Decolonial Futures Research Articles

For the archive yet to come

Abstract This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical power relations, they also hold the potential to unsettle the ‘toxic imperial debris’ of our time. How can the colonial archives challenge the post-colonial politics of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures? Drawing on research in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women as always already violated or silenced. We argue that the logics of the African Archives reveal a set of destabilising state anxieties that reflect the duality and instability of colonial rule itself and that infuse contemporary (international) politics. This recounting of the violence contained in the archives both narrates the concrete, violent manifestations of our ‘global coloniality’ and works towards its own demise as part of a broader ‘anticolonial archive’.

Review of Decolonial Futures by Christine J. Hong

Allie Utley reviews Decolonial Futures by Christine J. Hong.

Fugitive Archives: Architecture, Police Photography, and Decolonial Futures

ABSTRACT This paper examines underexplored police photographs of Chinese migrants in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, with a focus on architectural spaces. In 1940, a secret anti-Japanese association known as Ildonghoe was established by a group of Chinese migrants in the Korean city of Incheon. Following the arrest of its members in 1943, Japanese colonial authorities documented with photographs locations and objects related to the organization’s activities. This investigation serendipitously created a photographic archive of architectural spaces in and around Incheon’s Chinatown, many of which have since disappeared. The paper sheds light upon these police photographs as an “accidental archive,” a repository of historical materials that gives rise to unintended outcomes with critical information about certain events, places, and moments. The paper pays particular attention to the peculiarity of police photographs as a form of happenstance yet significant documentation capturing historical moments that might otherwise remain elusive. Reading against the grain of colonial archives, this paper shows how the Ildonghoe photographs invite viewers to envision a different narrative of the racial relations forged under colonial rule and imagine decolonial futures that have yet to come.

Integrating Indigenous Knowledge in South African Geography Education Curricula for Social Justice and Decolonization

This paper analyzes the integration of indigenous knowledge into South African geography education as an intersection of social justice and decolonial imperatives. Historically, colonial education systems have marginalized indigenous epistemologies by privileging Western knowledge as universally superior. Integrating indigenous perspectives into curricula can counter this legacy by promoting cognitive justice and unsettling Eurocentric dominance. However, meaningful integration requires moving beyond superficial additions of indigenous elements within unchanged Western-centric curricula as this risks appropriating indigenous knowledge in disempowering ways. The paper argued that ethical integration necessitates recentring indigenous knowledge systems in their own right alongside Western frameworks to enact pluralistic, horizontal cognitive frameworks. A qualitative literature analysis identified key themes around recognizing indigenous epistemologies, dismantling enduring hierarchies, and developing responsible community-centred integration processes. While systemic constraints pose barriers, integrating indigenous perspectives into geography education holds the transformative potential to advance both social justice inclusion aims and decolonial decentralization agendas. This convergence provides opportunities to develop anti-oppressive curricula that empower marginalized knowledge and ontologies. However, realization requires extensive efforts to sustain reflexivity and enable indigenous self-determination over knowledge. Ultimately, the paper underscored that indigenous knowledge integration must move beyond tokenism towards fundamentally transforming education systems through ethical, empowering processes grounded in partnerships with indigenous communities. This is vital for nurturing students able to navigate the world through plural epistemologies and enacting both social justice and decolonial futures. Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge, Decoloniality, Social justice, Geography Education

Working towards decolonial futures in Canada: first steps for non-Indigenous fisheries researchers

Motivated by the leadership, scholarship, and activism of Indigenous Peoples, there are growing calls to transform and decolonize Canadian institutions that govern fisheries research in Canada. As a predominantly non-Indigenous group that works at the intersection of fisheries and justice, we encounter questions daily about how to act as allies in these efforts and take up this urgent call in our own work. Our goal with this perspective is to synthesize and share some of what we have learned about encountering and combatting colonialism in the hope that it may offer something to other non-Indigenous and settler fisheries researchers who are grappling with colonization in their own work. This synthesis is based on both Indigenous scholarship and our own experiential learning. We look to actions fisheries researchers may take to advance Indigenous sovereignty in fisheries research. We offer this to our fellow non-Indigenous researchers who likely also struggle with similar questions, and hope that in doing so, we can help move towards decolonial fisheries futures.

The devil's picture book and tautology fetishism: A response to Sosteric et al. regarding the tarot and decolonial futures

AbstractA recent Letter to the Editor in Anthropology of Consciousness, by Sosteric, Ratkovic, and Sosteric, is positioned as a critique of my article “Imaginal Research for Unlearning Mastery: Divination With Tarot as a Decolonizing Methodology.” The letter posits that the esoteric tarot is a repository of colonial ideological propaganda, and because of that, it cannot and should not be used as a tool for decolonial practices. However, the letter is misleading in its implications that what I have proposed in my article cannot be a methodology for decolonizing mental models, and includes statements about my position which are incorrect. This response clarifies and expands on ideas from my article—both about the tarot and also about the carceral mental models my article attempts to address—in part by highlighting the modern/colonial underpinnings of Sosteric et al.'s critique.

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? Crafting Cyber Transfeminist and Filipinx Futurisms through Creative Technologies

Abstract Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022) animates speculative aesthetics through creative technologies that give rise to decolonial futures. The installation centers on the fictive artificial intelligent figure, Piña, who carries Philippine and Ecuadorian ancestral and matriarchal data into the present and to diasporic communities who have been separated from this knowledge and culture by colonial suppression and global migration. Recapitulating the connection of these two former Spanish colonies, the artist duo generates Piña as a gender-fluid embodiment of digital systems designed to archive and convey Philippine and Ecuadorian Indigenous worldviews for the future. Echoing the aesthetic and political impulses of Indigenous futurisms and Afrofuturism, the authors argue that this work crafts Filipinx futurisms, global Indigenous resurgence, and what the authors coin as “cyber transfeminist aesthetics” by eluding binary categorizations—both gendered and computational, collapsing geographies and temporalities through virtual reality and enlivening ancestral epistemologies.

Liberty of Land, Liberty for God: Between Indigenous Land-Human Relationship and State Sovereignty in French Polynesia

This paper will discuss tiàmāraa faaroo, the concept of religious sovereignty advocated in the Māòhi Protestant Church in French Polynesia, and how it intersects with the idea of political sovereignty. Whilst territorial politics revolves around the possibility of national independence, religious sovereignty suspends the idea of political self-governance, and instead promotes the recovery of Indigenous relationships with the land, a core doctrine of local Christian theology. Religious sovereignty supports a notion of Indigenous sovereignty that is practice-based and conceptually independent of the modern nation-state, but nonetheless is seen to be crucial for national independence, should they wish to achieve it. I suggest how localised Christianity in the Pacific, itself a combination of Indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, provides a model of cultural and temporal hybridity for shaping decolonial futures.

Afrofuturist Horror on the Western Frontier: Capitalism’s Reckoning and Queer Possibilities in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Abstract: As in all his films to date, Jordan Peele deftly weaves metaphor in Nope , his latest film, to critique capitalism and its white supremacist foundations. The film’s monsters include an abstracted alien and a domesticated chimpanzee gone violent and come to signify capitalism’s recalcitrant reckoning. Drawing from Black feminist studies, Afrofuturism, and queer theory’s work on utopia and potential in queer failure, Peele compels viewers to consider Black Americans’ centrality in the formation and destruction of American capitalism. What other worlds become possible in the process of the Black and queer protagonists’ survival against the Lovecraftian monster? This study examines how horror becomes a useful lens—for rethinking the role of Black people in horror, for its contribution towards more critical discussion on capitalism’s legacy and its impending collapse(s). And, most importantly, for centering and imagining decolonial futures led by queer people of color.

Indigenous and decolonial futures: Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas as potential pathways of reconciliation

Crown governments, the conservation sector, academics, and some Indigenous governments, communities, and organizations are framing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)—a newly recognized form of Indigenous-led conservation in Canada—as advancing reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Yet it is often unclear what is being, or could be, reconciled through IPCAs. While highly diverse, IPCAs are advanced by Indigenous Nations, governments, and communities who protect them, with or without partners, according to their Indigenous knowledge, legal, and governance systems. IPCAs may be expressions of “generative refusal,” visions of Indigenous futures, and commitments to uphold responsibilities to the lands, waters, and past and future generations. IPCAs refuse settler colonial ontologies including the expectation of ongoing white settler privilege, which relies on the continued appropriation of lands and resources. By examining the practical, relational, and systemic challenges Indigenous Nations advancing IPCAs encounter, we discuss opportunities for Crown governments and the conservation sector to cultivate decolonial responses. Indigenous Nations advancing IPCAs may face challenges with resource extraction, laws and legislation, financing, relationships and capacity, and jurisdiction and governance. We contend that IPCAs could be pathways of reconciliation if Crown governments and the conservation sector support IPCAs in ways consistent with the recommendations of Indigenous leaders. This requires dismantling the roadblocks arising from settler ontologies and institutions that impede IPCA establishment and ongoing stewardship. Thus, not only could Indigenous futures be advanced, we might also cultivate decolonial futures in which all peoples and species can thrive.

(Re)Mapping Worlds: An Indigenous (Studies) Perspective on the Potential for Abolitionist and Decolonial Futures

(Re)Mapping Worlds: An Indigenous (Studies) Perspective on the Potential for Abolitionist and Decolonial Futures

(De)coloniality of “Tethered Mobilities” in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Nyarugusu Refugee Camp, Tanzania

Drawing from historical case studies from Sierra Leone and Tanzania, this article fundamentally asks, what constitutes decoloniality? Before answering, we analyze the enduring coloniality of national borders, internal boundaries and identities, and manipulation and coercive imposition of (im)mobility. These colonial logics create “tethered mobilities” moving internal and external migrants in and out of approved spaces to facilitate extraction and racialized categorizations. We explore the impact of these aspects of coloniality on rural-urban migration and law in Sierra Leone and forced migration and containment of citizens and refugees in Tanzania. Conversing with critical migration and abolition literatures, we argue that despite no explicit revolutionary intent, migrants create their own tethered mobilities through everyday life-making in prohibited spaces as “rehearsal” for decolonial futures and mobility justice.

Taking Stand‐Up Seriously: Comedy as a Site for Imagining Decolonial Futures

Stand‐up comedy is a rich arena of sociological inquiry that enables social actors to utter bold truths in a way that educates rather than offends. As such, stand‐up comedy can inform conversations around potentially “thorny” issues like racial inequality. This article draws on primary qualitative content analysis of the work of Kura Forrester, a female, Indigenous comedian in Aotearoa New Zealand, to illustrate the potential of comedians and the medium of stand‐up comedy as agents of change. We employ the concepts “parrhesia,” “critical public pedagogy,” and “prefiguration” to argue that stand‐up comedy provides a valuable opportunity to challenge racist stereotypes, encourage critical reflection on “race‐thinking,” and imagine out loud what an alternative, decolonial future in Aotearoa New Zealand might entail.

Speculative Fictions for Decolonial Futures

Speculative Fictions for Decolonial Futures

Geographical education II: Anti-racist, decolonial futures

This report critically reviews developments in geographical education through the themes of anti-racism and decoloniality, reflecting on the silences around these issues across previous progress reports and arguing that the present moment might be understood in terms of a decolonial turn. Publication trends and increasing attention associated with the turn are unevenly distributed, contested and attenuated by structural issues surrounding the recruitment and retention of more diverse geographers. The report concludes with suggestions for developing anti-racist, decolonial futures through improving representation, addressing disciplinary fragility, and giving greater attention to nuance and singularity.

Diversities of Design: Celebrating Plurality in the Anthropocene

Within an Australian context, the realisation of decarbonised and de-colonial futures requires scrutiny of the socio-political industrial complex upon which the contemporary Australian settler-colonial project was founded. Central to this scrutiny is the need to investigate, contemplate and address a history of systemic racial violence and its impact on Country. Diversities of Design explores the capacity for the entangled fields of design, architecture and environmental planning to celebrate and empower oppressed Indigenous and First Nations peoples and expertise. This article seeks to highlight the contemporary value of indigenous expertise through the lens of current projects in environmental design, exploring how contemporaneous and historical traditions, technologies and voices can coalesce within the context of net zero transitions and the emergent habitats of the Anthropocene.

Re-envisioning Decolonizing Pedagogies: Beyond Knowing, Delving into Being as an Access to Possible Decolonial Futures

Re-envisioning Decolonizing Pedagogies: Beyond Knowing, Delving into Being as an Access to Possible Decolonial Futures

A Systemic and Transdisciplinary Study to Contribute to Decolonial Futures in Two Indigenous Municipalities of Chiapas, Mexico

We draw from participatory action research and sustainable livelihood approaches to integrate a systemic and transdisciplinary methodological proposal capable of contributing to decolonial futures for indigenous peoples. This methodological proposal is illustrated with two decades of research experience collaborating with Mayan Tseltal communities in Chiapas, Mexico, to contribute towards improving their life strategies. The conceptual framework employed was Local Socio-Environmental Systems, a soft system proposal made up of four sub-systems that are interrelated, based on their formations in a particular territory framed within specific historical regimes. Community workshops were organized, and ethnographic fieldwork was conducted. The findings were systematized through Grounded Theory coding processes and linguistic translation. The results focus on (a) showing the process of alignment of the transdisciplinary horizon from the interests of three groups of actors participating in the accompaniment (communities, academia and civil society), (b) analyzing the emergence of Tseltal ethos associated with territory, family lineages, community harmony and dignified life that complexified the initial methodological proposal and (c) detailing the reinterpretation and appropriation that social subjects made to the category “capitals” of the livelihood framework. We conclude by reflecting on ‘knowledge dialogues’ and epistemic decolonization to which transdisciplinary research has given rise, to the extent that the accompanied Tseltal communities are currently demanding recognition of their political autonomy from the state.

Taking a seat: Curating spaces of (un)learning

Through an edited conversation, curator-educators Amy Halliday and Clare Butcher engage with artist-scholar Helina Metaferia whose work acts as a catalyst for further discussion around various inheritances, questions and approaches shaping curatorial and artistic methodologies in relation to spaces of ‘knowledge production’ and practices of study in a more expanded sense. Be it within university gallery settings, biennial programming or in research-based collaborations, the pedagogically grounded curatorial and artistic models Halliday, Butcher and Metaferia activate and learn with often sit uncomfortably between hierarchies of visibility and value, process and product, learning and unlearning, education and representation. By sharing a number of exhibition, programming and artist-led case studies – including Halliday’s work with Helina Metaferia – in the development of the Against a Sharp White Background () exhibition and Butcher’s collaborations shaping recent programming and learning projects, informed by the work of artists such as Annette Kraus (on the ‘hidden curriculum’) and the collective work of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures – the authors reflect on the generative lines of inquiry prompted by socially engaged, context-responsive artists’ practices working in these uncomfortable intersections. Halliday, Butcher and Metaferia also consider their own embeddedness in colonial, institutionalized art histories and the curatorial ethics that might transform these canons. Through the conversation, various questions emerge: what are the shared and uncommon vocabularies and positionalities that emerge through critical and collaborative curating and creative practice across colonial histories and presents? How are roles and accountabilities determined where participating stakeholders – such as artists, students, faculty or community members – are both authors and audiences? Who is acknowledged as expert or knowledge keeper in such conflicting value systems? Which voices and genealogies of practice inform the curricula we collectively create in pedagogical processes? Can we practise care in careless systems that are temporally bound and often output-oriented?

Education in Africa: a critical historiographic review

ABSTRACT Examining developments in the history of education in Africa as a whole raises far-reaching philosophical, anthropological and historical questions about what Africa is and whether such a history is even possible as such. The course of that history and its tributaries wend around social theories; its dominant issues, tensions and gaps represent ideological interventions that highlight competing narratives in attempts to theorise social progress along a set of converging historiographic projects through which the conflicts between positivist, Marxist and poststructuralist (and other critical theory) perspectives – and the Eurocentricity of their objects – become visible. Anticipating broadened inquiries that centre Africans in historical narratives concerning education in Africa, this review (a) critiques historians’ obsession with and dissensions on colonial education, (b) clarifies epistemic ruptures in the well-worn quest for ‘truth’ in history evident in that obsession, and (c) proposes some prospects for decolonial futures in the history of education in Africa.