Clelia O. Rodríguez

Clelia O. Rodríguez is an educator and decolonial scholar whose writing joins personal testimony, creative form, and criticism of institutional power. Decolonizing Academia, published by Fernwood Publishing in 2018, carries the subtitle Poverty, Oppression and Pain. The book combines creative nonfiction, poetry, art, reflection, and theoretical argument to examine how racialized academic structures silence or erase the knowledge of women and people of colour. Rodríguez writes from experience across El Salvador, Canada, Ghana, Bolivia, and international human-rights teaching, giving the work a transnational frame rather than treating the university as an isolated institution. Decolonizing Academia also addresses students directly, offering language for recognizing exclusion and building forms of learning grounded in community. Rodríguez earned graduate degrees at the University of Toronto and founded SEEDS for Change, an educational collective centered on liberatory practice. Her approach refuses a detached scholarly voice: family history, teaching experience, and institutional critique remain deliberately connected. The result is both an academic intervention and a compact guide for readers navigating unequal educational spaces.