Bea Rodriguez-Fransen, Assistant Research Professor in Principled Innovation, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, announces the release of Decolonial Portals as Pedagogical Practice, a book chapter in Southern Anthropocene, a new publication from Routledge. Rodriguez-Fransen's co-authors are Victoria Desimoni and Iveta Silova.
"Educators often want to decolonize but need practical ways to begin," says Rodriguez-Fransen. "This chapter introduces decolonial portals: accessible entry points that help people notice erased histories, question default assumptions, and build relationships across human and more‑than‑human worlds. It points to living examples—from Indigenous‑led Bakwit Schools in the Philippines to Argentinian art to Latvia’s revival of land‑honoring traditions—so educators, artists, organizers, and policy makers can adapt what works in their own contexts."
The chapter abstract follows:
This chapter explores decolonial portals as both a theoretical lens and a pedagogical practice, offering pathways to challenge dominant narratives and reimagine more just and sustainable planetary futures. Inspired by decolonial literature and rooted in lived experiences of the Philippines, Argentina, and Latvia, the concept of portals emerges from cracks in the fabric of modernity/coloniality—scars inflicted by colonial violence, ecological destruction, and suppressed histories. The authors navigate suppressed histories and subjectivities, from the Philippine-American War to settler colonialism in Argentina and Soviet ecological devastation in Latvia, to illustrate how decolonial portals disrupt extractivist logics and foreground relationality and care. Together, they discover partial connections between their narratives, ultimately creating pedagogical spaces that encourage a radical reimagination of planetary futures: those that recognize and emphasize our care and kinship with one another, human and more-than-human, honoring the interconnectedness of all life.
Rodriguez-Fransen offers the following acknowledgments: Victoria Desimoni and Iveta Silova, brilliant scholars and kindred spirits
