traditions that condemned African spirit mediation, ancestral veneration, and ritual healing were carriers of a tradition that had practised structurally analogous things before disciplining them out of its own self-understanding. The paper shows that colonial religion produced layered forms of subjectivity in which ancestral obligation, Christian doctrine, communal personhood, moral anxiety, and therapeutic pluralism coexist in tension. The concept of ontological compression is proposed to name the condition under which parts of the self become unsayable within authorised vocabularies, a condition rendered doubly intense by the fact that the compressing tradition had already performed this narrowing upon itself. Rather than treating African spirituality as residue, superstition, or cultural background, the paper proposes that it should be approached as a living philosophical and psychological archive through which many people continue to interpret suffering, relation, responsibility, and reality itself. Full article

This critical review interrogates how contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reforms in STEM education engage the deeper project of epistemic decolonisation. Framed by critical race theory, feminist science studies, and decolonial scholarship, it asks whether inclusion agendas move beyond representational expansion to disrupt Eurocentric hierarchies of legitimacy; which pedagogical and curricular innovations enact pluriversal STEM; and what institutional conditions constrain transformation. A multi-stage search of Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, Google Scholar, and grey literature (2010–2025) yielded 152 records; PRISMA-informed screening produced 80 sources for interpretive thematic synthesis. Findings show that DEI initiatives have increased access and participation, yet typically preserve assumptions of scientific neutrality and universalism, leaving epistemic injustice largely intact. In contrast, decolonial innovations, such as two-eyed seeing, culturally sustaining and place-based pedagogies, history, philosophy, and sociology of science integration, and project-based learning grounded in indigenous knowledge systems, reposition learners and communities as co-producers of knowledge and reframe science as situated and relational. However, these practices remain peripheral due to assessment regimes, accreditation pressures, funding and tenure incentives, disciplinary gatekeeping, and limited educator preparation. The review argues that meaningful reform requires structural reconfiguration of curricula, evaluation, and institutional reward systems to recognise multiple epistemologies, cultivate ethical relationality, and enable sustained community partnership. Full article

This study explores water as memory and as method in African thought. It shows how rivers, rain, and oceans act not only as sources of life but also as teachers who carry a story, restore balance, and reveal moral truth. Drawing from Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, southern African, Kenyan and Afro-Atlantic traditions, this paper presents water as archive and as oracle, holding the past while speaking to the present. This article develops the idea of hydro epistemology, understood here as a way of knowing through flow, renewal, and relationship. In this framework, knowledge is created through ritual engagement with water, transmitted through oral memory and ecological observation, tested against environmental response and revised when conditions change. Water is treated as a witness, mediator and guide, rather than a passive resource. By setting these traditions alongside global discussions on water governance, nature-based ecological care and decolonial environmental ethics, this paper argues that African water imagination offers more than symbolism. It proposes a practical philosophy in which caring for water and caring for life are the same act. To listen to water is to remember, to restore and to recover a way of living that renews both people and land. Full article

This study critically examines the structure, mechanisms, and enduring relevance of character education embedded in the indigenous knowledge systems of the Greater Horn of Africa. Pre-colonial African societies upheld sophisticated educational frameworks that emphasized holistic moral formation and communal character development, values that continue to influence rural communities today. Drawing on an integrative literature review, the paper identifies preparationism, functionalism, and communalism as core philosophical foundations shaping these systems. Moral and civic values were cultivated through informal, lifelong learning, guided by the collaborative roles of the home and community in fostering respect, responsibility, and social cohesion. Central pedagogical instruments included initiation rites, which provided structured moral instruction, and oral literature, which transmitted ethical reasoning and cultural wisdom. The findings underscore the continued relevance of indigenous character education in addressing contemporary societal challenges and advocate for Decolonizing the Mind as a pathway to revitalizing these traditions. The study concludes that reformed rites of passage, when purged of harmful elements, preserve cultural identity and strengthen communal ethics, offering a sustainable model for moral and civic education in modern Horn of African contexts. Full article

This essay argues that Holiday Powers’ s Moroccan Modernism (2025) offers a compelling case study for rethinking global modernist art from a decolonial perspective, highlighting Morocco’s unique creative, esthetic, and philosophical forces. The questions and issues this book raises, and this essay addresses, revolve around the problematic of non-European modernism as both a phenomenon of decolonial politics of esthetics, in the Jacques Rancière sense, and an artistic movement born out of the history of Western art through the colonial imposition of the European conception of modernity and system of education. I take particular issue with the dominance of political history, identity discourse, and redundant postcolonial rhetoric that characterizes not only Powers’ narrative but also the account of other area modernisms. This dominance generates a tendency to misestimate art agency and to neglect the investigation of the complex creative, esthetic, and philosophical underpinnings of the modernist construct. A lucid revisiting of Orientalism is mandatory for tackling this understudied aspect of modernism. Yet, I also demonstrate the accomplishments of Moroccan Modernism as a cogent historical exposition of this construct in Morocco, upon the basis of which future studies can be undertaken. Full article

The transition from school to university and subsequently into the workforce is increasingly non-linear, shaped by diverse socio-economic realities and interrupted learning pathways. This study examines the effectiveness of Readiness Programs in preparing students for higher education and explores the potential of integrating the African Ubuntu philosophy to enhance these programs. Using a quantitative research design, a structured survey was administered to 1132 participants enrolled in the University of Namibia’s 2024 Readiness Program. Descriptive statistics and ordered logistic regression were employed to analyse key predictors of readiness, including program structure, delivery, academic skills, and resilience to challenges. The findings indicate that program delivery, improved academic skills, and academic performance significantly influence students’ readiness to pursue university studies, while resilience to personal challenges shows a weaker correlation. The results suggest that structured interventions play a more pivotal role than individual perseverance in ensuring academic preparedness. The study concludes that integrating Ubuntu principles, such as communal support, ethical leadership, and collaborative learning into readiness programs can strengthen student engagement and institutional inclusivity. This integration aligns with decolonial imperatives in African higher education and contributes to more contextually relevant, supportive, and transformative readiness initiatives. Full article

This paper critically examines Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation through the lens of Watsuji Tetsurō’s theory of fūdo (climate and milieu), arguing that Watsuji’s insights help address some of the tensions and limitations in Glissant’s thought. While Glissant foregrounds relationality as a dynamic process of cultural creolization, his emphasis on fluidity and opacity at times risks obscuring the material and environmental conditions that shape human interactions. In contrast, Watsuji’s fūdo provides a framework for understanding relationality as always embedded in specific climatic and spatial conditions, grounding Glissant’s poetics of relation in a more concrete phenomenological and ecological perspective. By integrating Watsuji’s attention to the reciprocal formation of human subjectivity and milieu, this paper argues for a more nuanced articulation of relational identity—one that does not merely resist fixity but also acknowledges the formative role of an (interconnected) place (or places) and environment (or environments). Ultimately, this comparative approach highlights the potential for a deeper ecological and material grounding of Glissant’s thought, offering a corrective to its occasional indeterminacy while reaffirming its decolonial aspirations. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on the intersections of environmental philosophy, postcolonial thought, and theories of intersubjectivity. Full article

The present work considers the communicative dimensions of intellectual practices in an effort to discern how these practices can take full account of their own placement within and accountability to the human communities and cultures they cultivate. The discussion is framed with a focus on intellectual communities who have struggled against the dominance of Euromodern epistemological orientations that have constructed their own cultures and intellectual practices as irrelevant or, at best inferior. This struggle is a decolonial praxis. The development of communicology during the post-World War II period in the United States is taken up as an approach to theory construction that allows for the fullest possible examination of the very human condition in which thought and action emerge. Chicana and Latina phenomenology constitute a further development of this decolonial praxis consonant with the sensibilities of communicology. Chicana and Latina phenomenology is shown to advance our understanding of philosophy as an intellectual (i.e., communicative) practice that takes place in a world of other human beings to whom we are accountable. Theory construction as it relates to boundary conditions is taken as an important point that spans the all too common gap between the existential and the cultural and aids in constituting a theory construction project that is also a decolonial praxis. Full article

We engage the decolonial option from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe with an interest in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living. This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality and its constitutive effect on lived experience. We depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of a particular philosophy. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being. Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from non-discursive domains, and from a different genealogy than western Europe’s; the coloniality of the senses, time and being. We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide, therapists and hotline workers, and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of erasure and violence that the epistemologies and ontologies of suicide, suicide assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further sustaining dehumanization and the imposition of death as a constant in life. We discuss a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments, constructed as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings, under the control of modernity/coloniality that discriminates against pluriversal temporalities, sensings, and relationalities. Full article

Coalitional communication is a dwelling amidst non-dominant differences that requires introspective, complex communicative philosophy and practice. My concern is with differentiation in hierarchies. They are understood and shaped by colonial modernity. They are historical logics and practices of settler colonialism, enslavement, and citizenship. My perspective is feminist, decolonial critiques of modern, capitalist social systems. The analysis is grounded in communicative philosophy in intercultural contexts where folks intend justice and equality. For example, in political democracies, localized social alliances actually harm one another being hegemonic by taking routes of familiarity through structures of linguistic and practical cultural systems. Communicative projects of liberation across oppressions (with monologic and single-axis perceptions) tend to miss intersections of our raced and gendered experiences. The result is unintelligibility among us. In this state, one can sense in the body the space of the liminal—with both a communicative impasse and opening. Rather than aligning liberation and domination in the impasse, I describe the creativity of liminal space as a communicative opening. The opening is a recognition of multiplicity and a refusal to assimilate each other’s lived experiences into familiar, complex codes of habituated thought and action. Examining communication hostilities in oppressed–oppressing relations is a necessary condition for coalition. Thus, coalitional communication is a call to engage a full sense of listening to one another as relevant. Ways that decipher codes and signals of resistance come to constitute the project of creating relevant intelligibility together. Praxis as critical, dialectical, and intersectional thinking is part of this method. Full article

In a precarious occupation, martial arts instructors must be inspiring and build a shared philosophy. Drawing on Taijiquan and Capoeira, which have their philosophical or epistemological roots in Asia and Africa, this article explores core concepts that feature in students’ enculturation. These concepts are grounded in epistemologies contrasting with Papineau’s work on popular and elite sport, Knowing the Score. More specifically, the philosophical approach used builds upon Papineau’s chapters on focus, cheating and racism, although these martial practices are not grounded in the Judeo-Christian Western epistemologies underlying Papineau’s thinking. Indeed, one of the attractions for Western Capoeira and Taijiquan students is precisely their “strange” or exotic philosophical concepts driving specific pedagogical practices. Ethnographic fieldwork in Britain and written and oral accounts of embodied expertise are used to explore the practical uses of these non-Western epistemologies by teachers to build shared cultures for their students. Specifically, we examine the concepts of axé (life force) and malicia (artful trickery) in Capoeira, noting its contrast to Western ideas of energy and fair play. We then examine Taijiquan and the concepts of song (鬆 or “letting go”) and ting (听 or “focused listening”), considering the movement skill of systematic relaxation and the focus on specific components of human anatomy and body technique among adults unlearning embodied tension built throughout their lives. We close with considerations for projects examining the diverse, alternative southern, non-Western, and potentially decolonial and subaltern epistemologies in such martial activities. Full article

A turn from the “whither” to the “whence” of anarchism is at stake in Catherine Malabou’s interpretation of Latin American decolonial theory. This is a turn from a materialist philosophy that seeks to open the space of anarchism within the modern state toward one that discerns anarchism as already operative in the modern state given the social implications of colonial legacies. In tracing this turn, I propose a development of Malabou’s work insofar as I put her in dialogue with María Lugones, who is much closer to Malabou than the more canonical decolonial figures she actively engages, especially in view of anarchism as a form of social–political plasticity. Understanding Lugones’ critique of earlier iterations of decolonial theory helps make explicit an immanent anarchic resistance to domination as an explosive inhabitation of everyday loci of tension. Full article

This article puts forward the core argument that a pedagogical shift is very much needed if we want to address the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities represented by increasingly diverse educational settings and move towards a more inclusive, equal, and just academia. First, it is suggested that we replace the current pedagogical models in use, namely, the teacher-centered and student-centered models, as their educational philosophies are insufficient and can be considered, to a certain extent, oppressive. Then, it is argued that transformative pedagogy can broaden the scope of academic goals by including students’ well-being, as well as their individual and collective emancipatory goals. To support the argument, the author presents a theoretical framework that has been developed over time while teaching migration topics to students coming from all over the world. The framework includes a holistic approach rooted in transformative pedagogy, which engages with students’ cognitive, practical, and affective dimensions. It is further argued that the theoretical framework should integrate intersectional and decolonial approaches into its praxis. These approaches offer further insights into how to challenge power imbalances in the classroom, center the experiences and voices of marginalized communities, and recognize the interplay between individual experiences, systemic oppressions, and the broader socio-political context. The article concludes by explaining that transformative pedagogy has not yet received the attention it deserves, both in practice and in research, and that more efforts need to be made to explore its potential and scientific relevance. Full article