Rosalba Icaza Garza is Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science.

More information about Rosalba Icaza Garza

My research lies at the intersection of global politics, feminisms, and decoloniality. The field of global politics analyzes interactions between power and knowledge under conditions of globalization.

The field of feminisms investigates the gendered inequalities in such interactions. Feminisms in plural indicates my long-term interest in the plurality of approaches reflecting and acting upon gendered inequalities across the Global North/South divide.

The field of decoloniality is concerned with modern and colonial structures of power, knowledge, gender, and subject formation. It proposes a turn to an epistemic or cognitive South in the reconstitution of a global political society.

Global Politics and Epistemic Justice
Interconnecting these strands, my academic work has generated rigorous societally engaged analyses of global politics and epistemic justice in development studies. Thematically, it reflects my long-term fascination for understanding the productive learning tensions that emerge when communities organize across borders to resist multiple intermeshed oppressions along lines of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age/generation, sexualities, and body capacities. I have conceptualized such responses as ‘social struggles as epistemic struggles’ (Icaza and Vazquez 2013).

Decolonial Feminism
In advancing this intellectual interest, I have contributed to feminist decolonial perspectives by accounting for an epistemic dimension of collective action across borders (Icaza 2010; Icaza and Vazquez 2013; Icaza 2013; Icaza 2015; Icaza 2017; Icaza 2018). Such a perspective was previously only marginally recognized in the fields of international relations (IR) and global development studies.

My research on the epistemologies of affect and the corporeal in social struggles (Icaza 2017; Icaza 2018) has brought this topic to the forefront. I have identified how modes of knowing and being are produced through experiences of epistemic vulnerability and fragility when encountering and hosting radical difference.

Collaborative Research Methodologies
In advancing a conceptualization of social struggles as epistemic struggles, I developed a collaborative research methodology characterized by its engaged and rigorous non-extractive approach to knowledge cultivation through mutual learning across differences (Icaza 2018; Icaza and Leyva 2019; Icaza, Jong, and Rutazibwa 2018).

Societally Embedded and Accountable Research
As well as being deeply engaged in teaching, my research emphasizes a strong societal orientation and impact. In 2016, I served on the University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission, set up to investigate the meanings associated with diversity in the existing governance frameworks at UvA. Under the Chairship of Emerita Professor Gloria Wekker, my contribution revealed how UvA tended to limit diversity to gender and internationalization. I also pointed out a prevailing demographic understanding of diversity (who is at the university) to the neglect of an epistemic understanding of diversity (what knowledge is produced and taught).

In the collaborative project “We won’t think what we don’t do: Learning from Stories of Solidarity in times of Covid in the City of the Hague” (LEF-SOS; 2020-21) co-lead with Dr Aminata Cairo, Opens external I investigate the meanings of solidarity that circulate among marginalized communities in The Hague during and after the COVID-19 “intelligent” lockdown in the Netherlands and the global Black Lives Matter mobilizations. As the research foregrounds active engagement with and accessibility to what has been collectively learned, the outputs are directed to different audiences, including academia, teachers and students, the Den Haag Municipality, local policymakers, as well as community and religious centers.

Collaborations, Coalitions, Relationships
As someone who constantly seeks long-lasting collaborations in the Netherlands and abroad with academic, policy, and activist networks concerned with global justice, equity, and sustainable development, I value the practice of critical self-reflexivity as a basis to respond to and be with others effectively but caringly.

Teacher, Mentor, Woman of Color
As a teacher, and mentor in both undergraduate and postgraduate education in seven different countries, I have learned the importance of deep listening, connection, and relation for sustaining long-lasting collaborative work. As a woman of color, I understand my role in academia as an opportunity to honor those who precede me and mentor those who come after me.

Interconnected areas of research:

**I Decolonial thinking and 'the international'**
How can one revisit the modern/colonial character of notions such as region, regionalism, social resistance, and global justice?

My way of working this question has been through the identification of decolonial trajectories in knowledges and cosmovisions that have been actively produced as backward or ‘subaltern’ by hegemonic forms of understanding of 'the international' (including liberalism, Marxism, some feminisms, post-structuralism, and the current IR hype on “new materialism”). Post-development, critical pedagogies, feminists, and decolonial thinkers Arturo Escobar, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, and Maria Lugones have been crucial for my understanding of the epistemic violence of Eurocentrism.

**II Thinking academia in the promotion of autonomy**
Can modern/colonial academia contribute to sustaining forms of epistemic dissent that promote global social justice and autonomy? And if so, how?

In exploring these questions, I have been involved in different collaborative research initiatives, including the Transnational Network Other Knowledges  (RETOS) and its autonomous publishing house. I also collaborate with Suumil Mooktaan in Sinanche, Yucatan, Mexico.

**III Learning as liberation/liberation of learning**
I am interested in the application of anti-oppressive and decolonial pedagogies in my teaching articulated as pedagogies of positionality, pedagogies of relationality, and pedagogies of transition (Icaza and Vazquez 2018). In teaching about the politics of decolonial investigations and decolonizing research practices, I seek to encourage relational accountability and mutual (un)learning. My pedagogical practices are inspired by Third-world, Chicana, Black, and decolonial feminist theories and epistemologies. I  collaborate with the Going Glocal initiative - co-financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a pioneering effort in education and research on global citizenship in the Netherlands and teach in the Decolonial Summer School "Maria Lugones", co-organized by the Utrecht University College and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven.

**IV Plural feminisms for plural liberations**:
I am deeply interested in intercultural dialogues among different strands of feminism. I have been exploring the ideas of coalitional politics as developed by Maria Lugones and the points of convergence and divergence between decolonial and post-colonial feminisms.