Radical Relationism and Its Emancipatory and Decolonial Promise
The etymological source of “radical” refers to forming the root and radical relationism is committed to seeing relations as the root of all reality. For us humans, this means that each actor is seen as a cluster of dynamic relations with other human and non-human “entities,” at the same time as they are embedded in and dependent on their natural environment qua embodied organisms who are entangled with other human and non-human relations. Applying this perspective to knowledge production considers that human actors and their attributes constitute each other through their exchanges with each other and their social/political and natural environment. Radical relationism resists seeing reality in terms of abstract binaries and considers that seeing “nature” as separate from us, is colonial thinking par excellence. Instead of “nature” I use the expression “more-than-human” which intends to express that humans are embodied, embedded, and entangled with the natural environment and each other. I will explain how radical relational thought emerged from thinking the world in a way that aligns more with quantum rather than Newtonian physics, and has been seen as congenial with Indigenous and ancestral ways of knowing with decolonial potential. Radical relationism also has emancipatory potential as a way of thinking that avoids seeing freedom as individual independence or autonomy—an illusory type of freedom. Rather, it embraces human and more-than-human relationality as the basis for freedom that can only come to fruition in loving and caring relations. I will discuss why genuine freedom must be based on a clear awareness of loving and caring relationality, and will provide an example of such genuine freedom as “racial healing” (see Sanchez-Flores 2026). The latter entails embodied processes that involve active engagement with one’s own biases and vulnerability, supports us in shedding such biases (forever work), and in lovingly embracing the “pluriverse,” or a “world where many worlds fit.”
Dr. Mónica J. Sánchez-Flores is the faculty Coordinator of the MA in Human Rights and Social Justice and Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Environment, Culture and Society (ECS) in Thompson Rivers University (TRU). She was Chair of the ECS department in the 2022-2023 academic year and interim Associate Dean of Arts in 2023-2024. Dr. Sánchez-Flores received the 2025-2026 TRU Award for Excellence in Interculturalization. She is Co-Leader with Christopher Powell of the International School of Radical Relationism (ISRR) and the Relational Sociology research cluster of the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). Her research focuses on the social construction of processes of racialization, radical relational social theory, decolonial theory, political theory, multiculturalism and settlement, mindfulness, equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of the books Political Philosophy for the Global Age (2005), Cosmopolitan Liberalism: Expanding the Boundaries of the Individual (2010), and Decolonizing Bodies; a Radical Relational Approach to Racial Healing and Worlding Shared Humanity (2026). She is co-author of the open-access recent articles “Global solidarity as a non-anthropocentric, radical relational self-interest; the COVAX facility and governance of wicked problems in late global capitalism” and “The Case for a Radically Relational (Non-Anthropocentric) Democracy.”