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Reading decoloniality
Reading decoloniality
  • ARTICLES
    • Recent articles ⌄
    • Inhabiting borderzones, becoming woman in women’s writing
    • Entangled circulations and decoloniality: Rethinking from southeast Asian Islam
    • Defining decolonial liberation in Palestine
    • “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you”
  • ABOUT
    • Aims & scope
    • Editorial & Programming
    • Contact
    • FAQ
  • JOIN A READING GROUP

Reading group registration

We are an open-source publication and reading group that produces and disseminates international and interdisciplinary scholarship for liberation.

You have reached the registration page where you can sign-up to programmes of reading groups. The discussions from these reading groups are captured in reflective pieces from authors within our publication, printed alongside the minutes.

Our next programme, featured below, runs from October to December 2025. Register and sign up to our mailing list to be reminded on a rolling basis.


 

Incompatibility, decoloniality, and vaccine hesitancy with Dimas Iqbal Romadhon

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 29 October 2025, 17:00 - 18:30

(British Summer Time)

or 18:00 - 19:30

(Central European Time)

REGISTER

Abstract

Romadhon centres this discussion on the case of measles-rubella vaccine hesitancy that occurred in the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2018. The hesitancy, which was supported by the provincial government, was triggered by concerns over porcine contamination in the vaccine product. Guided by Da Costa and Da Costa (2019)’s multiple colonialisms framework, Romadhon shift’s the geography of blame behind the vaccine hesitancy in Aceh from religious conservativism and local right-wing politics to the layered colonial hierarchy that positions Indonesia as the long arm of present colonialism in global vaccination governance.

Romadhon focuses on the local concept of ‘tidak cocok’ (incompatible) that was used by many social actors in Aceh to rationalise their refusal to participate in the vaccination. By tracing the flow of incompatibility narratives across sociopolitical realms, from personal narratives to public responses to a vaccine allergy case to an official meeting to determine the vaccination campaign’s future, he argues incompatibility as a lexical item of decoloniality.

Romadhon contends that incompatibility paves a pathway to refuse tools and systems considered unfit according to locally situated knowledge and historical experience, and to reclaim what has been marginalised, delegitimised, and ignored by dominant epistemic and political structures. He also suggests that many Islamic expressions arising during the vaccine hesitancy have given a distinct local flavour to the decolonial critique of vaccination.

Reading

There are two articles for this session:

Dimas Iqbal Romadhon. 2025. “It was tidak cocok (incompatible)”: Incompatibility, Decoloniality, and Vaccine Hesitancy in Banda Aceh, Indonesia”. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. (Accepted, forthcoming)

Da Costa, Dia, and Alexandre E. Da Costa. 2019. “Introduction: Cultural Production under Multiple Colonialisms.” Cultural Studies 33 (3): 343–69. doi:10.1080/09502386.2019.1590436.

Bio

Dimas Iqbal Romadhon is a medical anthropologist and a reader of decolonisation and global health. Currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Davis, Dimas has studied about the colonial and postcolonial histories of leprosy, malaria, and vaccination, with a specific regional interest in Indonesia. He is a father of two fully vaccinated children, one of whom had to repeat vaccinations because Indonesian vaccines were not ‘recognised’ in the United States.

A genealogy of adab and the urge to question world literature with Mwaffaq Al-Hajjar

Online reading group via Teams

Friday 7 November 2025, 20:00 - 21:30

(Australian Eastern Standard Time)

or 10:00 - 11:30

(Central European Time)

REGISTER

Abstract

Where is world literature? Building on Hamid Dabashi’s question, this intervention interrogates not only the spatial and institutional location of world literature but also the sites of knowledge it renders invisible. It specifically examines the place of adab within literary practice and the academy, tracing the transformations that have rendered it marginal, peripheral, or even unrecognisable.

By presenting a genealogy of adab, this study uncovers a concept of deep epistemic potential – one that might have been silenced, modified, or overlooked under the universalising frameworks of Western literary scholarship. Historically, adab functioned as a practice of integrated knowledge, ethics, and literary cultivation. Yet this intervention questions whether, through encounters with coloniality and the structures of the academy, it has been reduced to a mere literary object, stripped of its epistemic and ethical breadth.

Reclaiming adab requires more than historical recovery: It demands a critical relinquishing of ‘world literature’ as a universalist mode of reading. Doing so opens space for ‘othered’ modes of reading, approaches that engage the episteme from alternative vantage points. This intervention does not prescribe a method but proposes a reflective exercise in epistemic possibilities, using adab as a lens for thinking beyond the limits of conventional literary frameworks.

Reading

There are a selection of articles for this session to peruse:

Allan, M. 2012. ‘How Adab Became Literary: Formalism, Orientalism and the Institutions of World Literature‘. Journal of Arabic Literature, 43(2/3), 172–196. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41725599

Dabashi, H. 2023. ‘Where is World Literature’, in Bin Tyeer, S & Gallien, C (eds), Islam and New Directions in World Literature, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p. 260.

El-Desouky, AA. 2013. ‘Beyond Spatiality: Theorising the local and Untranslatability as Comparative Critical Method’, in Küpper, J (ed.), Approaches to World Literature, Akademie Verlag, Germany, p. 61.

Patel, A. 2015. ‘The Trajectory of Arab Islamic Humanism: The Dehumanization of a Tradition’, The American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 1343-1353.

Bio

Mwaffaq Al-Hajjar is an independent Syrian writer and researcher, based in Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MA degree in Comparative Literature from Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Doha, Qatar. His research focuses on literariness, spatiality, and aesthetics in traditional and modern Arabic literature and Comparative Literature in Arabic, English, French, Malay and Persian languages. Mwaffaq writes in a number of literary and cultural magazines and had published two poetry collections titled ‘Poetic Entropy, 2019’ and ‘A City in Debt, A Hole in the Head, 2024’ in addition to participating in other literary anthologies. He was the winner of the Poetry Prize for Migrants in Kuala Lumpur – Malaysia in 2017, and he’s been participating as a writer and panelist in several literary festivals in Malaysia, Singapore, Qatar and Australia.

Revisiting the three and a half decades of decoloniality with Madina Tlostanova

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 3 December 2025, 15:00 - 16:30

(Central European Time)

REGISTER

Abstract

What is still relevant, what needs to be reconsidered and is there a future?

Decoloniality has lately turned into a new academic and political vogue which has resulted in considerable simplification, decontextualisation and paradoxically, depoliticisation of decolonial thought. Moreover, within decoloniality itself certain shifts have taken place and both positive and negative trends have emerged. Some previously important decolonial notions and concepts were forgotten. A number of recent events have remained unreflected or significantly distorted in the decolonial interpretation. And in general, the key trends in the contemporary world such as the technocratic dictate or the enviro-climatic crises, remain largely outside the sphere of interest of most decolonialists. Therefore, it is important to self-critically and meta-critically revisit decolonial ideas to see if they are still relevant for understanding the world, and which of them require reconsideration due to the growing incongruence of the initial decolonial frameworks and the complexity of the current world (dis)order. This internal dynamic of decoloniality vis-à-vis the rapidly changing reality will be the focus of our discussion hopefully allowing us to understand the prospects of decolonial discourse in the interpretation of the present and its potential in the political imagination of the future.

Reading

There are two articles for this session:

Madina Tlostanova. 2023. ‘Decoloniality. Between a travelling concept and a relational onto-epistemic political stance’. In: Groglopo, A. and Suárez-Krabbe, J. eds. Coloniality and Decolonisation in the Nordic Region.  London: Routledge, Chapter 8, pp. 145-163.

Tereza Hendl, Olga Burlyuk, Mila O’Sullivan & Aizada Arystanbek. 2023. ‘(En)Countering epistemic imperialism: A critique of “Westsplaining” and coloniality in dominant debates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’. Contemporary Security Policy. Volume 45, – Issue 2, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13523260.2023.2288468

Bio

Madina Tlostanova is a feminist thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests focus on decoloniality, particularly in epistemic and aesthetic spheres, feminist social movements and theories of the Global South, the postsocialist human condition, fiction and art, critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Tlostanova`s numerous articles, book chapters and monographs have been translated into many languages. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Centre of Contemporary Culture Tselinny, Kazakhstan, 2020, Kazakhian translation published in 2023), the co-edited volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Routledge, 2021) and the most recent experimental book of essays and speculative fiction Narratives of Unsettlement. Being Out-of-joint as a Generative Human Condition (Routledge, 2023). Currently she is working on a book on the stateless future.

PREVIOUS READING GROUPS

The return of biological races? With Celso Neto

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 9 July 2025, 16:00 - 17:30 (British Summer Time)

Event passed
Inhabiting borderzones, becoming woman: A decolonial reading of Krishna Sobti’s select fiction with Bharti Arora

Hybrid reading group via Teams and AIAS (Denmark)

Wednesday 7 May 2025, 10:00 - 11:30 (Central European Time)

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
Decoloniality in the midst of genocide with Muhannad Ayyash

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 4 December 2024, 17:00 - 18:30 (GMT)

Event passed, click for minutes
Knowledge production in the 'Arab-majority' world and unlearning in the field: Toward alternative research politics with Ali Kassem

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 6 November 2024, 11:00 - 12:30 (GMT)

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
From subjects to authors: Reclaiming agency in refugee research and building a publishing praxis with Kirandeep Kaur

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 9 October 2024, 18:00 - 19:30 (BST)

Event passed, click for minutes
Social justice in times of racial saturation with Gaspard Rey

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 18 September 2024, 16:00 - 17:30 (BST)

Event passed
Thinking with the grain of geography: Dust, desert and storytelling with Aya Nassar

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 7 August 2024, 16:00 - 17:30 (BST)

Event passed, click for minutes
(Re-)routing as Methodology: Unpacking the Ambivalent Proximities of Eastern European Whiteness with Špela Drnovšek Zorko

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 3 July 2024, 10:00 - 11:30 (BST)

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
Decoloniality in South African Language Policy: Resisting Marginalisation of African Language Speaking Children with Xolisa Guzula

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 5 June 2024, 16:00 - 17:30 (BST)

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
Decolonising Critique: Enfleshing Futurities (M)otherwise with Sara C. Motta

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 8 May 2024, 9:00 - 10:30 (BST)

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
Religion, modernity, coloniality: Thinking through decolonial Judaism with Santiago Slabodsky

Online reading group via Teams

Thursday 7 March 2024, 16:00 - 17:00 (GMT)

EVENT PASSED
Decolonisation as practice: Reflecting on personal and institutional journeys towards change with Asanda Ngoasheng

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 21 February 2024, 14:00 - 15:30 (GMT)

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
'Afroscenology and British actors?: Mobilising cultural and linguistic resources in performer training'

Wednesday 31 January 2024, 16:30 (GMT) with Samuel Ravengai, University of the Witwatersrand and Claire French, University of Birmingham

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
'Postcolonial memory work is wake work'

Wednesday 6 December 2023, 15:00 (GMT) with Sakiru Adebayo, University of British Columbia

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES
'What is the Relationship between Modernity and Capitalism?: A Decolonial Approach'

Wednesday 4 October 2023, 18:00 (BST) with Ramon Grosfoguel, UC Berkeley

EVENT PASSED, CLICK FOR MINUTES

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Reading decoloniality
  • ARTICLES
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    • Inhabiting borderzones, becoming woman in women’s writing
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    • Defining decolonial liberation in Palestine
    • “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you”
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