The Decolonial Conference emerged from the People’s Assembly held at the AERA 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver, which was organized by the Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anticolonial Studies in Education Special Interest Group and EdScholars4Palestine. After the AERA Council refused to meet the demands of nearly 800 signatories of the Petition for the Resolution for Justice in Palestine, we decided to create an alternative space for those committed to the liberation in material terms. The Decolonial Conference aims to build a coalition of radically committed scholars and liberation movements, from the Americas to Palestine to Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. This conference counters academia’s silence, indifference, complicity, and moral apathy by firmly standing against Zionism and the attacks on dissident voices, activists, and movements that militantly speak out and organize against genocide and settler colonial dispossession.

We are not a traditional academic conference that privileges theory and academic research at the expense of concrete struggles. Instead, we make praxis—the inseparable relationship between thought, action, and reflection—the heart of our organization. Political education, in other words, is central to movement building. Our conference is a gathering of scholars, organizers, artists, and activists whose work makes the interconnectedness or entanglement of ours struggles more explicit in order to develop organizing strategies to build a deep and lasting coalition. We believe knowledge emerges in sites of struggles and that it is not the property of the counterinsurgent machinery of the academy. Intellectual work must contribute to liberation, not the preservation of academia and its Ivory Towers. Otherwise, radical intellectual work risks reproducing what it claims to unsettle.

Through dialogue, workshops, and political education grounded in lived experiences and collective struggle, we work to build a shared space with decolonial, abolitionist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, and feminist thought and praxis. The Decolonial Conference is committed to confronting the material conditions of domination, exploitation, dispossession, and genocide—while simultaneously dreaming and enacting a world otherwise.