Dialogues on Decoloniality Through Critical Future Studies

Abstract

Decolonial scholarship offers crucial resources for rethinking emancipation, yet the collective construction and legitimation of decolonial futures remains insufficiently examined. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve scholars engaged in decolonial praxis, this paper investigates how future imaginaries are articulated, justified, and contested under conditions shaped by coloniality and neoliberal crisis. Framed through dialogical futurity as an integration of Critical Futures Studies and Social Representations Theory, the analysis shows how participants unsettle colonial temporalities, mobilise memory and affect, and position their visions in relation to contemporary Left politics. Three recurrent orientations emerge: unsettling, creating, and reworlding. These orientations reveal decolonial futures as contested fields of temporal legitimacy in which plural worlds are imagined against extractivism, epistemic hierarchy, and state violence. The paper contributes a psychosocial account of futurity as a socially mediated political practice and argues that resonance, rather than assimilation, offers a more productive relation between decolonial thought and the contemporary Left.