Decoloniality and Critical Social Sciences. Tensions and Promises

While the discourse on decolonizing academia and individual disciplines is widespread, it remains far less clear what this actually entails. A critical perspective on agenda-setting in the social sciences and humanities begins with essential conceptual distinctions, such as the relationship between decolonization and decoloniality, as well as between decoloniality and postcolonialism. South Asia has often served as a central example of postcolonialism, and South
America as a key reference point of decoloniality. The lecture will address which other regions these critical approaches tend to direct our attention and which regions risk being overlooked as a result. Another discussion point will explore global perspectives on the modern institution of citizenship and its role in the (re)production of inequalities. Methodological questions will likewise be considered, particularly how decolonial methods can be put into practice within these contexts.

Date
Thursday, 11. December 2025, 6:15 p.m

Location

LMU, main building
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Room M 109

Further Information

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the author of From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis (Leske+Budrich, 2003), Global
Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (Routledge 2016), Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație (IDEA, 2020) and co-author, with Anca Parvulescu, of Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires (Cornell UP 2022).

Website of Prof. Dr. Manuela Boatcă

Website of the Research Training Group