birth_date: 1949-12-09 00:00:00
avg_rating: 4.39
name: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
about: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is an Aymara/Bolivian feminist sociologist/historian/activist. She is one of the best known ‘decolonial’ thinkers in Latin America who contests the use of the term ‘decolonial’. Her scholar activism goes back to the early 1970s. Cusicanqui has written extensively in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara, often moving between the three languages within a single text. She writes in a multilingual way as part of her decolonial practice (see below), perhaps because of this way of working, Anglo and European scholars seldom reference her as a pioneer in decolonial theory within the Global South. She is a founding member in conjunction with her students at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Bolivia) of the Taller de Historia Oral And Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is an Aymara/Bolivian feminist sociologist/historian/activist. She is one of the best known ‘decolonial’ thinkers in Latin America who contests the use of the term ‘decolonial’. Her scholar activism goes back to the early 1970s. Cusicanqui has written extensively in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara, often moving between the three languages within a single text. She writes in a multilingual way as part of her decolonial practice (see below), perhaps because of this way of working, Anglo and European scholars seldom reference her as a pioneer in decolonial theory within the Global South. She is a founding member in conjunction with her students at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Bolivia) of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop). The taller uses Aymara and Quechua epistemologies to build counter methodologies to Western ways of doing science through oral construction of knowledge. In 2018, she was given a Doctor Honoris Causa in Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, where she was a lecturer for over twenty years. She has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University (USA), University of Austin (USA), and Universidad Simón Bolívar (Ecuador), among others. She has been an activist in the katarista movement (political movement in Bolivia to recover the political identity of the Aymara people) and the cocoa growers movement. Rivera Cusicanqui’s work is extensive but three concepts/practices can be identified in her work. ...more