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Diego Ballestero

@dballestero.bsky.social

550 followers 420 following 250 posts

Anthropologist/Decolonialism/Provenance research reddecolonial.hypotheses.org http://uni-bonn.academia.edu/DiegoBallestero http://transformationalhps.org

uni-bonn.academia.edu

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · Sep 5

My former X account @diballestero was suspended, but insurgent memory cannot be silenced.
From now on you can find me there as @InsurgentMemory — continuing the decolonial struggle against colonial archives, epistemic domination, and silencing.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 5d

✊ The word expands.
📚 So does the deadline.
🗓️Now until Oct 12, 2025.
📝 400–600 words. Flexible for workshops/symposia.
If you have questions, ask. If you have a proposal, share it.
Because thinking is also resistance.

#decolonialconference

Decolonial Conference @decolonialconf.bsky.social · 5d

Deadline extended!!!

The Program Committee has decided to extend the deadline to October 12, 2025. Proposals can be 400-600 words. If you are submitting a symposium or workshop proposal, word limits are more flexible.

Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions!

#decolonialconference

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 5d

@dgska.bsky.social : While Palestinian genocide unfolds & fascism rises in Germany, silence is complicity. Will we take collective action or keep researching in our ivory tower as comrades resign over our political void? Neutrality serves the oppressor. What is our position?

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 6d

If we discuss teaching under repression but ignore the systematic destruction of an entire intellectual tradition, what does our academic freedom mean? Solidarity demands we name Gaza.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 6d

A necessary question: was Palestinian epistemicide discussed? Every university in Gaza destroyed. 95+ scholars killed. Libraries bombed. Archives erased. Research halted. Students buried under classrooms.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

I ask because the time for ambiguity is over. Because neutrality, in the face of structural violence, is complicity. Because if anthropology does not serve to defend life, then what is it for?

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

Does anyone know if, during the @dgska.bsky.social
members’ plenary, a clear and dignified stance was taken? Was there a decision to sever ties with academic institutions of the State of Israel—institutions complicit in occupation and the silencing of entire peoples?
#dgska2025

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

9/ Our conclusion: decolonial theory belongs to struggle, not to empire. To honor it, we must keep it rooted in the South, in the oppressed, in the collective. Otherwise, it is nothing but another mask worn by the very structures it sought to destroy. #dgska2025

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

8/ Together, these voices revealed how the North metabolizes decoloniality as commodity. Yet they also lit sparks: in scholar-activism, in student refusal, in epistemic justice, in alternative ontologies. Sparks that insist on another horizon.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

7/ Nina Krienke urged us to abandon Western categories of “movements.” By centering tension instead of outcomes, she revealed hidden resistances—those that refuse to fit neat boxes, unsettling the very grammar of hegemony.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

6/ Romy Köhler traced Mapuche collections in German museums back to colonial entanglements. She asked: can digital access be more than a token of justice? Can it rupture the colonial order of knowledge, or will it remain another archive for empire?

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

5/ Noor Blaas highlighted student struggles in Dutch campuses, where austerity and securitization attempt to domesticate dissent. Yet refusal, she showed, creates cracks—spaces beyond reform, where abolitionist practices and new worlds take root.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

4/ Joaquín Molina unveiled the neoliberal ontology behind postmodern anthropology. Against the cult of Latour or Viveiros, he turned to Lukács, showing us that being is collective. The Global South speaks through praxis, not the fragments of European thought.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

3/ Jasmin Goldhausen spoke of scholar-activists in German universities, young and precarious, who resist while surviving. Their daily practices remind us: decoloniality is not a slogan but a tension—living in the contradiction, refusing epistemic violence.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

2/ Diego Ballestero showed how DGSKA congresses embraced the “decolonial turn” as agenda, while emptying it of force. A language of rupture tamed into protocol. He calls for an anti-colonial praxis that refuses to be neutralized by the institution.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

1/ This is a summary of my panel at #dgska2025.
We asked: what happens when decolonial theory, born from the wounds of the Global South, is turned into ornament for the European academy? A theory of fire turned into polite rhetoric.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 7d

After the roundtable on Palestine at the #dgska2025, the @dgska.bsky.social must cut ties with all Israeli institutions. In the face of genocide, it is our ethical and moral duty: solidarity is not abstract—it demands rupture with structures of oppression and genocide

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

Today we spoke, listened, unlearned. The panel Un/communalizing Decoloniality became a space of insurgent thought, where theory walked and archives trembled. Gracias to all who challenged, shared, and stayed. The struggle is collective. #dgska2025

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

Ecological and Indigenous justice are inseparable. Decolonizing nature is not metaphorical—it is about life, survival, and the possibility of other worlds

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

Decolonial praxis means defending Indigenous sovereignty while reimagining futures where human and more-than-human communities thrive together.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

Water justice demands we unlearn property logics and embrace relational ontologies: rivers as relatives, mountains as guardians, and ecosystems as political actors.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

Colonial logics have reduced rivers, forests, and territories to extractable objects. Indigenous struggles remind us that justice is not only human-centered, but more-than-human—rooted in reciprocity and care.

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

At the plenary More-than-human Un/Commoning, reflecting on decolonial perspectives of nature: how water and land are not resources, but relations that sustain collective life #dgska2025

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 8d

Come today at Un/communalizing Decoloniality, 11:00 , Philosophikum S65. Let’s unpack how European academia co-opts and flattens radical theory. Come ready to think, challenge, and commune. #dgska2025 nomadit.co.uk/conference/d...

P004: Un/communalizing Decoloniality: European Academia and Epistemic Hegemony in Times of Polycrisis

The European academy promotes decolonial theory as a “ commons”. This panel explores how the class/racial/economic hierarchy of European academia limits access to it and explores how we can rethink th...

nomadit.co.uk

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 9d

Best T-Shirt so far. Somewhere between decolonial methodology and tropical sabotage. 🌈🪇 #TropipunkTheory #UncommoningFashion

Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 9d

Intriguing how “planetary” frameworks for commons management often presume a universal epistemology. What local knowledges were already entcommoned before they were recognized as commons? And whose cosmologies remain untranslatable in this shift?