Maria Jose Recalde-Vela

Maria Jose Recalde-Vela is an Ecuadorian/Honduran PhD candidate at the Department of Public Law and Governance at Tilburg Law school, The Netherlands. She is part of the European (joint) Doctorate on Law & Development (EDOLAD) program. She is in the final year of a PhD project which investigates the manner in which inclusion is conceptualized in the field of statelessness through the practice of human rights and international development actors. As part of this research, she conducted interviews with practitioners who work on statelessness in various sectors, including international organisations, think tanks, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and grassroots organisations, to name a few. Her research delves into questions of inclusion, nationality, citizenship, and statelessness. She has an interest in matters relating to: The influence of coloniality in current development trends, on decolonial approaches to development, and on understanding the meanings of inclusion in a bottom-up manner. What draws her to Reading Decoloniality is that it is a friendly and safe space for scholars with an interest in decoloniality to share knowledge, thoughts, and ideas beyond their own fields. In her view, decoloniality requires thinking across disciplines and together with others, from within and outside of academia. She is currently reading 'Decolonizing Human Rights' by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (2021, Cambridge University Press) and 'Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge' by Folúkẹ́ Adébísí (2023, Bristol University Press).