Decolonial Geographies and Catholic Social Teaching

“A feminist decolonial and spatial reconceptualization of Catholic social teaching uplifts the resistant voices that have always been present in spaces of marginality and furthers coalitional possibilities of social action. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Melissa Pagán Mount Saint Mary's University Contact Me

About this first book grant for scholars of color

This project provides a feminist decolonial and critical spatial appraisal of the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), to ascertain to what extent the coloniality of knowledge, the coloniality of being, and the coloniality of gender (i.e.: Eurocentrism and the knowledges it disregards; racism and the death ethics it espouses; sexism, heterosexism and the genders and sexualities it rejects) undergird and therefore undermine its teachings on social, political, and economic justice. Such an appraisal entails a transdisciplinary study of CST that historicizes the co-constitution of race, gender, and sexuality and questions how a decolonial and spatial reconceptualization of CST can model a Christian social tradition that is anti-colonial in the knowledges, bodies, and aesthetic practices it privileges, in order to further intercultural and coalitional possibilities of social action by uplifting resistant voices that have always been present in spaces of marginality.