Julia von Sigsfeld

Taking as a starting point the complex dynamics of coloniality and struggles for equality and decolonization in the context of postcolonial Ecuador, the research will revolve around the ways in which ‘sumak kawsay’ (“living well”) and interculturality – read as expressions of minor/decolonial cosmopolitics – can be understood as active, embodied, ethical-relational, political-epistemic projects that conceptualize “other” forms of interrelation and ethics of coexistence out of the experience of coloniality-modernity. The aim will be to create, through an in-depth ethnography, a better understanding of ‘sumak kawsay’/interculturality, as minor/decolonial cosmopolitics, as embodied, lived, and theorized in the everyday by historically subalternized social actors in the Ecuadorian Andes, of their negotiation in inter-ethnic and intercultural interactions, and of the processes of their translation into political and institutional spheres.

Kontakt: j.vonsigsfeld@fu-berlin.de