Confronting Coloniality in Migration Societies
Coloniality: the persistent racial, social, political, cultural and economic hierarchies imposed by the European Colonial Project. How can we recognise and counteract the colonial knowledge and practices of the educational spaces, healthcare systems and laws that interact with contemporary migrations?
In the following video interviews, Lives in Motion brings to the fore three different voices of educators and practitioners who are committed to critically interrogating and dismantling coloniality in their daily interactions with contemporary migrations: in educational spaces, within the mental health sector and in international law.
Kolar Aparna (University of Helsinki), in conversation with Stella Brook Young, speaks of how educators can continue to dismantle, through a decolonial lens, the hegemony of colonial knowledge surrounding migrations, time and space that persists in current formal educational spaces like universities and schools.
Simona Taliani (Centro Franz Fanon, Università Orientale di Napoli), connects the practices of “control” and “abandonment” within Italy’s mental healthcare system against people on the move with histories of forced pathologisation from the imperial colonies, whereby colonised subjects were constructed as “ill” and “insane” others. The professor and ethno-psychiatrist then suggests how this system can be resisted through “political acts of care.”
Thomas Spijkerboer (Gent University), explains how the European Court of Human Rights continues to defend colonial governance of human mobility in international law, granting Europeans freedom of movement across the world while limiting the movement of people from Africa and Asia in a process of “doing race, without mentioning the word race.”
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
