Undoing nation-state: Plurality, pluralization and plurinational propositions

If nation-states have been and continue to be – at least for the majority of peoples in the world– a naturalized anchor and conduit of colonial permanence, should we not turn our thinking and doing toward denaturalizing and undoing them?

In this talk, Catherine Walsh will open reflections on processes, practices and propositions that disrupt, fissure and undo the centrality and colonial permanence of the Euromodern nation-state and engender otherwises from the ground up.

Her interest is with the conceptualization and practice of other forms of governance, authority and social organization that open toward plurality, including with regard to the nation and nation(s), and with plurinational propositions (including, but not only, in Ecuador and Bolivia) that put into play the relation of land-territory, life and an 'other; social project for society at large.

About Catherine Walsh

Catherine Walsh is a militant intellectual involved for many years in the processes and struggles of social justice and decolonial transformation, first in the US, and in the last three decades in Latin America, where she has worked closely with Indigenous and Black movements at their request.

Catherine has degrees in sociology, human development, and education. She has worked in the areas of education, social sciences, the humanities, cultural studies and law, has taught at the University of Massachusetts and Duke University, and has been a visiting lecturer on five continents as well as a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Until her recent retirement, Catherine was senior professor and founder-director of the doctorate in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar-Ecuador, where she also coordinated the Intercultural Workshop, the Chair of Afro-Andean Studies and the Afro-Andean Documentary Fund, the largest archive in Latin America of Black collective memory.

Catherine is the author of more than 300 publications in a number of languages focused, among other topics, on decolonial thought, pedagogies, and praxis; critical interculturality; gender otherwise; and philosophies of life/re-existence. 

In 2019, Catherine received the prestigious 'Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award' from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.