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The theme for the chair's plenaries at the 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference is 'Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world'. This commentary explains why this pursuit of critical consciousness via decolonial thinking could do more harm than good. We show how the emphasis on decolonising geographical knowledges rather than structures, institutions and praxis reproduces coloniality, because it recentres non-Indigenous, white and otherwise privileged groups in the global architecture of knowledge production. It is argued that an effective decolonial movement within geography must recognise the intersectionality of indigeneity and race, and necessitates that the terms on which the discipline starts debates about decolonisation and decoloniality are determined by those racialised as Indigenous and non-white by coloniality.

This paper explores the important role of critical science, and in particular of post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as amongst the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt holds the promise of far-reaching positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable peoples. Values and power are central to this discussion. Decolonial theories use historical hindsight to explain patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social world. By embedding a decolonial critical approach within its technical practice, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles, centring vulnerable peoples who continue to bear the brunt of negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. We highlight problematic applications that are instances of coloniality, and using a decolonial lens, submit three tactics that can form a decolonial field of artificial intelligence: creating a critical technical practice of AI, seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and the renewal of affective and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight and the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives available to us, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of beneficence and justice for all.

I attempt a dialogue between phenomenology (Husserl) and decoloniality (Quijano), understanding that both are theoretical frames by means of which transcendental phenomenology and the lifeworld, on the one hand, and modernity/coloniality, on the other, came into being. Phenomenology and transcendental consciousness/lifeworld are mutually constitutive. One cannot exist without the other; and so it is for the mutual constitution of decoloniality and modernity/coloniality. There cannot be modernity/coloniality without decoloniality, and vice versa. The axis around which the dialogue I attempt here turns is the geopolitics of knowledge and colonial difference, structuring and ranking all spheres of life.

The recent growth of internationalization at colleges and universities in the Global North has amplified the need to address the ongoing colonial politics of knowledge in these institutions. In this article I argue that a failure to denaturalize and interrupt long-standing patterns of curricular Euro-supremacy may result in internationalization becoming yet another means of economic expansion and epistemic erasure. However, rather than offer a prescriptive roadmap for epistemic decolonization, this article is an effort to consider the paradoxes, challenges, and difficulties that often arise in efforts to do this work. El reciente crecimiento de la internacionalización en las universidades en el norte mundial ha aumentado la necesidad de enfrentar las actuales políticas coloniales del conocimiento en estas instituciones. En este artículo sostengo que la imposibilidad de desnaturalizar e interrumpir los duraderos patrones de la supremacía del plan de estudios europeo puede provocar que la internacionalización se convierta en otro medio de expansión económica y supresión epistémica. Sin embargo, en lugar de ofrecer una guía prescriptiva para la descolonización epistémica, este artículo es un esfuerzo por considerar las paradojas, los desafíos y las dificultades que suelen surgir en los esfuerzos para realizar esta tarea. La croissance récente de l’internationalisation dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur dans les pays du Nord a amplifié le besoin de traiter la politique coloniale des connaissances en cours dans ces institutions. Dans cet article, j’avance que ne pas dénaturaliser et interrompre les vieux schémas consacrant la suprématie des programmes européens pourrait faire de l’internationalisation un autre moyen d’expansion économique et d’effacement épistémique. Toutefois, plutôt que de prescrire un itinéraire de décolonisation épistémique, cet article constitue une tentative d’étude des paradoxes, des défis et des difficultés qui se posent souvent lors des efforts en ce sens. 北半球高等院校近来的国际化增长 放大了在这些 院校讨论持续的殖民政治知识的需求。本文中，我论证了无法本质改变和打断长期存在的 欧洲至上课程的模式可能导致国际化成为 另一种方式的经济扩张和认知抹灭。然而， 并非为知识非殖民化提供指定的路线图，本文 旨在思考在努力 进行这项工作时经常出现的悖论、挑战和困难。 أبرز النمو الأخير لاتجاهات التدويل في الكليات والجامعات في الجزء الشمالي من العال م هذه ف ي ال حال ي ة ا لا ست ع ما ري ة ال م ع ر ف ي ة ال سيا سا ت معالجة إل ى الحاج ة .ال م ؤ س سات وف ي هذه المقالة، أدفع بأن العجز عن إعادة الأمور إلى طبيعتها وعن وقف الأنماط المناهج ت د و ي ل جعل إل ى ي ؤد ي ق د المناهج عل ى ا لأ و ر وبي ة ل ل ه ي م ن ة ال م ست م رة .ال م ع رف ي والمحو الاقتصا د ي ا ل ت و س ع س ب ل أحدوعلى الرغم من ذلك، ا لال مق ه ذ ١ ي ع ت ب ر ،ال م ع رف ي ا لا ست ع ما ر لإنهاء علاجية طري ق خارطة و ضع من وبد لا من كث ي ر ف ي تنش أ ا ل ت ي وال صع وبا ت وال ت ح ديا ت ا ل ت ن ا ق ضا ت ف ي الن ظ ر إل ى يهدف جهد ب م ث ا ب ة مجهودات إطار ف ي ا لأ حيا ن .العمل ب هذا ا ل ق ي ا م Наблюдаемый в последнее время рост интернационализации в колледжах и университетах развитых стран требует повышенного внимания к действующей колониальной политике знаний в этих учебных учреждениях. Автор статьи утверждает, что отказ от денатурализации и пресечения многолетних традиций европоцентризма в учебных программах может привести к тому, что интернационализация станет лишь еще одним средством экономической экспансии и эпистемологической чистки. При этом статья не предлагает конкретный план эпистемологической деколонизации, а представляет собой попытку проанализировать парадоксы, сложности и проблемы, которые часто возникают в ходе данной работы.

We engage the decolonial option from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe with an interest in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living. This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality and its constitutive effect on lived experience. We depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of a particular philosophy. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being. Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from non-discursive domains, and from a different genealogy than western Europe’s; the coloniality of the senses, time and being. We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide, therapists and hotline workers, and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of erasure and violence that the epistemologies and ontologies of suicide, suicide assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further sustaining dehumanization and the imposition of death as a constant in life. We discuss a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments, constructed as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings, under the control of modernity/coloniality that discriminates against pluriversal temporalities, sensings, and relationalities.

Background: Rhizocephalan barnacles stand out in the diverse world of metazoan parasites. The body of a rhizocephalan female is modified beyond revealing any recognizable morphological features, consisting of the interna, a system of rootlets, and the externa, a sac-like reproductive body. Moreover, rhizocephalans have an outstanding ability to control their hosts, literally turning them into \"zombies\". Despite all these amazing traits, there are no genomic or transcriptomic data about any Rhizocephala. Methods: We collected transcriptomes from four body parts of an adult female rhizocephalan Peltogaster reticulata: the externa, and the main, growing, and thoracic parts of the interna. We used all prepared data for the de novo assembly of the reference transcriptome. Next, a set of encoded proteins was determined, the expression levels of protein-coding genes in different parts of the parasite's body were calculated and lists of enriched bioprocesses were identified. We also in silico identified and analyzed sets of potential excretory / secretory proteins. Finally, we applied phylostratigraphy and evolutionary transcriptomics approaches to our data.  Results: The assembled reference transcriptome included transcripts of 12,620 protein-coding genes and was the first for any rhizocephalan. Based on the results obtained, the spatial heterogeneity of protein-coding gene expression in different regions of the adult female body of P. reticulata was established. The results of both transcriptomic analysis and histological studies indicated the presence of germ-like cells in the lumen of the interna. The potential molecular basis of the interaction between the nervous system of the host and the parasite's interna was also determined. Given the prolonged expression of development-associated genes, we suggest that rhizocephalans \"got stuck in their metamorphosis\", even at the reproductive stage. Conclusions: The results of the first comparative transcriptomic analysis for Rhizocephala not only clarified but also expanded the existing ideas about the biology of these extraordinary parasites.

After the end of Latin American dictatorships, scholars closely analyzed the relationship between violence, memory and democracy. But these societies have continued to grapple not only with the legacy of authoritarian governments but with centuries of colonial power, with the result that many of the assumptions of earlier scholars are now being revisited. Intersectional questions of race, indigeneity and gender continue to refashion our understanding of memory and injustice. These questions frame this introductory article, in which we argue that Latin American contemporary social mobilisation that has denounced recent and long-term violence is constituted through intervention and creation of heritage from below. We propose that the interdisciplinary field of Critical Heritage Studies, that has burgeoned recently in the region, offers a means to understand how space, scale, and society interact to create meanings and work through violent pasts. The works of this Special Collection extend traditional conceptions of urban heritage as the mere conservation of cities’ landscape, towards the study of the relation between cultural geographies and the production of social mobilizations in Latin America. These geographies enable unique formulations of protest for activists, creating new capacities to contest recent and long-term human rights abuse. Tras el fin de las dictaduras latinoamericanas, las/os académicos de la región analizaron de cerca la relación entre violencia, memoria y democracia. Pero estas sociedades han seguido lidiando con el legado de los gobiernos autorita-rios y con siglos de abuso colonial, por lo que muchos de los supuestos de estos primeros estudios ahora están siendo examinados. Preguntas sobre la interseccionalidad racial, indígena y de género continúan reformulando nuestra comprensión sobre la relación entre la memoria y la injusticia. Estas preguntas guían este artículo introductorio, en el que sostenemos que la movilización social contemporánea en Latinoamérica que ha denunciado las violencias recientes y de larga data se constituyen a través de la intervención y la creación de patrimonio desde abajo. Proponemos que el campo interdisciplinario de Estudios Críticos del Patrimonio, que ha florecido recientemente en la región, ofrece un medio para comprender cómo el espacio, sus diferentes escalas y la sociedad interactúan para crear significados y elaborar sus pasados de violencia y opresión. Los trabajos de este número especial amplían las concepciones tradicionales del patrimonio urbano como la mera conservación del paisaje de las ciudades, hacia el estudio de la relación entre geografías culturales y la producción y performance de movilizaciones sociales en la región. Estas geografías constituyen de forma única las protestas y sus significados, creando nuevas capacidades para luchar en contra de las violencias recientes y coloniales.

This article reads A Modest Proposal from the darker side of the westernised/anglicised Enlightenment. Firstly, it critically engages with the proclivity within the Anglocentric academy to celebrate English language literary figures associated with \"The Enlightenment\" in Ireland without a questioning of their role in the colonial project and in shaping its discourses of racism and sexism. Secondly, it focuses on how, from an Irish decolonial perspective, Jonathan Swift can be understood as a manager of the colonial racial/patriarchal matrix of power. Thirdly, it argues that the satire written by Jonathan Swift should be understood as an Anglocentric geo-cultural category and may be understood as westernised/anglicised Enlightenment satire. Finally, A Modest Proposal is analysed in terms of the exceptionality principle of irony, Swift's project of improvement and salvation of the colonised, and modernity/coloniality's rhetorical promise yet inability to solve the problems it produces. Este artículo propone una lectura de A Modest Proposal desde la perspectiva más oscura de una Ilustración occidentalizada y anglicista. En primer lugar, aborda desde un prisma crítico la proclividad de la academia anglocéntrica a celebrar figuras literarias en lengua inglesa asociadas con “la Ilustración” en Irlanda sin cuestionar su papel en el proyecto colonial y en la configuración de discursos raciales y sexistas. En segundo lugar, el artículo se centra en demostrar cómo, desde una perspectiva decolonial irlandesa, Jonathan Swift puede entenderse como un gestor de una matriz de poder colonial racial/patriarcal. En tercer lugar, el ensayo propone que la sátira escrita por Jonathan Swift debe abordarse como una categoría geocultural anglocéntrica y que puede entenderse como una sátira ilustrada occidentalizada/anglicanizada. Por último, se analiza A Modest Proposal en términos del principio de excepcionalidad de la ironía, el proyecto swiftiano de mejora y salvación de los colonizados, y la promesa retórica de la modernidad/colonialidad, aunque incapaz de resolver los problemas que produce.

In recent times, an ideological critique of the main concepts of religious studies has been carried out. However, that same criticism is not made in relation to the very notion of science. Rather, these critiques reveal the close connection between religious studies and a conception of modernity and science. The purpose of this article is to show how the radicalization of this criticism through decolonial theories leads to openness to other epistemologies, which challenges some assumptions made in religious studies. The central question is: would opening up to other rationalities imply the dissolution of religious studies into many regional theologies? In other words, to what extent would the resistance to this decolonial radicalization through the affirmation of scientific and social approaches to religion, observed in certain trends in current religious studies, reveal a challenge brought by the decolonial theory to religious studies? To address this problem, this article is divided into three sections. In the first part, it points to the main features of what is understood as decolonial, adopting the thought of Walter Mignolo as a reference. In the second part, the article highlights the close connection between religious studies and modern epistemological values. Finally, the article raises some questions and implications that come from the decolonial turn toward the field of religious studies.