AFRICAN WOMANISM: DESAFÍOS FRENTE A LA CONDICIÓN POSTCOLONIAL EN PURPLE HIBISCUS DE CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

En el presente artículo se desarrollará un análisis crítico literario sobre la obra Purple Hibiscus (2003) de la escritora nigeriana Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Dicho estudio sentará su base sobre el African Womanism de acuerdo al desarrollo realizado por las teóricas Chikwenje Okonyo Ogunyemi y Nah Dove. A lo largo de este artículo, se buscará mostrar aquellas características de dicha propuesta teórica reflejadas en la obra de Adichie, en donde los contextos desarrollados dan cuenta de escenarios y personajes altamente conflictuados. Lo anterior es atribuible a lo que podemos identificar como condición postcolonial que se refleja en la trama y ante la cual la propuesta de Okonyo y Dove es contrastada, dando paso a visiones críticas que permiten verificar que, a pesar de las complicadas situaciones retratadas en la novela, existe una resistencia que posibilita una apreciación disruptiva que quebranta la mirada occidentalizada sobre dicho contexto. 

The OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings

From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape

The Outer Reaches of Inner Peace: healing-centred peace emergence in North-Western India

This thesis emerged from a collaborative peace research project based in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (north-western India) in partnership with Yakjah Reconciliation and Development Network. In this thesis, I make a case for a healing-centred approach to conflict transformation and peace emergence that brings together inner (psycho-spiritual) and outer (socio-political) realms of peace. I inquire why and how intra- and inter-personal healing are imperative in contexts of protracted conflict and structural violence. This responds to a deficiency of wholistic inner-outer peace research, particularly in addressing the spiritual dimension of collective trauma and socio-political transformation. I argue that this deficiency stems in part from Eurocentric ontological and epistemological orientations, which give rise to fragmentary and compartmentalised understandings of peace, largely focusing on material, structural ‘outer’ dimensions of peace and neglecting psycho-spiritual dimensions. As I argue, this is a form of epistemic violence that arises from disembodied habits of modernity/coloniality. I therefore articulate healing-centred peacebuilding as an anti-colonial approach that demands new ways of seeing, being, knowing, and relating to self, other, earth, and sacred. In this project, we brought together 20 emerging youth peace leaders across identity fault lines for a series of immersive workshops centred around personal-political transformation and leadership development. Using a methodology I developed called Mapping Ritual Ecologies, I explored participants’ ‘stories of separation’ (trauma) and ‘stories of connection’ (healing) to understand and conceptually map each ‘ritual ecology’ as a wholistic space of intergroup contact and microcosm of the wider conflict context. I pose healing as an embodied relational process that moves from separation and fragmentation to wholeness and unification on individual and collective dimensions. This emerged in a fractal ‘healing spiral’ of embodied inside-out transformation that rippled outward in self-similar patterns at increasing scales of each ritual ecology and through participants’ relational spheres of influence. I reveal these relational patterns, arguing that outer socio-political structures emerge from collective and individual inner conditions, and conversely, inner experience and relational dynamics are shaped by outer socio-political structures and systems in dynamic, co-emergent processes