Decolonial Futures represents one of the most comprehensive and philosophically rigorous resources for understanding decolonization not as inclusion within existing systems but as disentanglement from the violent assumptions of modernity itself. Created by an international collective of scholars, educators, and practitioners (including Vanessa Andreotti, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew, Rene Suša), the project offers frameworks, tools, and provocations for interrogating how colonial logics shape everything from education to economics to relationships with land and each other. Rather than prescribing solutions, the work invites “gesturing towards” alternatives—acknowledging that genuinely decolonial futures cannot be known in advance but must emerge through difficult, transformative processes of unlearning and relearning.
Key Highlights
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Hospicing Modernity: The project introduces the concept of “hospicing modernity”—recognizing that the systems created through colonialism and capitalism are dying while supporting what needs to end with compassion rather than desperately trying to save what cannot be sustained. This reframes transformation as accompaniment through necessary endings rather than innovation or reform.
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Metabolic Literacies: Decolonial Futures emphasizes “metabolic literacies”—capacities to sense our participation in larger living systems and metabolize experiences of harm, complicity, and transformation. This body-based, relational approach counters the cerebral, individualist frameworks dominant in Western education and organizing.
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Radical Relationality: The work explores relationality beyond liberal multiculturalism—acknowledging entanglement, complicity, and mutual implication rather than maintaining comfortable distance. This challenges both individualism and superficial solidarity, requiring ongoing work to address power differentials and colonial inheritances.
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Indigenous Resurgence: Rather than treating indigenous knowledge as resource to extract, the project centers indigenous resurgence movements and emphasizes that decolonization means land back, sovereignty, and supporting indigenous self-determination rather than incorporating indigenous aesthetics into colonial institutions.
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Critique of Futurity: Decolonial Futures interrogates modern obsessions with progress, innovation, and future-building, showing how these temporal orientations reflect colonial logics that devalue present relationships and ancestral wisdom. This temporal reorientation fundamentally challenges how transformation is imagined.
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Four Denials of Modernity: The work identifies four denials sustaining modern/colonial systems: denial of systemic violence, denial of complicity, denial of limits, and denial of separability. Confronting these denials becomes prerequisite for genuine transformation rather than repackaging extraction.
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Educational Tools and Frameworks: The project offers accessible frameworks including the “House” metaphor (modernity’s architecture), “Soft Reform vs. Radical Interruption” analysis, and “Compost Heap” practices—providing practical entry points into complex decolonial theory.
Practical Applications
Decolonial Futures offers transformative frameworks across contexts:
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Organizations and institutions can use the hospicing modernity framework to honestly assess what needs to end rather than reform, creating space for genuine alternatives rather than perpetuating harm through progressive rhetoric
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Funders and philanthropies can apply the four denials framework to examine how their practices reproduce systemic violence, complicity with extraction, growth dependence, and separation from land—developing accountability structures that address rather than deny these dynamics
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Educators can integrate metabolic literacies and decolonial pedagogies to center embodied learning, relationship with land, and capacity to sit with discomfort rather than prioritizing cognitive mastery and certainty
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Social change organizations can distinguish between soft reforms (inclusion within existing systems) and radical interruptions (disentangling from colonial logics), clarifying whether work perpetuates or challenges fundamental structures
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Indigenous-led initiatives can reference the resource when engaging non-indigenous allies, using the frameworks to articulate why meaningful solidarity requires addressing power, land, and sovereignty rather than merely diversifying representation
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Technology projects can apply decolonial analysis to examine how platforms and protocols reproduce colonial assumptions about progress, ownership, efficiency, and human exceptionalism—informing genuinely alternative rather than rebranded extractive approaches
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Individual practitioners can use the compost heap metaphor for transformative work—understanding change as messy, emergent processes of breakdown and regeneration rather than clean strategic plans
The project’s depth and rigor provides essential grounding for anyone serious about transformation beyond inclusion or reform.
Connection With SuperBenefit
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Beyond Progressive Inclusion: Decolonial Futures’ critique of soft reform challenges SuperBenefit to distinguish genuinely regenerative Web3 approaches from those that merely diversify who benefits from extraction, providing analytical tools for this critical evaluation.
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Metabolic Relationality: The emphasis on embodied, land-based relationships informs SuperBenefit’s understanding that regenerative coordination cannot be purely digital but must address relationship with place, bodies, and more-than-human world.
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Hospicing Extractive Systems: The hospicing modernity framework supports SuperBenefit’s work to develop alternatives to platform capitalism rather than reforming it, acknowledging that some systems cannot be made regenerative but must end with care.
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Indigenous Sovereignty: Decolonial Futures’ centering of land back and indigenous self-determination provides essential context for SuperBenefit’s decolonial commitments, clarifying that meaningful solidarity requires addressing sovereignty not just representation.
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Temporal Reorientation: The critique of progress narratives and futurity challenges SuperBenefit to question Web3’s innovation rhetoric, suggesting that regenerative approaches may require different relationships to time, ancestry, and emergence.
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Complicity and Accountability: The work’s emphasis on ongoing complicity in colonial systems—even while working for change—supports SuperBenefit’s commitment to power-aware approaches that acknowledge how regenerative projects participate in and benefit from extraction even while seeking alternatives.
Related Concepts
- Community - Collective organizing and mutual support
- Coordination - Mechanisms for collective action
- Mutual Aid - Solidarity-based resource sharing
- Sustainability - Regenerative approaches to organizing
- Power - Distribution and transformation dynamics