{"id":664,"date":"2019-02-07T11:18:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T10:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.convivialthinking.org\/?p=664"},"modified":"2019-02-07T15:36:17","modified_gmt":"2019-02-07T14:36:17","slug":"decolonization-not-just-a-buzzword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/2019\/02\/07\/decolonization-not-just-a-buzzword\/","title":{"rendered":"Decolonization: not just a buzzword\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Budd L Hall<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the name of a \u2018headphone verbatim show\u2019 capturing campus conversations at London\u2019s School of Oriental and African Studies.\u00a0 It will be the third interaction with discourses of decolonisation and epistemic justice that I will have within two weeks. The first interaction was with Florence Piron, a scholar of epistemic justice at Laval University.\u00a0 I spent three days with her and her colleagues in Quebec City, Quebec. She shared with me the special issue of the journal Sociologie et Societes<\/em> on epistemic injustice edited by Baptise Godrie and Marie Dos Santos of the University of Montreal. In that journal she shares an article, Haitian Meditation where she recounts a visit to Haiti to teach about epistemic justice (2017). She reminds us of the words of Frantz Fanon written in 1992, speaking about the dominance of European thought in the colonial world, \u201cmy friends, the European game is definitely over\u2026if we want to see humanity advance, for Africa and for the world, we need to invent and discover a new way of thinking\u201d<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

She goes on to write of the violence of positivist epistemology, a violence of hegemony and exclusion of peoples, a violence of neoliberalism, a violence of indifference and a violence of a separatist epistemology. She writes of an \u2018epistemology of place\u2019 (epistemologie du lien) which is a spiritual companion of Dos Santos’, \u2018epistemology of the global South\u2019.<\/p>\n

My second interaction took place at Birkbeck College, London thanks to a session on \u2018Decolonising the curriculum: what\u2019s all the fuss about?\u2019 organised by the Decolonising the curriculum working group at Birkbeck. Speakers included Kerry Harman, Jan Eitenne and William Ackah of Birkbeck, Gurminder Bhambra from U of Sussex and Meera Sabaratnam of SOAS, London. Each of these speakers are engaged in both the intellectual work and the hard practical work in transforming their spaces within universities in decolonial ways. William Ackah draws on the poetry of Audre Lorde, the fiction of Ralph Ellison and the lyrics of Bob Marley to speak of the \u2018Ambush in the night\u2019 that is the domination of white Eurocentric knowledge with a majority world of black and brown people. The contemporary university curriculum is, according to Ackah, \u2018affirmative action for the white middle class\u2019<\/strong>. Gurminder Bhambra notes that contemporary university curricula is producing racial inequality.\u00a0 She reminds us that \u2018modernity is not only a European phenomena\u2019. Gurminder is the co-editor of Decolonising the University <\/em>(2018). Meera Sabaratnam, a member of the Senate at SOAS as well a member of the SOAS Decolonising the University Working Group shares ideas from her current praxis: that teaching differently (in a decolonising manner) is hard work, that we need to understand teaching as a practice of critical pedagogy, that we need to show that anti-racist pedagogy is good teaching and that you have to make demands.<\/p>\n

Meera makes another point that, \u2018decolonialisation is always a contextualized within place, history and context\u2019<\/strong>. For myself and others living and working in Western Canada, our focus will prioritize the Indigenisation of our curricula, but within a larger decolonial framework. The decolonial project in Uganda will take on a validation of African Indigenous knowledge as a priority project of decolonisation. Similarly the decolonisation of universities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Colombia, Sardinia will have distinct intellectual trajectories.\u00a0 And we are reminded that the theories and practices of community-based participatory research with their focus on an epistemology of place have a significant role to play in the extraordinary project of decolonising our universities. Knowledge democracy calls for decolonisation of institutions of higher education, the end to epistemic violence and the practices of epistemologies of place.<\/p>\n

Budd Hall lives and works on Lekwugen First Nations territory in what is called Victoria, British Columbia these days. He has been working on issues of knowledge, power and social justice since the early 1970s during his time in Tanzania. He currently shares a UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education with his colleague Rajesh Tandon, the founding President of PRIA in New Delhi, India. He is actively engaged on issues of decolonising knowledge and higher education. Budd can be found on Twitter at @buddhall
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Originally published on the blog of the UNESCO Chair of Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education<\/a><\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gurminder K. Bhambra<\/a>,\u00a0Dalia Gebrial<\/a>,\u00a0Kerem Ni\u015fanc\u0131o\u011flu<\/a>, eds (2018) Decolonising the University<\/em> London: Pluto 272 pages<\/p>\n

Piron, Florence (2017) \u201cMeditation haitienne: Repondre a la violence separatrices de l\u2019epistemologie positiviste par l\u2019epistemologie du lien\u201d in Sociologie et Societes<\/em> vol xlix, No 1, Printemps 2017 pp 33-60<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Budd L Hall This is the name of a \u2018headphone verbatim show\u2019 capturing campus conversations at London\u2019s School of Oriental and African Studies.\u00a0 It will be the third interaction with discourses of decolonisation and epistemic justice that I will have within two weeks. The first interaction was with Florence Piron, a scholar of epistemic … Continue reading “Decolonization: not just a buzzword\u2026”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[33,25],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speaking","tag-decolonising-the-curriculum","tag-decolonization"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions\/669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/convivialthinking.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}