The 'indigenous native peasant' trinity: imagining a plurinational community in Evo Morales's Bolivia

Over the last two decades Latin America has been a laboratory for the implementation of new models of state and citizenship. In Bolivia the (neo)liberal multicultural paradigm dominant in the 1990s has recently been replaced by a plurinational paradigm, which implies a deepening of the decentralization process and the strengthening of rights for traditionally marginalized social sectors. This paper describes the process of construction of a plurinational ‘imagined community’ and, in particular, of one of its core narratives: The ‘indigenous native peasant’. I argue that the negotiation of this collective identity and its inclusion as one of the core ideas in the new constitution is the result of a contingent strategy in response to a highly conflictive scenario, which has not been, however, able to trigger a change in the way people identify themselves. Yet in recent years, social movements’ identities have been shaped by centrifugal forces. These forces should be understood as the result of a process of collective actors’ adaptation to institutional and regulatory reforms and contribute to explaining the increase of new intrasocietal conflicts linked to the redefinition of citizenship and territorial boundaries

Decolonial education and geography: Beyond the 2017 Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference

This review is inspired by the recent resurgence of grassroots movements aimed at the decolonisation of education. The departure point of the paper are the numerous, recent academic responses to campaigns such as Rhodes Must Fall, Why is My Curriculum White?, Why Isn't My Professor Black?, and #LiberateMyDegree. Following from there, the narrative is divided into two sections. The first part reviews theoretical approaches to decolonial education, especially those rooted in the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality paradigm. The second part analyses the ways in which geographers have applied these ideas to our discipline. The review pays particular attention to the 2017 Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference, curated under the “Decolonising geographical knowledges” theme. I argue that as geographers, we have to continue reflecting on the meaning of decolonial praxis, especially in relation to geographical education, beyond the recent conference. To these ends, the review concludes with seven specific questions for geographers to consider in the near future