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Reposted by Diego Ballestero

Simon Strick @unddieregel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Almost behind my back, K. Motyl and R. Schober published "Knowledge and Failure in U.S. Cultural History" in OA feat @katrinhorn.bsky.social @nitzkesolvejg.bsky.social @astarre.bsky.social @dballestero.bsky.social @marlonlieber.bsky.social @julianestraetz.bsky.social and others! link below

Knowledge and Failure in
U.S. Cultural History
Edited by
Katharina Motyl and Regina Schober

1 The Failure / Knowledge Nexus: An Introduction
Katharina Motyl and Regina Schober
SECTION I
Failing Knowledge and the Privilege Not to Know
2
3
4
5
Queerness as Lie and Liability: Recent Renditions of the Celluloid
Closet 27
Katrin Horn Failing to Care: Catastrophic Knowledge Transfer in Jenny Offill's
Weather and Judith Hermann's Daheim
46
Solvejg Nitzke The Failures of Western Decolonization: Towards an Anti-Colonial
Perspective from the Global South
64
Diego Ballestero Science under Siege: The Erosion of Academic Freedom and
Transatlantic Exchange under the Second Trump Administration 84
Christian Lammert
SECTION II Knowledge Production and Media Affordances: Aesthetics,
Politics, Infrastructures The Details: Knowledge Destruction in the Contemporary
Fashosphere
97
Simon Strick

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9 An Ambiguous Utopia, after All: Ursula K. Le Guin, Lionel Trilling,
and the Literary Knowledge of Utopian Failure 113
Marlon Lieber
Toxic Knowledge and the Digital Pharmakon - Patricia Lockwood's
No One is Talking About This and the Failures of Social Media 132
Regina Schober The Failure of Manifest[o] Knowledge: Donna Haraway's "Eco-
Manifestos" Call for Action 149
Molina Klingler
SECTION III The Failures of Institutional Knowledge - Knowing Institutions
and Their Failures Black Tragedy in the Age of Welfare Reform: Restaging Poverty
Knowledge in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Red Letter Plays 16g
James Dorson The Failed Scholar Turned Novelist: W. E. B. Du Bois's Early Fiction
within and against the University 191
Alexander Starre Caring Bodies and Material Resistance to the Epistemic Failures of
Late Capitalism
210
Juliane Gamböck-Strätz
SECTION IV
Knowledge from Below: Subversive / Subjugated Knowledges Nestling up against and with: Entwinements of Abstraction,
Abjection, Failure, and Knowledge in Nella Larsen's Passing
Marius Henderson

14
15
Narratives of Failure in Literary Depictions of Mental Illness
Roman Bischof Vegh
251 Living on the Line: Border Epistemologies, Failure, and the
Resurgence of Subjugated Knowledges in the Québec / Vermont
Borderlands
271
Astrid M. Fellner

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

En 1921, una disputa por el nombre del Cap Polonio revelaba algo mucho más profundo: la Gran Guerra también atravesó museos, universidades, sociedades científicas y redes intelectuales en Buenos Aires. reddecolonial.hypotheses.org/3124

reddecolonial.hypotheses.org

Antropología

Las condiciones de emergencia de la Antropología están estrechamente vinculadas con las necesidades políticas y económicas de los espacios geo-políticos occidentales. Lejos de centrarse en un estudio ...

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Enjoy Buenos Aires. The legacy of the 1976 civil-military coup teaches us that Nunca Más was never meant to be selective. If memory condemns state terror only when it is convenient, it ceases to be memory and becomes ideology. The challenge is to make Nunca Más truly universal—including for Gaza.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Absolutely. Many works remain marginal while academia celebrates a sanitized version of decoloniality. That neglect is itself evidence of co-optation: the language was absorbed, the disruptive critique was not.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

What happens when collection histories are intertwined with forced labour migration? These are not encounters between cultures but the material afterlives of coercion, racial capitalism, and imperialism. The movement of objects and people is inseparable from the violence that enabled it

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

For me “transculturality” becomes meaningful only when it names the asymmetries that structure movement: who circulates freely, who is displaced, who is extracted, who becomes collectible. Without that, the term risks masking colonial power under the language of exchange.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

My aim is not to moralize but to map the contradictions of a field that often speaks of pluriversality, solidarity, and liberation, yet sometimes hesitates when confronted with the most urgent anti‑colonial struggle of our time

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Do you know of other decolonial or counter‑colonial thinkers who have either openly supported the Palestinian cause or, conversely, avoided taking a stance since 2023? Any leads, statements, interviews, or even notable absences would be extremely helpful.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Comrades, I hope you’re all doing well. I’m writing because I’m currently working on an article about the challenges of teaching pluriversalities in a moment marked by the ongoing Palestinian genocide and the tightening grip of what many are calling techno‑feudal governance.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Dear Friends the deadline for #EASA2026 is 26.01. Our panel interrogates multipolarity as colonial continuity, refuses current academic neutrality and centers decolonial praxis from the colonial wound. We are looking for your proposal! Spreading it widely nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...

nomadit.co.uk

P177: Multipolarity as Decolonial Overwriting. Dismantling Epistemic Geopolitics for a Pluriversal World [Decolonial Anthropology Network (DAN)]

This panel interrogates multipolarity as colonial continuity. We demand anticolonial anthropology that refuses neutrality, destabilizes power-laden polarities,

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

We gathered not in academia but in rebellion. Against epistemicide in Palestine, against silence polished as neutrality. Knowledge under siege is defiance. Resistance is method. Futures are built together. Read our reflections #DANRoundtable reddecolonial.hypotheses.org/2837

reddecolonial.hypotheses.org

DAN Roundtable

The inaugural roundtable of the Decolonial Anthropology Network felt less like an academic event and more like a rupture—an opening carved by those who refuse to bow to the machinery of erasure. We ga...

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

✊ 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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

@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?

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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?

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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?

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

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?

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

🚨 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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

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

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

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.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Do you mind the post whit the email account?

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Thank you for your quick and helpful response!

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Reposted by Diego Ballestero

Guerra en la Universidad @guerraenlauni.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

La European Association of Archaeologists ha enviado un email a todos los organizadores de sesiones en el próximo congreso amenazando con censurarlas si permiten que se critique el genocidio en Gaza. Es un ataque intolerable a la libertad de expresión. Boicot a @archaeologyeaa.bsky.social

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Dear colleagues! Have any of you had your Twitter account suspended? How long did it take to get it active again?

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

I’m calling on everyone who still has an account: please tag @XSupport and demand the reactivation of @diballestero. Your voice matters. Together we can stop this error from silencing real people.

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Diego Ballestero @dballestero.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

This isn’t just my case. If X can arbitrarily decide who is “real” or not, every professional, journalist or activist is at risk. This undermines trust in the platform itself.

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