Abstract

9.30 – 10.30 – Dialogue: Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Syed Farid Alatas
A vivid dialogue, stimulated by original questions coming from the audience, exploring some important topics related to the concepts, methodologies and case-studies of decolonial knowledge and thought, in the Global South.

10.45 – 11.45

1 - Maria Paula Meneses, CES
Religion(s) as politics – reclaiming silenced epistemologies and ontologies in Southern Africa 
Many of the ‘global’ references are based upon defined knowledge corpus, mostly of Eurocentric origin. This raises a series of epistemological and ontological questions in times when decolonization is a growing challenge. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos advances with the Epistemologies of the South, in line with Alatas intellectual provocation, if the epistemological diversity of the world is to be accounted for, other theories must be developed and anchored in other epistemologies to account adequately for the realities of the global South. This presentation briefly seeks to address two topics: on the one side, to explore the arbitrary nature of our ‘disciplinary’ and ‘continental’ academic interpretations and the impacts resulting from any attempt to impose a macro-narrative about our world. On the other side, it challenges the center-periphery model, by addressing religious modes of thinking about the world in South-eastern Africa as political and epistemological ideals, paths towards interpolitical and intercultural translations.

2 - Jason Keith Fernandes, CRIA
Catholicism as an epistemology of the South 
One of the results of the widespread secularization of our world has been the tendency to clumsily band all Christian ideologies into a single rubric of Christianity. Challenging this propensity, I argue that Catholicism has much to offer to an epistemology of the south, not least because of its historical location in the global south, and the way secular liberalism has located it as the enemy, but also the way in which it fractures secular liberal imaginaries.

12.00 – 13.00

3 - Marta Aráujo, CES
Sacrificing Muslimness: Islamophobia in the media and the academia in Portugal
Drawing on S. Sayyid’s (2014) understanding of Islamophobia as a form of racialized governance, this communication discusses academic knowledge, political and media discourse mobilizing the figure of the Muslim in Portugal. Drawing on the analysis of online narratives (e.g. academic articles, news reports, blog entries, social commentary) published between 2000 and 2017, I analyze how Islam is performatively evoked and constructed in national imaginaries as being situated in the externality to the idea of Europe, in which Muslims are allowed to enter insofar as they sacrifice their Muslimness– defined both culturally and politically.

4 - Teresa Toldy, CES, UFP
Critique of “gender ideology” - scenes of theological and political approaches
The critique to the so called “gender ideology” is growing in different parts of the world nowadays. Inside Christianity it is part of the discourse of “official documents” issued by the Vatican and repeated a-critically by many Bishops Conferences in different countries. However, this critique seems to have place also outside of Christianity. Is “gender” being used as a “stage” for fundamentalisms and nationalisms?