Critical Interculturality from a “Southern” Perspective
Visiting Scholar Benanchour Saidi at the Junior Professorship of Intercultural Practice with a Focus on Digital Cultures
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Prof. Dr. Benanchour Saidi (Mohamed First University, Morocco) say at the Junior Professorship of Intercultural Practice with a Focus on Digital Cultures, headed by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yolanda López García. Photo: Dr. Miriam Schreiter-Deike
On 29 October 2025, Prof. Dr. Benanchour Saidi (Mohamed First University, Morocco) delivered a guest lecture titled “Criticality, Interculturality and Decoloniality: A Southern Praxis.” The event was part of his Visiting Scholar stay at the Junior Professorship of Intercultural Practice with a Focus on Digital Cultures at Chemnitz University of Technology, headed by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yolanda López García. During his stay from September 2025 to January 2026, Prof. Saidi has been contributing as a Visiting Scholar to several courses in the Bachelor's and Master’s programs in Intercultural Communication. Together with Jun.-Prof. López García, he engaged with critically decolonial discourses as well as everyday practices and forms of knowledge related to interculturality. In doing so, they focused particularly on Latin American perspectives and those from the MENA region.
In his guest lecture, Prof. Saidi examined the epistemic intersections of criticality, interculturality, and decoloniality. He analyzed how discourses on interculturality are frequently depoliticized and rely on tokenistic notions of diversity, thereby unintentionally reproducing colonial structures of knowledge and power. At the same time, he cautioned against essentializing or reducing perspectives from the Global South, emphasizing that decoloniality must be oriented not merely reactively but transformatively.
Prof. Saidi advocated understanding criticality and decoloniality as ongoing epistemic and meta-ontological projects—processes of delinking, re-existence, and re-worlding. Such approaches require reflexivity, situatedness, and openness toward plural, multiversal articulations of Southern epistemologies.
Prof. Saidi’s Visiting Scholar stay fosters ongoing dialogue and academic exchange with Jun.-Prof. López García, whose research focuses on critical interculturality, (post)digital everyday practices, coloniality, and migration. Further collaborations are already being discussed to continue this dialogue beyond his current visit.
(Source: Junior Professorship of Intercultural Practice with a Focus on Digital Cultures)
Mario Steinebach
28.11.2025
