Perspectives on Colonial Violence “From Below”: Decolonial Resistance, Healing, and Justice in/Against the Neoliberal Academy

Coloniality governs who has the right to exist and belong, and who is disposable and deportable. It determines who has the right to express the full range of their humanity, while others are relegated to realms of subhuman invisibility. For colonized communities, this normalization of violence and suffering unfolds within everyday existence, which becomes a site of trauma and resistance. The neoliberal academy is one such key site through which coloniality is produced and naturalized. Many of us working within the academy continue to quest for opportunities to write against apolitical obligations and patterns of putting publications above people while placating neoliberal employers. We seek to understand and countermove the weight of the harm of academic institutions and Western/Global North knowledge systems. In this article, introducing the first of our two-part special issue, entitled Perspectives on Colonial Violence “From Below”: Decolonial Resistance, Healing, and Justice, we explore how majority world peoples are contending with manifestations of coloniality in the neoliberal academy. How are folx envisioning, theorizing, and practicing everyday modes of decolonial resistance within academic institutions, graduate training programs, and in various roles as researchers, educators, students, professors, and beyond? While decolonial approaches within academic spaces offer incomplete points of entry when it comes to undoing of the legacies and persistence of colonial violence, we believe that the set of articles here offer meaningful glimpses into critical spaces of refusal, renewal, and resistance required in journeys forward, even when there is no going back.