Decolonising the social sciences

Abstract

This article unpacks some complexities of ‘decolonising’ in Ireland, a complicated semiperipheral ‘mixed colony’, in which rhetorics, logic, and grammar are simultaneously colonial and decolonial, interrupting and complicitly reproducing divisive and dehumanising colonialities of knowledge and being. The global call to decolonise academia invites Irish social scientists to confront significant social divisions, economic precarities, and epistemic erasures. I present ‘decolonial repair’ as a doubled figure of return and mending, engaging the decolonial work of double translation: centring anti-colonial thought and enacting horizontal dialogue. Facing partly obscured colonial wounds that remain difficult to countenance, a doubled repair re-approaches transformation via renewed engagements between non-Occidental demands for decolonisation and ambiguous legacies of extraversion. Unpacking elisions, complicities, and precarities of Irish social science, this article teases out what ‘decolonising social science’ might entail in a semiperipheral, white(ly) post-colony. In keeping with the scope of this journal and the defining role of sociology in the social sciences, this article focusses on sociology as a lens for discussing the broader, constitutive elisions, turns, and complicities of Irish social science. The broader aim and hope is to help unpack some of the challenges, projects, and pitfalls involved in this Special Issue's focus on ‘decolonising academia’.