Catherine E Walsh

Catherine E Walsh is a senior professor and director of the doctoral programme in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Andean University Simón Bolívar in Ecuador. Her academic work centers on decolonial theory, critical interculturality, and the political, epistemic and ethical dimensions of knowledge production in Latin America, with particular focus on Indigenous and Black social movements across the region.

Walsh's research interests span decolonial studies, Indigenous epistemic traditions, critical pedagogy, race and gender studies, and Latin American political movements. She has developed influential theoretical frameworks including "re-existence" and "cracks" to understand how alternative social practices emerge from below to challenge coloniality and hegemonic neoliberalism. Her work places Indigenous knowledge systems in conversation with feminists of color like M. Jacqui Alexander and Maria Lugones, as well as anticolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon, creating a rich interdisciplinary approach that bridges social movements with academic theory. She examines how communities living in direct relation with the land challenge Western nation-state sovereignty and imagine alternative forms of humanity "after Man."

Walsh's publication trajectory reveals a consistent evolution from early work on educational exclusion of Latinos in the United States toward increasingly sophisticated decolonial frameworks. Her recent scholarship demonstrates how decolonial "cracks"—understood as extant and nascent fissures in the dominant order—take form through ground-up theorizing and practice. She argues for moving beyond "pedagogy as justice" toward "pedagogies of and for life" that enable alternative modes of living despite and beyond the capitalist-modern-colonial-racist system. Her work consistently centers Indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge while critically engaging with Western theoretical frameworks.

Among her most significant contributions is the 2023 book "Rising Up, Living On," which provides a comprehensive overview of Indigenous and Black militant social movements in Latin America from the mid-1990s to the present. As an editor, she has made foundational decolonial works accessible to broader audiences through her 2024 editorial work on "Aníbal Quijano: Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power." Her conceptual development of "re-existence" has become a powerful framework for understanding resistance that not only opposes domination but actively creates new forms of being and knowing.