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Dr. Rolando Vázquez is an acclaimed scholar and thinker in decoloniality, regularly in demand to deliver keynotes on decoloniality at academic and cultural events and institutions. Dr. Vázquez is one of the co-founders of the annual Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School. For the last 3 years Dr. Vázquez has been the cluster chair at ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ College Utrecht, and will leave at the end of October to take up a new post as Professor of Post/Decolonial Theories and Literatures, with a focus on the Global South’ at the Faculty of Humanities of the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Amsterdam. In the meantime, we sat down with Dr. Vázquez to talk about his work, time at UCU and upcoming projects in his new role.

Can you tell us a little bit about your academic interests?
I would say that I am generally concerned with decoloniality. I am engaged in different research practices and sustain conversations on decoloniality with many professional fields from dance to museums, from development studies to architecture, etc. Here at UCU, I co-teach a course on encountering China with Dr. Chiara Robbiano, where I contribute with the Decolonial methodology of world-travelling and positioned thought. I have also taught in the geography track and the qualitative methods class.

What are the themes in decolonization right now that you find important to discuss?<
Well, maybe a matter of precision in vocabulary. We normally speak of decoloniality, not decolonization, because people confuse these two terms. Decolonization refers to the political processes of reaching independence from imperial structures, whereas decoloniality is broader. It has to do, for example, with transforming institutions such as universities, and looking at various aspects like the classroom, the curriculum, the teaching methodologies, the hiring practices, who staffs the university in which levels, the recruitment of students. We are also looking at the question of decolonizing museums: What does it mean to decolonize a contemporary art museum that has no colonial collections but that has been engaged in colonial practices since its foundation? Of course, this topic is key for ethnographic museums. I contributed as advisor to the new permanent exhibition at the Troppen Museum in Amsterdam. It is important to note that it is the most important ethnographic museum in the country and that it now has an exhibition with a strong focus on decoloniality. In dance we are also having very intense debates on decolonizing, we just hosted the first meeting of an Erasmus Plus consortium on diversity in higher dance education here at UCU with important dance academies in Brussels, Lausanne and Stockholm. Visual artists are also very engaged in the topic, for example the work of Patricia Kaersenhout, who did the slavery monument here in Utrecht and has important exhibitions in Rotterdam and Maastricht at the moment.

Can you explain a little bit more in depth, especially related to dance? It sounds interesting, but what does it actually entail?
Well, I'm also not a dancer, so it has also been learning journey for me to get in conversation with the field. For example, if you look at the curriculum of contemporary dance schools, you will find similar problems that we have in the university, the eurocentrism of the canon and how the Western tradition is what is considered modern and contemporary dance, and how other dances from the world are excluded from what is being taught or are seen as marginal or not contemporary. They are seen as traditional or exotic or something else, but not contemporary. More deeply, it has to do with what is being expressed through dance, for example, how the contemporary dancing body is a body that is dancing for a representation, for a visual expression in space for a public, whereas in other traditions of dance, you might have people dancing to create community, to offer to the Earth, to remember and not necessarily for the spectacle. Can these other functions of dance, can the plurality of dances find a space of recognition in dance academies? What the canons do is that they normalize and they tend to reduce a the plural universe of things into what we call a monoculture, this reduction of plurality is something that we need to be aware of not just in dance but in all our disciplines. That's why in the college we have had many conversation on the need to decolonize the disciplines, of positioning  the curriculum, etc.

Can you tell us a little bit about your own academic journey, what brought you to this field of study?
Well, there is no one reason. There are many reasons but I think importantly, my own positionality and the fact that I come from Mexico has made me aware of these questions. As a kid in Mexico City I was studying at the French school. So from very early on, I experienced the dissonance between a Eurocentric curriculum, especially in place that was not Europe. In retrospect, my decolonial awareness, or sensitivity might come from there. It's already there in your lived experience, when you are being trained on the geography of France while living in Mexico, you know? There is a discrepancy, and that is the discrepancy of the modern/colonial structure of knowledge. Eurocentric history becomes universal history and many in the global South must study it, even above their own local history.

Apart from these early experiences, I have to say that I entered the field through meeting the right people at the right moment. For example, around 2006 I met Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar who are key figures in this current of thought. With Walter Mignolo I co-founded the Decolonial Summer School 14 years ago. The summer school became a meeting place for many people that are deeply involved in developing the field. Importantly, we have shared the space with Prof. Gloria Wekker and Prof. María Lugones, with Prof. Catherine Walsh and Prof. Jean Casimir, with extraordinary visual artists like Patricia Kaersenhout and Jeannette Ehlers and many other great thinkers and doers! The faculty of the summer school comes from many different fields, sociologists, linguists, political scientists, feminists of color, artists, visual artists, dancers and more. It shows that decoloniality is not conversation that belongs to a disciplinary field, but it goes across fields and across institutions.

What was the journey from Mexico all the way to ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ College Utrecht like?
Well, it was a long journey... before coming to UCU, I was at ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ College Roosevelt in Middelburg. I worked there for 14 years and I was the sociology track fellow. There I developed courses around decoloniality and I founded with Prof. Walter Mignolo from the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Duke, the Decolonial Summer School. It was meaningful to start the summer school in a city like Middelburg, that has been so central in the history of Dutch slavery. The summer school takes place around 1st July, the day of the commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Many debates that later became more prominent in Dutch society were addressed at first the summer school, for example the debate on decolonising the university and the museum.

Do you think like in the present day, that these discussions have been opened up enough in the universities in the Netherlands specifically, or do we have more still things to do that you see being critical?
Of course there is still a lot that needs to be done. It's all a process that takes time, it takes very long for things to change. Previous generations were not trained with this scholarship, so it is hard for teachers from previous generations to see the relevance of decoloniality. It is the students, the current generation of students that is very much aware of what decoloniality means. They begin asking  things like "why is my curriculum white, is this not a very Eurocentric curriculum, or an anthropocentric curriculum? Can we not read authors from other places of the world?" That transformation is happening. But it's a process. Sometimes we see decolonial terminology being misused. It is one thing to use the term and just hijack the concept, and another thing is to really do it. You know that you are really practicing decoloniality when you are working against erasure and you are working towards social justice, towards undoing what we call the colonial wound. So decoloniality is not just a critique or a form of deconstruction, but decoloniality involves an engagement with justice.

How do you see the efforts at UCU to embrace decoloniality?
UCU is a community that is very open to this challenge. The student association has been working on this topic and there are also key members of the faculty that are very engaged with it. The Board of Studies also made a call for new courses that included a decolonial approach. As you can see there is a strong group of people seriously engaged with decoloniality, and the college has invested in it, but of course, as I say, it's a process. I think it's very much alive in particular courses with specific teachers, but of course, there is a long way to go. It is an ongoing task when our disciplines, our institutional formations, come from what we call the modern/colonial order. To challenge all those structures is very complex. To really to diversify and decolonize, you need to act at the level of the content: The what -  what are we teaching? What are we researching? What are we producing? We also need to look at The who. Who is governing the university? Who is cleaning the university? Is there a colonial structure there? To look at the practices of hiring, who hires, who gets hired, who has precarious conditions working at the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, all that. It's a slow process to change, to diversify the people. For example, in the recruitment of students it is important to realize that internationalization is not necessarily diversification. Diversity and decoloniality require deep transformations. I'm hopeful because I see it slowly happening and there is good will to do it.

Of course, there is also resistance, and there are blind spots. I like to compare this period with 1968. One of the main demands of the students’ movements in 1968 was for gender equality at the university, for women to be able to access university. At that time, it was normal that universities were almost all male. And now it's normal that women are at the university in equal numbers, and in places like UCU they are even a majority. The questions that have been opened around decoloniality and diversity are so clear and important for society that they won't go away. The fact is that the coming generations are seeking a more complex and inclusive understanding of the world, they know that a Eurocentric view is not enough to understand our times.

You have been at UCU for three years now, what has been the highlight of working here?
For me, it's the people, really, the students and my fellow colleagues. I leave with a lot of sadness. I think it's an institution that is built with very good-hearted people, you know, at all levels. There is a basic level of trust. I know that in my Cluster, for example, my colleagues come with joy and trust to their work. This cannot be taken for granted, when we look at other institutions. It is not easy to leave the team and the broader community. For me, that is a highlight. It is so important to work in an environment where things are done through consultation, where people are heard and trusted. That I really like.

What is next in your career? After your move what do you look forward to?
I have been offered a professorship at the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Amsterdam on postcolonial and decolonial theories and literatures, which is very adequate for my field of scholarship. It came as a gift to me, because I was not doing my work in order to get a professorship. It came more as an outcome of what we are actually doing, of the impact of the work we have done with cultural and academic institutions, but also the way our writing is being read and used by academics and practitioners in many fields. By having a chair, I will be able to have a PhD group. I will have more time for research, and my teaching will be more connected to the things I write and research.

Many other projects are coming up, like the Erasmus+ project on decolonising higher dance education. At UvA we will be working on decolonizing literatures and on aesthetic and epistemic restitutions which was one the topics of . Countries like the Netherlands have apologized for slavery and colonialism; but what happens after apologies? Apologies are certainly very important they provide a clear recognition that these things happen and that something needs to be done to repair and restitute. Restitutions is importantly about materiality, like restituting territories and collections of stolen material cultures. But restitution has also to do with what I call epistemic and aesthetic restitution, how you restitute other knowledges and other forms of aesthesis.

Thanks very much for spending the time to talk to us, we wish you all the best in your future adventures!

Read more about Rolando Vazquez’s work .