At the heart of this year’s fellowship, the Sawaba Institute of Critical Consciousness invites its fellows to journey under the evocative theme of Alchemical Transmutations. In this shared space of thought and action, fellows will nurture deep knowledge and ignite anticolonial indignation, challenging the stubborn endurance of coloniality across the realms of power, knowledge, and being.
Alchemical Transmutations speaks to a powerful process: the unmasking of colonial legacies and the healing of fractured relational commitments—whether in thought, behavior, belief, or action. This theme calls us to engage transformation not as abstraction, but as a grounded, intentional practice of deconstruction and reconstruction.
Through this lens, we are granted the imaginative and intellectual freedom to revisit, reinterpret, and revitalize the vast resources embedded in African philosophies, feminisms, arts, world-building traditions, and education systems. Here, decoloniality is not just a critique—it is a call to repair, to reimagine, and to give shape to new ways of knowing and being.
Fellows are invited to reflect deeply on the core questions of mind and meaning. Through practices of exposition, framing, reframing, and repair, we embrace critical consciousness as both awakening and responsibility—a commitment to interrogate inherited norms and to move beyond inertia, towards reflective, liberatory choices.
To undergo alchemical transmutation is to become ever more aware of how coloniality has shaped our world—and to courageously participate in the birthing of new realities rooted in dignity, justice, and collective flourishing.
Read more about the application process for the 2025 Sawaba Fellowship here Join the Sawaba Fellowship for Decolonial Feminist Transformation
