As educators, organizers, and artists, we share a sense of urgency in actualizing decolonial, transversal pedagogies in the context of the neo-liberalization of universities. The chapter will focus on those spaces of education that are informal, contingent, and even private, that challenge the capitalist paradigm of schooling and emerge from what Enrique Dussel calls the “underside of modernity.” These are other spaces, decolonial in practice, in that they center non-Western and Indigenous epistemes to generate new social practices and subjectivities. The Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research serves as a case study, founded to foster specifically decolonial practices and support projects that defy categorization according to normative Western discourses of the disciplines. In this essay, the authors discuss the decentering of Western knowledge-the “underside(s) of modernity”-as a praxis of transdisciplinary and transcultural co-creation.
