Decolonial Research Methodologies
A sharing session with Jazmin Llana (De La Salle University, Philippines)
24th November 2021, 10:00 – 12:30 via Zoom
What interests does research serve? Why does knowledge production in the twenty-first century university take the form/s that it takes? Are there other ways of conducting research that might open up the university to something other than neoliberal logics of marketisation? Is decolonizing knowledge possible? What can decolonial methodologies enable?
In many parts of the world today the insidious effects of research conducted for imperial and colonial purposes continue to be felt. While research has made possible the explosion of knowledge that brought so much good in all imaginable aspects of our lived world, it has also caused unspeakable ills and suffering and death to many populations. As the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith puts it, “’research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary” (Smith 1). The critique is as much an invitation to self-reflexivity and decolonial thinking for researchers from the Indigenous groups and the formerly colonized as it is a call for a radical reorientation of the research enterprise for researchers in the seat of imperial and neo/colonial power, who are themselves caught in the grip of market logics and metrics. This session is an exploration of possible ways to do emancipatory research that address and redress issues of injustice and inequality linked to neo/colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism, using texts on decoloniality and decolonial research practices. It is also an invitation to a dialogue with “epistemologies from the South” that propound not an inversion or privileging of the South over the North but an opening up to “ecologies of knowledge” and “the [infinite] diversity of the world” in order to enlarge and deepen world experience and conversation” (Santos 230).
Booking information
This session is open to students in any year of their doctoral studies at one of LAHPs eight partner institutions (both LAHP-funded and non-LAHP funded) and will be limitied to a maximum of 40 places.
Please book a place via the session booking form.
The deadline for booking a place will be 12pm on Tuesday 23rd November 2021. The Zoom details will be sent out shortly after this.
Works Cited
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Decolonizing the University.” Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, Routledge, 2020, pp. 220-39.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Third ed., Zed Books, 2021.
Other suggested readings:
Conquergood, Dwight. Cultural Strugges: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis — Edited and with an Introduction by Patrick Johnson. The University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press, 2018.