Title:
Foundations of Decolonized Counseling Practices
Presenter:
Edil Torres Rivera, PhD, LPC, ACS
Description:
This session explores counseling approaches that attempt to understand and address the impact of colonialism and coloniality on individuals, communities, and ecosystems. From Frantz Fanon to Albert Memmi’s descriptions of the effects of colonial violence, racism, and exploitation, we locate the legacy of colonialism and neoliberal globalization in the contemporary world and our local communities and relationships. Through Cabral, Freire, Enriquez, Martin-Bar, and Montero, we enter liberation counseling approaches from a global context and explore the development of critical consciousness, critical dialogical pedagogy, prophetic imagination, and actions-in-solidarity to transform oppressive structures and to create liberatory environments and public homeplaces. Our shared undertaking is to explore the possible roles of liberation counseling in healing the sequelae of collective traumas, understanding and addressing their roots, and co-creating sustainable, just, and dynamically peaceful communities. Additionally, this session will cover an introduction to decolonial philosophy, which leads to questions about the coloniality of temporality and aesthetic experience that underlies the colonization of imaginaries. Beneath the colonized's political, social, economic, and military domination exists the colonization of the consciousness of the colonized. This course exposes aesthetic and affective dimensions of decolonial struggle and opens towards poietic engagements of the lives, histories, and senses of being of the excluded and colonized. Furthermore, this session includes: (1) decolonizing the mind or expanding critical consciousness. Decolonizing the mind means a process to end a false universalism in the wisdom of "Westernized" standards where the truth and knowledge are based on Western knowledge and the production of such knowledge. Decolonizing the Mind touches on language, politics, literature, and history. (2) Decolonization of Education. Throughout history, educational settings have become the center stage of colonial reproduction and indoctrination. As such, academic institutions have relied on curriculum, accreditation standards, and other regulations to control knowledge production and determine the curriculum, how it is delivered, and who can access formal education.