Pilar Aurelio Munoz
- ENGLISH
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Pilar Aurelio Muñoz is a PhD student and educator from the El Paso/Juárez border. Through his research at CU Boulder, he applies a critical framework of decoloniality on Latin American and borderland literatures to help make visible and advance decolonial knowledges and cultural practices that can help cultivate and sustain imaginaries that are delinked, and thus, always othered from the colonial logics of oppression that have come to dominate Western modes of thought. His research positions borderland cultural expressions as spaces of epistemic disobedience that can express relational ontologies that have always been present at the borderlands where the distance from the empire is at its greatest. By excavating these differential modes of existence, this decolonial work looks to imagine, and thus, lay the foundation for potential futurities that run counter to the colonial logics that are quickly running into their own horizon. However, this potential is greatly diminished if we do not attend to how these oppressive colonial logics exist at every level of our society: in our schools, communities, and institutions. As such, his research and community works looks to bridge the gap between the decolonial theorizations that happen in academic institutions and the community work being done along the border (in schools, mutual aid groups, or cultural centers for example) in order to reconceptualize and redistribute the powers of theorization and imagination that have historically been kept within zones of privilege, academic and otherwise.