Jairo Fúnez-Flores
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores is from a campesino village in southern Honduras. Campesino may directly translate to peasant but in Spanish it refers to the country or to the land. After over five centuries of colonial dispossession and displacement, many Indigenous and Mestizx campesino communities began to lose their language and identity, yet have maintained ancestral knowledges, collective practices, and reciprocal relations to land. After living in the US 18 years as an undocumented immigrant, Jairo returned to his village to begin a journey of learning from his campesino community once again.
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at Texas Tech University. Broadly speaking, his research is situated at the intersection of sociocultural studies in curriculum theory, decolonial theory, critical ethnography, and social movement research. He has published articles in Theory, Culture & Society, Globalisation, Societies and Education, and Educational Studies. Professor Fúnez-Flores is also the co-editor of the Bristol University Press book series Decolonization and Social Worlds, lead editor of the SAGE Handbook of Decolonial Theory, and Program Chair of the Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anti-Colonial Studies in Education SIG for the American Educational Research Association.
Read more about Jairo at https://twitter.com/Jairo_I_Funez and
https://jairofunez.substack.com/p/decolonial-thought-and-praxis
You can’t be anti-racist without being anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-heteropatriarchal
In this presentation, I aim to make the connections between capitalist exploitation and colonial, racial, and hetero-patriarchal domination more visible. I argue that anti-racism is not solely an individual task but rather a collective project, entailing a committed political and epistemological position towards interrogating interconnected systems of domination and exploitation. Racialization, dehumanization, and the coloniality of power constitute these systems, implying that anti-racist work demands an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-heteropatriarchal stance, rather than an individualistic, liberal anti-racist approach. I draw on decolonial thought and praxis from Latin America and the Caribbean to discuss what Indigenous, Black, campesino/peasant, student, and feminist movements have to teach us in terms of articulating struggles across differences in order to unsettle the modern/colonial, capitalist, and hetero-patriarchal world.
