Decolonizing Bodies: Knowledge, Culture and Global Inequalities

This session explores how bodies have been historically shaped by colonial, racial, gendered, and geopolitical power relations, while also serving as sites of resistance, creativity, and alternative forms of knowledge. Drawing on decolonial, postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and Global South perspectives, the session examines the body as a privileged locus for understanding the persistence of global inequalities and the possibilities for social transformation.

Colonial legacies continue to influence how bodies are classified, represented, regulated, and valued across different societies. Scientific knowledge, state institutions, media discourses, educational systems, and cultural practices have often contributed to the normalization of hierarchies based on race, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, and class. At the same time, diverse communities and social movements have challenged these dominant frameworks, producing alternative epistemologies and embodied forms of resistance.

This session seeks to foster critical dialogue on the relationships between bodies, knowledge production, culture, and power in contemporary societies. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which embodied experiences reveal tensions between universalist assumptions and plural ways of knowing, being, and inhabiting the world.

We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions addressing topics including, but not limited to:

• Decolonial and postcolonial approaches to the body;
• Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and Global South epistemologies across the bodies;
• Race, racism, and the racialization of bodies;
• Gender, sexuality, and colonial legacies across the bodies;
• Disability, ableism, and embodied inequalities.