Diego Ballestero

✊ 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

@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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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...

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

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?

🚨 Call for proposals open! Deadline: Oct 3, 2025.
📍 April 6–7, 2026: in-person conference
🌐 April 8, 2026: online sessions

A space for dialogue, struggle & imagination across borders. Join us! ✊🏽

#DecolonialConference2026

To decolonize is to confront power, to tear off the mask of complicity. ✊🏾 The Decolonial Conference is not an event, it is a trench: where voices meet, where new worlds are imagined, where dignity becomes action. Los Angeles, April 6–8, 2026.

To crown as “hero” a man who was misogynist, racist, xenophobic, transphobic, and a cheerleader of genocide is to betray our own dignity. Killing is wrong—but so is sanctifying the oppressor’s voice.

Little by little, I am re-establishing the community in the other virtual space. Look for me as @InsurgentMemory. Let's reconnect!

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.