Prof. Dr. Manuela Boatcă – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Manuela Boatcă

University of Freiburg
Sociology / Global Studies

Rector’s Fellow
October 2021 – March 2022

E-Mail: manuela.boatca@soziologie.uni-freiburg.de

Last Update: 31.08.2022

Curriculum Vitae

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree in English and German languages and literatures and a PhD in sociology. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/08 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In 2018 she was awarded an ACLS collaborative fellowship alongside literary scholar Anca Parvulescu (Washington University in St. Louis, USA), for a comparative project on inter-imperiality in Transylvania. The resulting co-authored book, titled “Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires” is forthcoming in English, German, and Romanian in 2022.

Selected Publications

Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație, Cluj, 2020
Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism, Routledge, 2016.
Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches (co-edited with Sérgio Costa & Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez), Ashgate, 2010
Globale, multiple und postkoloniale Modernen. Theoretische und vergleichende Perspektiven (Global, Multiple and Postcolonial Modernities. Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives) (co-edited with Willfried Spohn), Rainer Hampp: Munich, 2010

FRIAS Project

De-Coloniality Now: Trajectories and Contestations

De-Coloniality Now: Trajectories and Contestations is a collaborative and multidisciplinary research initiative at the University of Freiburg that engages with coloniality and decoloniality as global phenomena of the contemporary period. The team project examines transregional processes of contact, interaction, domination, appropriation, contestation, and resistance, as well as asymmetries, hierarchies, relationalities, and entanglements in today’s world. Our research initiative defines coloniality as a form of social domination that pertains to the extraction of resources just as it does to regimes of knowledge.

While coloniality, as a phenomenon that started with the European colonial expansion into the Americas in 1492, continues to characterize global asymmetries and epistemologies today, we can also observe counter-currents, resistances, appropriations, and the emergence of new hegemonies. The phenomenon of decoloniality and the discourses that convey it will be focal points of interest. Our global, transregional, and comparative approach takes into consideration different geopolitical contexts and emerging contemporary forms of coloniality and their connections and overlaps with forms of imperial rule. As a project situated at a university in Western Europe, it aims to integrate perspectives from the Global South and East and consistently collaborate with partners from these regions through fellowships and joint publications.