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Reading decoloniality
Reading decoloniality
  • ARTICLES
    • Recent articles ⌄
    • 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 our reading groups, running in three-month programmes for at least half of every year since 2021. The discussions from these reading groups are captured in reflective pieces from authors within our publication, printed alongside the minutes.

Our next programme runs in May, June and July of 2025. The programme that follows this will span October, November and December of 2025.

Click below to register and sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of the page to be notified of our reading groups and articles on a monthly basis.

 

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)

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Abstract

Reading Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani (To Hell with You Mitro 1967) and Surajmukhi Andhere Ke (Sunflowers of the Dark 1972), this reading group will explore the (re)production of heteronormative sexualities across the caste, gender, and sexuality spectrum in postindependence India.  While Mitro (Mitro Marjani) revels in a sensual exploration of her sexuality, Ratika (Surajmukhi Adhere Ke) inhabits a traumatic darkness, holding on to the memories of her sexual abuse as a child. These women are constantly measured on a scale of morality, impinged by factors like shame and honour. The discussion will explore how Sobti’s creative spectrum challenges the dominant structures of the state and the Indian women’s movement which consider women’s expression of sexuality (both within and without marriage) as entwined with either violence or sexual excess. By so doing, it attempts to de-link the idea of woman’s sexuality from the constraints of the patriarchal epistemology, exploring instead, what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls ‘sexual and spiritual borderlands’ (3) that would heal women’s subjectivities, making them full citizens of the nation state.

For the in-person event at AIAS, Aarhus in Denmark, click here to REGISTER 

Reading

There are two articles for this reading group:

Bharti Arora’s ‘Negotiating structural inequalities: Marriage, sexuality, and domesticity in Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra’. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature Vol. 53(3): 2018. 430–447

Ratna Kapur’s “Sexcapades and the law.” URL: https://www.india-seminar.com/2001/505/505%20ratna%20kapur.htm 

Bio

Dr Bharti Arora is currently a Fellow of Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and the Aarhus University Research Foundation, Denmark, developing the project ‘Decolonial Aesthesis of Social Movements in Select Fiction of Postindependence India’. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Delhi. She earned her PhD (English) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She was the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow (2022) at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her areas of research include Gender Studies, Women’s Fiction, Indian Literatures, Social Movements and Nation. Her articles have appeared in journals like Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, and Society and Culture in South Asia.  She is the author of Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence India (Routledge 2019).

The return of biological races? With Celso Neto

Online reading group via Teams

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

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Abstract

The belief in biological races has a long history associated with colonialism, eugenics, and scientific racism (Bernasconi and Lott 2000; Saini 2019). This belief was vigorously rejected in the aftermath of WWII, but some mainstream scientists and philosophers of race are now reviving it (Andreasen 2004; Spencer 2012; Hardimon 2017; Reich 2018). These scholars are self-declared anti-racists and some of them even claim that accepting biological races is a good strategy for anti-racist movements (Hardimon 2017). In this reading group, I critically evaluate this return of biological races. I start by presenting its motivations, showing how scholars attempt to free the notion of biological race from its past racist and political connotations. Then I consider arguments in favor and against this new notion of biological race. I argue that both sides of the debate fall into a common trap, namely they overlook how political values still shape beliefs in biological races. Exposing these values is key to fully understanding the implications of scientific and philosophical beliefs about race. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of why the return of biological races fails.

Reading

There are two articles for this reading group:

Celso Neto’s ‘The Risk of Biological Race‘, currently under review, please do not cite or distribute.

Nora Berenstain’s ‘Biological Race Realism and the Legacy of Racial Pseudoscience‘, Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming).

Bio

Dr Celso Neto is a philosopher of science and race, based at the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, University of Exeter (UK). He currently leads the ERC Project ‘Human Genomics without Racism’ (HUGERA). His main interest lies in understanding how biases and values influence methodologies and reasoning in science, with a particular focus on evolutionary biology and its intersection with societal issues. His publications cover a variety of topics, such as the social roles of scientific concepts, ancestry classifications, causal explanations, and alternative understandings of natural selection. Celso did his B.A and M.A in philosophy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG, Brazil). After spending 2 years studying at the Leibniz Universitaet Hannover (Germany), he moved to Canada and obtained a PhD in philosophy at the University of Calgary (2020). Before joining Exeter, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University (Canada, 2020-2022), working in the philosophy department and the department of biochemistry and molecular biology departments.

PREVIOUS READING GROUPS

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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Read our Current issue with its provocations and minutes from previous reading groups.

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Reading decoloniality
  • ARTICLES
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    • Defining decolonial liberation in Palestine
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