Decolonizing Knowledge Production

Whilst North to South knowledge transfer patterns have been extensively problematised by Southern and decolonial perspectives, there is very little reflection on the practice of research capacity development (RCD), still strongly focused on technoscientific solutionism, yet largely uncritical of its underlying normative directions and power asymmetries. Without making transparent these normative and epistemological dimensions, RCD practices will continue to perpetuate approaches that are likely to be narrow, technocratic and unreflexive of colonial legacies, thus failing to achieve the aims of RCD, namely, the equitable and development-oriented production of knowledge in low- and middle-income societies. Informed by the authors’ direct experience of RCD approaches and combining insights from decolonial works and other perspectives from the margins with Science and Technology Studies, the paper undertakes a normative and epistemological deconstruction of RCD mainstream practice. High...

The “Decolonising the Curriculum” initiative has a long history at the School of Government, University of Birmingham, going back to a Curriculum Away Day organised in November 2018, with the enthusiastic participation of over thirty colleagues across all three of the School’s departments. The vibrant discussions, which were guided and facilitated by Meera Sabaratnam (SOAS, University of London), demonstrated both colleagues’ desire for stronger engagement with this agenda as well as the challenges that lay ahead. This collection of material was drafted in August 2020 as a way of tackling some of these challenges. We aim to take this agenda forward, firstly, by identifying a background and the rationale behind the “Decolonising the Curriculum” initiative. We continue by offering practical strategies that may be deployed by colleagues who wish to review their pedagogical approaches, including a list of relevant websites and FAQs. Finally, we include a section on students’ views on this agenda, as well as a range of reflective pieces drafted by colleagues, from across the three departments, who have sought to think about how they approach learning production within their teaching. We hope the collection will prove a useful and valuable resource.

In this article I explore the impact of worldview on a people’s ap- proach to dealing with conflict and compare the worldviews underlying specific Western and Indigenous approaches to dealing with conflict. I suggest that power imbalances in conflict resolution research and prac- tice perpetuate colonization through ontological violence, marginalizing Indigenous worldviews and ways of transforming conflict.

In this paper I draw from critical work on the historical, social, political, and economic functions of race to show how Eurocentrism, hegemony and colonialism (reproduce e " legitimate " knowledge and knowers in the Western world. Specifically, I discuss how mainstream academia in the West reinscribes colonial and racial thinking by strategically reducing the vast theoretical contributions of racialised and Indigenous scholars to experiential insights or " stories. " As such, these critical contributions remain marginalized in the mainstream, western scholarly canon. In my analysis, I outline the need for race-based epistemologies, in order to resist the ideological, discursive and material racism in research and knowledge production. I also argue that employing critical white supremacy as a theoretical framework would de-center and contextualize western ways of thinking and knowing, and intervene in projects which seek to know, essentialize, and represent bodies of color by unearthing the historical, colonial, and racial relations that have desired the " Other " as a category of analysis. This paper presents important theoretical positions on epistemology, and contributes highly to critical theory and practice.

This article reorients archaeology's approach to things by acknowledging the moment of the encounter with the past as one of speculation. Years of scientific claim, research design and methodology place the agentive nature of research in the hands of the archaeologist: we go to the site to find the past. However, if we acquiesce to the possibility that antiquity approaches the archaeologist (rather than vice versa), then that forces us to contend with the contemporary nature of the encounter. This article considers the efficacy, urgency, and poetics of decolonization. Prologue Not all soil/miti is the same. 1

This article examines the politics of knowledge production in the field of Islamic Studies, including Islamic Legal Studies, in the context of the Qur’an and Islamic law. It thinks broadly and freshly about Islamic Studies, categorizing it anew, by considering the study of the Qur’an as it relates to three forms of Islamic Studies: White Supremacist Islamic
Studies (WhiSIS), Patriarchal Islamic Legal Studies (PILS), and Intersectional Islamic Studies (IIS). The article examines the fundamental assumptions of WhiSIS and PILS, uncovering their operational logics, before discussing the theoretical framework that underlies IIS’ approach to Islamic Studies. It analyzes the critiques that WhiSIS and PILS
level against IIS, and the challenges that IIS poses for both WhiSIS and PILS. It concludes by considering the role of IIS in the future of Islamic Studies.

As scholars and educators, it is critical for us to explore the racialized dimensions of knowledge production and its effects in the classroom. As a Chicana of Apache descent, I feel obligated to apply decolonial approaches to pedagogy. In an academic context, decolonization has come to mean challenging the racist ideologies that produce hierarchies of knowledge systems/worldviews and peoples. While there is no single perfect approach to decolonizing your pedagogy, it could mean interrogating our assumptions around what constitutes legitimate and rational knowledge in the academy. By analyzing the ways racialization continues to stratify peoples and resources, students are enabled to listen without judgment and are motivated to explore collective solutions to material inequities.

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens.

These transdisciplinary projects shed light on how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. They may also be understood to ‘decolonize’ science in the Latin American context. They do so by seeking alternatives to the logic of extractivism, emphasizing nonhuman intelligence, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human, and (re)connecting Western science with other forms of knowledge and practice. This book focuses particularly on Latin American artists who are engaging with scientific ideas and methods to create new imaginaries for a post-anthropocentric world, in dialogue with decolonial thinkers and political ecologists from the region.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

The ayahuasca research community is familiar with the concept of plant intelligences; however, they have yet to be adequately accounted for by commonly used research practices. This chapter is a call to examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie research practices and how these practices and assumptions may reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and animacy. The first part of this chapter describes some absences created by following a " methods as usual " approach when researching ayahuasca, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the World Ayahuasca Conference in 2016 (AYA2016). This highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the methodological, disciplinary, and identity-based limitations on our abilities to produce and represent certain knowledges. Secondly, this chapter is a call to seriously and humbly engage with Indigenous sciences and epistemologies. This requires an honest reckoning with how research has contributed to colonial appropriation and marginalization of Indigenous knowledges. Indigenous ways of knowing have precedent for collaborating with teacher plants in producing knowledge and have much to contribute to discourse on multispecies perspectives. Lastly, I discuss possibilities for including multispecies sensibilities and Indigenous standpoints in research practices to create more collaborative and decolonial knowledges.

*This is just the abstract of the paper - send me a private message if you'd like a copy of the full paper - I'm not allowed to post it freely for download, but can share for non-commercial purposes*

I n the 1983 groundbreaking book, This Bridge Called My Back, Mitsue Yamada reveals, "I am weary from starting from scratch each time I speak or write, as if there were no history behind us, of hearing that among the women of color, Asian women are the least political, or the least oppressed, or the most polite." 1 And still I write, tired of being polite or of quickly silencing myself in what bell hooks calls the "dominator context." 2 As a Pinay 3 (pronounced Pee-nye) scholar, I struggle to speak in ts and starts. I struggle to write in ts and starts with words that parrot the academy, with words to legitimize my worth and position. I do belong here. Urgency is met with hesitancy, and I hate this feeling; it stings. Like you, I carry an ever-evolving epistemology, so dynamic and sometimes arbitrary that I can never fully detail my continuities and contradictions moment by moment; but today, I will try. This paper is a chance for me to communicate how I wrestle with such con ict: holding, shifting, sharing, and transforming a personal/political identity in academia. As part of an interconnected web of thinkers, actors, and players in relation to an agenda called equitable education, I lay bare the dynamic uidity of this identity. To explain, my dissertation research involves collecting the life histories of critically engaged Filipino American faculty in higher education to see how transformative moments in their lives (personal confrontations with race, class, gender and sexuality) inform their teaching today. However, before I can approach others with questions eliciting their vulnerability, candidness, and realness, I am obliged to put forth my own.

The following two-part series is a summary of a recent panel on decolonizing design education that took place at the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA)‘s 2021 conference. In order to address systemic racism and biases within institutions that teach landscape architecture, we must confront the way our profession approaches the teaching and production of knowledge within landscape architecture that replicates racist and oppressive processes, policies, and outcomes in communities of color.
– ASLA’s Environmental Justice Professional Practice Network Leadership Team

Agricultural production growth has been the main priority in agrarian development in Indonesia but its ends and means have been varied. In the colonial era, an exportoriented colonial plantation system resulted in the transformation of the Indonesian land tenurial system. In the post-colonial period, Soekarno's regime pursued agrarian development seeking to strengthening people's land rights through its land reform policies. Land rights were seen as the basis for agricultural production. Soeharto's New Order regime implemented its Green Revolution policy by developing agricultural mechanization and extensification which managed to improve agricultural production, but it gave greater privileges to the rural elite class and caused dependence on foreign inputs and aid. All agrarian policies were supported by knowledge produced through the research of influential institutions and individuals, including critical responses against the impacts of the transformation of land tenure. In this context, knowledge in agrarian studies with its critical perspectives were reshaped as part of the process of knowledge decolonization.

In this paper I draw from critical work on the historical, social, political, economic, and cultural functions of race, to trace how Axel Honneth’s recognition as a critical social theory of justice is activated through racial thinking. In my analyses, I outline the need to theorize recognition as a “racial recognition”; complicating current theories, which seem to continuously inscribe the bourgeois white male as the true provider of justice and the bearer of rights; the true subject. Critical questions for social work are raised. How might race/racial thinking underlie our visions of social justice, and who benefits from this? What happens when we re-view the social and political justice intentions of social work through the lens of global white supremacy, say, as we move towards international development work in the global south? This paper presents important theoretical positions on race and the "morality" of recognition as social justice, which contribute highly to critical, socio-political, anti-racist social work theory and practice.

On November 21, 2020, I’ve been invited to share a lecture I gave on zoom as part of the ‘Intersections of Care, Open School’, developed by Loraine Furter and Florence Cheval. This ‘Open School’ was part of ‘Risquons-Tout’, a series of events presented from September 12, 2020 to March 28, 2021 at Wiels, a center for contemporary art in Brussels, Belgium. ‘Risquons-Tout’ proposed an exhibition, performances and composed « an ambitious program that explores the potential of transgression, risk and unpredictability.” I come back to this spicy intervention which again questions the decolonial fever of a certain art world and I try at the same time to give it a context and a perspective, to pursue it concretely because it seems that criticism is not a form of action. This is the “Brussels lesson”.

Educational institutions, particularly those for higher education, seek to ensure their visibility and valid indicators for institutional accreditation processes through the publications of their teachers. Their projection is intimately associated with the circulation of their production in accredited publications whose reputations depend on their positions in prestigious rankings, databases, and indexing systems. That is why Colombia, in recent years, has experienced an increase in the number of scientific journals published in the country. This phenomenon was a reaction by academics to the obstacles for publishing in renowned journals, generally edited in hegemonic or central contexts, where it is presumed that knowledge is disseminated for the whole world. In this article, I analyze the role played by locally edited journals in the decolonialization of knowledge. I base my analysis on studies carried out in the fields of the English teacher as researcher and writer, academic writings, and the publication of scientific journals. I identify the contributions, suggestions and challenges for publications in the English Language Teaching area. I also stress the importance of strengthening professional communities, encouraging greater participation by professors in the dissemination of their work, and the need to value knowledge generated in peripheral contexts, without ignoring links with the global world.

This article explores some of the consequences of open access (OA) for scholars in the global South, centring on what constitutes their equal participation in the global circuit of knowledge production. Building on critical reflections by contributors to the 'Power Shifts' project within the From Poverty to Power blog, the limitations of the OA model are shown to be tied to a series of structural features characteristic of the twin systems of academic research and publishing. What the challenges faced by many scholars in the global South demonstrate is that 'openness', or inclusion in this format, is not yet the guarantee for equality that many had hoped. The article frames this as a systemic knowledge issue at a global scale that cannot be remedied by a simple reform to academic publishing. The article points to some creative efforts by scholars to forge alternative models for scholarly communication that move away from a marketized and restrictive model of knowledge production, and towards epistemic justice. The authors conclude that while OA represents a positive step forward in making knowledge a public good, it is no substitute for a more comprehensive rethink to pluralize our ways of knowing.

Pondering on the power of cultural preconceptions, this article examines the tension between self-representation and ‘representation from the outside’. Using the indigenous filmmaking practices of the Arhuaco community from Colombia as a case study, this article proposes that, thanks to the universal qualities of storytelling and narrative, film as a medium has the potential to bridge the intercultural gap and initiate an efficient knowledge exchange process. As such, it encapsulates the most effective way of establishing intercultural dialogue, regardless of the diverse backgrounds and aims of the creators and the audiences. The Arhuaco’s prolific auto- representation strategies which emerged as a response to violence and displacement served as efficient decolonisation strategy. The article demonstrates the film’s potential to become a successful tool to gain agency by communities traditionally denied the option to participate in intercultural communication.

This essay reflects on an anthropology course developed at one of the two “post-apartheid” universities in South Africa. The course included collaborating with artists and a local dance/ performance troupe. It culminated in a film by Francois Knoetze (featuring collaborators), a
musical performance by the Amandla Danca Teatro, and an exhibition by students. Knitting together practice, theory and alternative research and narrative methods, the course intervened on a developmentalist trajectory in the romantic “sparkling” narrative of Kimberley as the “city
of diamonds.” Alternative, ordinary and sometimes contested stories emerged.

Le 21 novembre 2020, j’ai été invité à donner une lecture sur zoom dans le cadre d’OPEN SCHOOL – Intersections of Care. Développé par Loraine Furter et Florence Cheval, cette open school était l’un des volets de Risquons-Tout, série de temps forts présentés du 12 septembre 2020 au 28 Mars 2021 au Wiels, centre d’art contemporain à Bruxelles, Belgique. Risquons-Tout comportait également une exposition, des performances et se propose de composer « un programme ambitieux qui explore le potentiel de la transgression, du risque et de l’imprévisible. » Je reviens sur cette intervention piquante qui interroge de nouveau la fièvre décoloniale d’un certain monde de l’art et j’essaie à la fois de lui redonner un contexte et une perspective, de la poursuivre de manière concrète car il paraît que la critique n’est pas une forme d’action. C’est la « leçon de Bruxelles ».

Whilst North to South knowledge transfer patterns have been extensively problematised by Southern and decolonial perspectives, there is very little reflection on the practice of research capacity development (RCD), still strongly focused on technoscientific solutionism, yet largely uncritical of its underlying normative directions and power asymmetries. Without making transparent these normative and epistemological dimensions, RCD practices will continue to perpetuate approaches that are likely to be narrow, technocratic and unreflexive of colonial legacies, thus failing to achieve the aims of RCD, namely, the equitable and developmentoriented production of knowledge in low-and middle-income societies. Informed by the authors' direct experience of RCD approaches and combining insights from decolonial works and other perspectives from the margins with Science and Technology Studies, the paper undertakes a normative and epistemological deconstruction of RCD mainstream practice. Hi...

Whilst North to South knowledge transfer patterns have been extensively problematised by Southern and decolonial perspectives, there is very little reflection on the practice of research capacity development (RCD), still strongly focused on technoscientific solutionism, yet largely uncritical of its underlying normative directions and power asymmetries. Without making transparent these normative and epistemological dimensions, RCD practices will continue to perpetuate approaches that are likely to be narrow, technocratic and unreflexive of colonial legacies, thus failing to achieve the aims of RCD, namely, the equitable and developmentoriented production of knowledge in low-and middle-income societies. Informed by the authors' direct experience of RCD approaches and combining insights from decolonial works and other perspectives from the margins with Science and Technology Studies, the paper undertakes a normative and epistemological deconstruction of RCD mainstream practice. Highlighting asymmetries of power and material resources in knowledge production, the paper's decolonial lens seeks to aid the planning, implementation and evaluation of RCD interventions. Principles of cognitive justice and epistemic pluralism, accessibility enabled by systems thinking and sustainability grounded on localisation are suggested as the building blocks for more reflexive and equitable policies that promote research capacity for the purpose of creating social value and not solely for the sake of perpetuating technoscience. Open Peer Review Reviewer Status AWAITING PEER REVIEW Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article.

This paper aims to examine the problematic case of language and identity estrangement that is gradually but steadily encroaching on and taking foot in middle class and elite schooling institutions in the Arab world due to poor adaptations of imported, international western curricula and the endorsement of English as the primary language of learning and knowledge in these schools. With the diffusely global, irresistible appeal of the English language and its far stretching outreach as the Lingua Franca par excellence of the times, preservation of local Arab tongue and all the spiritual values associated with it becomes a very challenging enterprise. Inculcating a sense of origin and a profound knowing of one’s firm place in the world is all the more impeded if one is not allowed to first learn about oneself without rivalry, to learn one’s tongue without interference, to learn in one’s tongue and then to finally extend the branches of the self to the other. This paper is synchronically informed both by a series of readings and by research investigations culminating with “ If the Ocean were Ink” a documentary film trilogy, comprising a total of 14 interviews with people about language, spirituality and folk spirit. The film discusses the following themes in this realm: Tongue of Place, How to get into Harvard?, Innateness of Tongue, The Tongue of the Soul, Taste, Diglossia The Crying of the Reed( Arabic Calligraphy and Folk Music), and Of Two Hearts in his Hollow.
Keywords: Mother tongue, Identity, Folk spirit, Arabic, Spirituality