Walter D. Mignolo co-organizes the Decolonial Summer Course in Middelburg with Rolando Vázquez. He is an Argentine semiotician (École des Hautes Études) and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality.
http://www.waltermignolo.com/
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Rolando Vázquez is co-organizer with Walter Mignolo of the Decolonial Summer Course in Middelburg. He is assistant professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt of Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His research circles around three interdisciplinary topics: ‘postcolonial thinking’, ‘visual social experience’ and the ‘critique of modern time’. His work brings together a variety of fields such as: critical theory, continental philosophy, post-structuralism, decolonial thinking, visual studies and aesthetics. He has written about Coloniality, Modernity, the Critique of Modern Time and Photography. His reflections on the visual aspects of social life and temporality also take expression in his photographic project: www.criticalphotography.com
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Fabián Barba was born in Quito in 1982. Since age 12 he started studying modern dance in La casa de la danza and later in the Frente de Danza Independiente as well as theater in the school of the theater group Malayerba. This education in his hometown allowed him to to work as a professional performer in that artistic milieu. Parallel to his artistic formation, Fabián followed for two years university studies in Communication and Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador.
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Jean Casimir teaches at the Université d’État d’Haïti (UEH) in the Faculté des Sciences Humaines. He began his career as a teacher and a scholar at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He also taught as a visiting professor at Stanford University and Duke University in the United States and at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica. He served as a UN officer for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean between 1975 and 1988 and as Ambassador to the United States and the Organization of American States between 1991 and 1997. He is the author of sever works, including La Culture Opprimée (2011), Haïti et ses elites, l’interminable dialogue de sourds (2009), and La Caraïbe, une et divisible (1991).
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Jeannette Ehlers studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The Funen Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Her works explore the Danish slave trade and colonialism worldwide through digitally manipulated photographs and video installations. She has exhibited her work at C&H Art Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, CBK, Zuidoost, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Museo Del Barrio, New York, USA, ISCP, New York, US, Kianga Ellis projects, Santa Fe, US, Cartel Gallery London, England, The Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Cph, Denmark, BRAENNEN Gallery, Berlin, Germany, and Image 10, Vevey, Switzerland.
http:// www.jeannetteehlers.dk/
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Rosalba Icaza is senior lecturer at the Institute for Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has been involved in collaborative research initiatives dealing with the global governance of knowledge making and the practices of epistemic dissent and resistance that contest its numerous institutional expressions (e.g. Global and Regional governance of trade, NGOization of development agendas, global governance of sexual and reproductive health, etc.). She is currently part of the Transnational Network Other Knowledges.
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Born in Den Helder, Holland, but a descendant from Surinamese parents, Patricia Kaersenhout developed an artistic journey in which she investigates her Surinamese background in relation to her upbringing in a West European culture.
The political thread in her work raises questions about the African Diaspora movements and its relation to feminism, sexuality, racism and the history of slavery. As an artist, I’m in a constant state of becoming, she writes. Read more here
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Alanna Lockward is an author, critic and independent curator specialized in time-based undertakings. In 1988, she was appointed Director of International Affairs at Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo.
She is the founding director of Art Labour Archives, a cultural platform and agency responsible for producing situation-specific art events and exhibitions since 1996 in the US, the Caribbean, Europe and the African continent. She is general manager of the Transnational Decolonial Institute.
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Maria Lugones is an Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women’s Studies at Binghamton University in New York.
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Ovidiu Tichindeleanu is a philosopher and culture theorist living in Chişinău and Cluj, writing on critical social theory, decolonial thought, alternative epistemologies, and the cultural history of postcommunism. Studies of philosophy in Cluj, Strasbourg and Binghamton, New York. PhD in Philosophy (Binghamton University) with a thesis on monolinguism, modern media and the archeology of knowledge at 1900, currently prepared for publication in English.
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Madina Tlostanova is a critical culture theorist and professor of philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of national Economy and Public Administration, living in Moscow but extensively teaching and doing research abroad, focusing on decolonial option, alterglobalism, postsocialist imaginary, fiction and contemporary art, non-Western feminism and gender studies, and the critical rethinking of Eurasian imperial/colonial histories.
Decolonial Summer School Middelburg 