Decolonial Perspectives on Europe: Transversal Epistemologies and Politics
Monday, February 3, 2025 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1Online (Zoom)
In this session, we will report on current projects and highlight the urgency of decolonial and postcolonial approaches for achieving a deeper understanding of European traditions. Through brief inputs from philosophy, cultural, and literary studies, we will discuss the constitutive role of colonial violence in the formation of European cultures, as well as how it has been resisted. Additionally, we will reflect on how decolonial and postcolonial critiques provide, on one hand, a precise understanding of structures of violence and power, and on the other hand, open up possibilities for transversal critique and solidarities beyond ethnic identities.
Join via Zoom here.
Curated by Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin), Céline Barry (Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung der Technischen Universität Berlin) and Pablo Valdivia Orozco (EUV Frankfurt/Oder).
Part of Postcolonial Critiques – Decolonial Perspectives, a hybrid Lecture Series initiated by AG Postkolonialismus of Allianz für Kritische und Solidarische Wissenschaft and presented by FG DeKolonial e.V.
Katja Diefenbach is Professor of Cultural Philosophy/Philosophies of Culture at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Her main research and teaching areas are contemporary French philosophy and epistemology (with a special focus on the relationship of Marxism and post-structuralism); the reception of contemporary French philosophy in Postcolonial and Gender Studies; Spinoza research as well as the colonial grammar of 17th-century political philosophy. Her publications include Spekulativer Materialismus. Spinoza in der postmarxistischen Philosophie (2018; English translation, 2025) and Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (co-edited with Sara Farris, Gal Kirn, Peter Thomas, 2013). She is a member of the publishing collective b_books in Berlin.
Gal Kirn is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Ljubljana, and currently finishing the research project Protests, Art Practices and Culture of Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Context. He will start to work at European University of Viadrina. He has published two monographs: Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019) and Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020).
Sanja S. Petkovska obtained a PhD degree in Cultural Studies from the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and previous academic degrees in Cultural Sociology and Adult Education from the Faculty of Philosophy at the same university. She works at the Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade, Serbia, as a Research Fellow and her research revolves around the domains of critical theory, human–animal relations, knowledge production, cultural studies, violence, and public policies. She edited the book Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries (Palgrave, 2024).
Pablo Valdivia Orozco is Senior Lecturer for Literary Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His main research and teaching areas are Latin American and Western European Literature of the early modern/colonial period and 20th century, critical theory, and the history of modern aesthetics from a decolonial perspective. His publications include Weltenvielfalt: Eine romantheoretische Studie im Ausgang von Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño and Sandra Cisneros (2013) and Gegen/Stand der Kritik (2015, co-editor). His latest work proposes a critical reexamination of Petrarch’s Secretum as a foundational text of colonial modernity and its cultural politics. He is a regular visiting professor in Bogotá, Colombia.
Email: [email protected]