Ernesto Rosen Velasquez – författare

Presents struggles for liberation in the Americas from the perspectives of structural victims Struggles for Liberation in Abya Yala explores the ways people occupying different positionalities respond to various catastrophes while discussing how collective processes of struggle make new meanings and create new forms of relationality and subjectivity. Bringing together contributions by a diverse panel of well-established voices and rising scholars, this provocative volume challenges readers to resist, take direct collective action, organize, protest, and give proper uptake to social movements that fight against injustice and life-threatening conditions. Operating primarily within the context of “Abya Yala” — the term deployed by indigenous peoples to refer to the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean — the volume demonstrates and advances the explanatory and normative power of Philosophy of Liberation and the Decolonial Turn through theoretical analysis of current social changes unfolding in the Americas. Throughout the book, academic scholars and on-the-ground activists illustrate the reach, impact, and implications of radical social transformations that support victims of the system. Offering perspectives from the people who have chosen to rebel and act in solidarity against the system that oppresses them, Struggles for Liberation in Abya Yala: Addresses different struggles for social justice in the US, México and Latin AmericaDraws from philosophical tradition with influence in Africana philosophy, feminism, critical race theory, ethics, and political philosophyTasks readers to fight for reparations, stand in solidarity with marginalized and indigenous peoples, and abolish dispossessionCritiques the capitalist and colonial relationships that facilitate the exploitation of large segments of the populationPromotes social mobilization through education and the decolonization of Westernized university and educational practicesAn urgent call to action for all those seeking to fundamentally change the world, Struggles for Liberation in Abya Yala is a must-read for undergraduate and graduate students, educators and university lecturers, academic researchers and scholars, social and political activists, policymakers, journalists and media professionals, and general readers who are committed to liberation.

An underlying assumption undergirding institutions of higher education is that they serve as a means to upward socioeconomic mobility and, in turn, a way to address poverty that is tied to certain racialized/sexualized bodies. Although the education crisis is not an American or European problem in the geographic sense, but instead a global problem that plays itself out differentially across space and time, this volume focuses on the westernized university, in the US and abroad. It asks questions about what is westernized about the university, what its aims are, and how those who work in, through and outside these sites of knowledge production—with local or global social movements—can participate in the slow, careful process of decolonizing the westernized university. Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without provides a sharper understanding of the crisis and the responses to the westernized university at multiple sites around the world. As an intervention in the philosophy of education discourse, which tends to assume the university is a neutral space, this collection will be of particular value to students and scholars working in philosophy of education, Latina/o philosophy, Africana philosophy, social epistemology, education, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, as well as to intellectual activists in the United States, south of the border, and around the world.