Apprehending the subject? The significance of the categorisation debate in decolonial studies for the social sciences

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ABSTRACT The purpose of this contribution is two-fold: to look critically at the ways in which dominant sociology and psychology work with the questions of subjectivity and identity, and to ask how the new decolonisation movement in epistemology might assist in generating more capacious ways of approaching the questions of who we are as human beings. I work with the proposition that sociology and psychology largely, not always, proceed from given starting points of ‘race’, ethnicity, culture, gender and the multiple ways in which human beings come to present themselves. They do so through categorisation and naming practices which pre-empt possibilities for exploring pathways through which subjectivities and identities are constructed. In its attempt to retrieve displaced and marginalised approaches to understanding the world’s multiple histories, decolonisation, I argue, opens up opportunities for working with the complexity of human subjectivity.