Decolonial Research Research Articles

Doing decoloniality in the context of a PhD born in precarity and pandemic

This article takes a deep dive into my doctoral journey and my lived experience as an emerging Black African scholar doing decolonial research in a South African colonial and Westernized university. I wrestle with the contradictions and tensions that emerged during this period that took place at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. I also look back with ‘willful resistance’ to the oppressive systems of knowledge productions and the limitations of doing decolonial work. I consider my own complicity with these oppressive systems of knowledge production as I attempt to work within institutional constraints to fulfil the requirements of a PhD degree. Using Black existential theory as a lens and autoethnography as method, the goal is to generate a discussion with other emerging scholars about their own lived experiences doing decolonial research in colonial universities.

How to … do decolonial research.

The imperative for decolonial research in health professions education (HPE) is rooted in a resistance to coloniality, which characterises modern medicine and HPE. Coloniality is a residual effect of colonialism, which upholds White, Western, Eurocentric knowledge systems while simultaneously marginalising diverse epistemologies. We outline the problematic nature of coloniality in HPE typified in unequal research partnerships, skewed student exchanges and poor representation of diverse authors. Decoloniality advocates for the active disruption and dismantling of colonial hierarchies to promote epistemic justice. We suggest a practical framework for applying decolonial principles in research, emphasising awareness (critical consciousness), deliberation (reflexivity) and action (transformative praxis). Practical steps for decolonial practice include interrogating research conceptualisation, sharing power and diversifying research teams, adopting participatory and reciprocal (mutually beneficial) methodologies, (re)centring marginalised voices and amplifying 'Other' knowledges, and disrupting hegemonic dissemination practices. By employing decolonial strategies, researchers can produce equitable, socially accountable and epistemically just scholarship, ultimately enhancing the relevance and impact of HPE research for all people globally.

Unlocking the Potential of the Decolonial Approach in Migration Studies

ABSTRACTBased on a bibliometric analysis of Scopus‐indexed articles on decolonial research on migration from Social Science disciplines this article outlines the main topics covered by the sampled literature, namely: (1) the academic migration as framed by the internationalization discourse in higher education; (2) migrants' social movements and their transnational dimension; (3) gender and age in decolonial studies of migration; (4) the ways in which intersectionality shapes migrants' experiences through their class, race, gender and sexual orientation; and (5) critique of humanitarian discourse regarding refugees and asylum seekers. The article shows that type of literature first emerged in 2010 and significantly increased after 2020. Likewise, the geographic distribution of the knowledge production in this field highlights the uneven contributions by various countries and regions. Moreover, this picture is further complicated by the biographies of authors who, in many instances, are academic migrants coming from different national backgrounds in the Global South to work in higher education institutions in the Global North. The article ends with suggestions for further developments of the decolonial approach in the study of migration.

‘ORIGEM’: Queering Indigeneity through Participatory (Audio)visual Methods in Northeastern Brazil

‘ORIGEM’ (2020) was a queer kind of research project from its inception. Its original funding was for research impact, yet no formal research project came before it. Instead, academics based at the University of Leeds (Paulo Pepe and Thea Pitman) used a modest pot of impact funding to support the work of two emerging artists (Laryssa Machada and Antônio Vital Neto Pankararu) with personal contacts in Queer Indigenous circles in Northeastern Brazil who set out to creatively honour and reflect on their relationships within those communities through digital photographic portraits and short video interviews. The UK-based researchers remained in the UK throughout the process, leaving the artists free to travel between the communities involved (the Pankararu community at Brejo dos Padres in southern Pernambuco, and the Tupinambá community at Olivença de Ilhéus in Southern Bahia) and explore the topic as they saw fit. Since then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the results were circulated online via a website and promoted on social media, and, with the post-pandemic return to offline encounters, they were also exhibited at the Bolivia International Digital Art Fair in Cochabamba in September 2022. The present article seeks to showcase the project and the work that came out of it, interpreting it as a form of decolonial research using participatory, creative methodologies (arts-based Participatory Action Research), and to explore the perspectives of a cross-section of those involved in the project – the artists, their friends and relatives who agreed to be interviewed and photographed (including most notably Fykyá and Bia Pankararu) and the academics too – as they engaged in the original project and its subsequent exhibitions. In so doing, it seeks to reveal the deep learning to be derived from the project without shying away from any tensions that this form of working can engender.

“All were gaining knowledge from each other”: decolonial participatory research capacity-sharing for and by non-academics

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the emerging literature on decolonial research capacity-sharing (the process of strengthening individual/organisational capacity to shape research agendas, assess, design, produce, disseminate, and apply evidence). It provides a discussion of a participatory research capacity-sharing initiative led by Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI), which was aimed at practitioners, activists, and researchers, with valuable experience as professionals and activists but little to no prior research experience, from various parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. While existing literature (including publications on decolonial research capacity-sharing) often assumes that research capacity-sharing is led by and aimed at academics, our article reflects on the question of how decolonial research capacity-sharing can be implemented in interventions led by and aimed at non-academics. It therefore makes an important contribution to existing literature on research capacity-sharing, pointing to the important role practitioners, activists, and community members can play, especially in interventions informed by decolonial principles.

Indian Time, Walking as Mapping, and Decolonial Methodologies in Mixteco Geographies

There has been an emerging shift by Indigenous geographers and non-Indigenous researchers to integrate decolonial methodologies into research protocols to challenge the Western Cartesian production of geographic knowledge across Native and Indigenous geographies. The commitment of geographic research with Indigenous communities must be to engage in a methodology guided by Indigenous temporality and Indigenous autonomous governance structures that allow the emergence of decolonial possibilities. This article extends the use of a decolonial research approach with Indigenous communities by applying it to Oaxaca, Mexico, in an Indigenous Mixteco municipality. I use a series of salient narratives from my field work in the summer of 2022 in a pueblo Mixteco to inform a decolonial method that engages with Indigenous normative governance structure (Altamirano-Jimenez 2020), “Indian time” (Blackwell 2023a) or Indigenous temporality (Curley and Smith 2024), and walking as map-making (Sletto et al. 2021) to suggest a decolonial Mixteco methodology with pueblos Mixtecos of Oaxaca, Mexico. I suggest that it is our responsibility as researchers, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, to uphold Indigenous governance across these differing temporalities and geographies, even once we leave the “field site” when dependent on Western academic timelines.

Colonial Dis/Continuities in Cameroon and the Postcolonial Dilemma in the Archive

Abstract Despite how significantly processes of decolonization have shaped contemporary political and social realities, their study remains marginal in the peace and security fields. Understanding historical legacies and how embedded they are in today’s peace and conflict structures is essential to the analysis of current conflicts. This article argues that by tracing dis/continuities in colonial relations, we can gain a better understanding of these contentious processes and of the marginalized positionalities they create. In doing so, much needed research on the ambiguities of these legacies and on who had a say in shaping historical events can be done without reiterating colonial power relations. Alongside its analysis of the Cameroonian internationalized decolonization process under a UN Trusteeship and of how it developed into the current Anglophone conflict, this article uncovers and explores the existing dilemmas in, and potential new avenues for security studies research on colonial dis/continuities using post- and decolonial theories. Its findings and discussion contribute widely to debates within post- and decolonial research, peace, security, and conflict studies.

How does the curriculum contribute to the experiences of belongingness in higher education?

This paper is a critical discussion about how the curriculum contributes to the sense of belonginess within Higher Education (HE), and how the ongoing aim of decolonisation needs to incorporate a more consistent intersectional lens with the curriculum within psychology. Psychology as a discipline has been criticised for its focus on primarily conducting research with people from countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD; Henrich et al., 2010). This approach has neglected a number of social groups within the wider literature and has indeed marginalised the voices and experiences of many. Through the topic of decolonisation, there has been the discussion of the importance of belonging and belongingness, but the intersectional experiences of various social groups within the curriculum has been neglected. In summary, this discussion reveals that there are several key ways in which curricula and decolonial research can contribute to belonging: 1) communication of what (who) is important; 2) consideration of student learning needs; 3) appreciation of course content that is salient to students; 4) demonstration of alignment with a wider range of philosophical approaches; 5) promotion and celebration of cultural differences which allow students to be themselves; and 6) inclusion of a wide range of factors within teaching that contribute to belonging, for example the importance of place.

Decolonial research methodology: an assessment of the challenge to established practice

ABSTRACT The decolonization project challenges the hegemony of Western knowledge and colonial ways of thinking. This article explores this challenge specifically in relation to research methodology. It notes how decolonization focuses on exposing the inappropriate use of positivistic/modernist/universalist approaches by Western researchers, and how it proposes alternative approaches that better protect the interests of indigenous and ‘Other’ minority groups. These alternative approaches are generally based on constructivist principles, and typically involve the use of qualitative methods such as participatory action research within a transformational paradigm. The degree to which these represent a new and/or distinct challenge to Western research methodology is discussed noting, in particular, the challenge posed by research involving Indigenous communities.

Decolonizing Relationality: Reflections From the Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Methods

We are members of the Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Methods, which attempts to shift social science research to be more inclusive and more explicitly connected to anti-racist and decolonizing principles. We tell a complicated, messy, often difficult story of what relationality could be in the context of work like ours. We hope that readers will consider the complications of relationality beyond the interpersonal questions of methods, as those conversations remain too narrowly focused on the interpersonal in the research encounter, with insufficient attention to the institutional and system-level assaults that inflict both material suffering and symbolic violence.

Beyond Colonial Politics of Identity: Being and Becoming Female Youth in Colonial Kenya

This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls’ agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women’s emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South.

Taking ’Asia as method’ seriously in decolonizing comparative curriculum studies in South Korea

ABSTRACT This conceptual article is to problematize Western-centered comparative curriculum studies in South Korea, drawing on research related to postcolonial criticisms of comparative education and curriculum studies, and to suggest a decolonial research imagination for comparative curriculum research in South Korea and East Asia broadly, based on Kuan-Hsing Chen’s idea of Asia as method. To this end, I elaborate on Chen’s concepts of inter-referencing and critical syncretism for decolonizing the compliant research imagination. Additionally, I argue for the shift of the point of reference towards Asia, the extension of curriculum manifestation as a unit of comparison with curriculum conceptualized as a space for constructing cultural imaginary and subjectivity, and curriculum researchers’ onto-epistemological considerations as a comparativist. I conclude the paper with a caution not to dismiss Western contributions to curriculum research in Asia and the possibilities of the existence of resistance to Western-dominant knowledge structure in South Korean curriculum scholarship in the forms of translation and/or hybridity. This study can contribute to decolonizing the intersection of comparative education and curriculum studies that has been Western-centered in South Korea and suggesting a transgressive onto-epistemological orientation for comparative curriculum studies in the contexts of South Korea in particular and East Asia in general.

Decolonising Research for Justice: Ethical Imperatives and Practical Applications

This article examines coloniality of research and discusses the theoretical foundations, ethical imperatives, and practical ways for conducting decolonial research for justice. It emphasises the need to shift away from research paradigms and approaches that perpetuate coloniality to a commitment to embracing the complexities and challenges of conducting decolonial research. The article contributes to the broader discourse on decolonising knowledge production. Drawing on the works of scholars addressing disobedient and defiant research, the article advocates for transformative decolonial praxis, suggesting the need to reimagine research and displace the hegemony and dominance of Western knowledge systems, which marginalise and delegitimise other epistemological traditions. Beyond critiquing coloniality embedded within research, the article proposes practical ways to inform anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-oppressive research practice. It argues that decolonial research requires defiance and resistance against non-relational, hierarchical, and extractive practices, involving critical examination of assumptions and values, centring non-Western voices and perspectives, dismantling coloniality and working towards social and epistemic justice in solidarity with Indigenous and other historically marginalised and oppressed groups. It calls researchers to integrate decolonial principles and frameworks into their research practices.

Three Decolonial Research Methodologies: Interrogating Qualitative Research in English Language Teaching Education

Along this reflection paper, we confront our former understandings of research as women teachers-researchers who intend to take the Epistemologies of the South as ways of being feeling-thinking-doing English language teacher education and research. A personal, academic, and collective journey has intersected and driven us into the decolonial turn to research ELT. Moreover, in this paper, we will share our uncertainties and struggles in an overt attempt to question our personal fine-grained colonial paradigms to find possible ways to demonumentalize research. Our research methodologies are intended to overcome a Western rationality of knowledge production that ingrains the ways through which our knowledge, research, and pedagogical practices are to be constructed. Walking the paths of decoloniality, we have moved from universal to more pluriversal understandings; we have constructed, co-constructed, valued and rescued situated knowledges emerging from our experience in our Global South. In the process, we have lived a mobilization of visions and pathways that destabilize and relocate our practices with a deep relation to that sense of locality that is ours. The aim of the following paper is to socialize how, through our research projects, we have envisioned inter-epistemic relational methodologies, hybrid, and testimonial narratives to portray ways to research English language teacher education with a decolonial spirit.

Funding of research agendas about the global south in Latin America and the Caribbean: lexicometric and content analysis in Latin American scientific production

ABSTRACT The Global South has increasingly become a recurring research agenda, often originating in the Global North. There is a need to understand what these research agendas consist of and what role Latin America and the Caribbean play in defining and/or reproducing them. The purpose of this study is to understand the agendas of the Global South supported by northern agencies, based on a methodological proposal that combines lexicometric analysis of abstracts, grant data-based content analysis on scientific production, and funding data. The study identified four central agendas in the literature: (1) State role and the strength of non-western countries cooperation; (2) Decolonial research, citizen, and feminist perspectives; (3) Academic Collaboration and Education in circuits of science production and (4) Developmentalism in underdeveloped Global South countries. We identified different types of northern organizations, such as non-departmental public bodies, philanthropic and charitable foundations, guiding an agenda based on precariousness, poverty, and underdevelopment, while Latin America and the Caribbean reinforce an agenda taking the South as an example that can be applied in the North. We highlight an emergence of a multipolar world and the need to strengthen research in Latin America and the Caribbean in this context.

Counter-mapping the archive: a decolonial feminist research method

The past decade has seen a growing interest in the ‘turn to history’ which has coincided with a counter-reading of the archive as a means to trouble contemporary practices of governance. In this article, I explore what a decolonial feminist approach to the colonial archive can look like through the development of a research method that involves counter-mapping. This method included the use of participatory interviews, carried out between 2019–2020, that involved asking interviewees to annotate colonial maps of Cairo, and the co-creation of an alternative map. This method presented a decolonial space where I, the researcher, and the participants, co-investigated the spatial securitisation of urban sites as ‘security threats’ and ‘dangerous communities’. In doing so, we co-examined how certain security ‘truths’ constructed by the colonial archive transcend the colonial/modern continuum in new postcolonial forms of securitisation in Egypt. Securitised spaces on the map were, instead, reimagined as spaces of emancipation and life. At the same time, the gendered differences between participants also point to the coloniality of gender in Egypt. In light of this, I thereby also discuss the troubles of representative methods, and the need for an intersectional feminist approach to decolonial research methods.

Sketches Toward a Decolonial Applied Linguistics

Abstract This special issue responds to an increasing interest in decolonial and Southern thinking in applied linguistics. In this Introduction, we first discuss some basic historical facts about colonization, and we highlight some key concepts. We then present the six contributions in the special issue. Three contributions compellingly expose the pervasiveness of coloniality and give reason to doubt that it can ever be overcome; the other three contributions open spaces for the decolonial possibilities of healing, hope, and futurity. We then discuss some key issues in decolonial and Southern scholarship, including the role of non-conventional writing in decolonial research, the differences between decolonial and social justice projects, the difficulties of decolonizing Eurocentric knowledge through Euro-Anglo-Northern tools, and deep inequities in the geopolitics of knowledge. We hope that the special issue will enable readers to re-see long-standing applied linguistics questions through decolonial and Southern lenses. We also hope to make the case why decolonial projects are worth the trouble.

Toward a Decolonial Cybersecurity: Interrogating the Racial-Epistemic Hierarchies That Constitute Cybersecurity Expertise

Beginning with a startling pattern of racialized practices in cybersecurity expert communities in the Gulf States, and drawing on the decolonial insights of the modernity/coloniality school, this article argues that race operates as a marker of who is a legitimate knower of dominant Euro-American knowledges of cybersecurity and who is not, and therefore whose understandings, experiences, and practices of cybersecurity are privileged. In demonstrating that decolonial thought can be fruitfully applied to questions of cybersecurity, this article makes three contributions to security studies. The first is empirical, drawing on original interview data to identify racial hierarchies of rationality and authority in cybersecurity expert communities. The second contribution is theoretical, demonstrating how a decolonial perspective is especially well equipped to understand racialized practices in cybersecurity knowledge production. The third contribution is programmatic, outlining a decolonial research agenda for cybersecurity—or, as we put it in the title, a path toward a decolonial cybersecurity.

Analysis of Participatory Action Research as a Decolonial Research Methodology

Decolonising the research process is inevitable in today’s world full of social and power inequalities. Participatory Action Research (PAR), as one of the methodologies that enhances the transformation of both the researchers and researched, is, therefore, inevitable in social research targeting social, inclusive, and informed change. This study responds to various agitations of decoloniality of the research process that sees the participants as mere subjects rather than essential partners of the knowledge production process. This study conceptualises decoloniality and PAR with an argument recognising PAR as a decolonised research process. This study is located within a transformative paradigm and employs conceptual analysis as a tool to argue the nexus between decoloniality and participatory action research and their assumptions. This study attests to the fact that it is an effective and valuable tool in achieving the decolonised research process because it allows for the research subjects to have input into the process, have their voices recognised, and provide them with a platform to take agency and exercise self-determination. The elements, therefore, resonate with the decolonial agenda to deconstruct oppressive power structures and remembering those who have been historically dismembered by systems of colonial occupation. In this way, this study finds that PAR functions as an important element in implementing the decolonised research process.

‘My Dad Was, Is a Soldier’: Using Collaborative Poetic Inquiry to Explore Intergenerational Trauma, Resilience, and Wellbeing in the Context of Forced Migration

The topics of intergenerational trauma, resilience, and wellbeing as they relate to forced migration are receiving more attention in the arts and health literature. Yet, we know very little about how refugee-background young adults manage their psychosocial wellbeing when they grow up surrounded by stories of conflict, loss, and trauma. Achol has been writing poetry to represent and amplify the narratives of those around her (parents, family, and the South Sudanese community in Sydney, Australia). These stories are central elements of her lived experience and the diverse experiences of her community. Using collaborative poetic inquiry, this paper identifies key themes in one of her poems, My dad was, is a soldier, to illustrate how poetry is an important artistic mode of expression that can improve our understanding of intergenerational trauma, resilience, and wellbeing. Rather than conveying interview data through research poems, we place Achol’s poem at the centre of our collaborative poetic inquiry to gain new insights into refugee lived experiences. This paper contributes to contemporary debates on how artistic means enrich our knowledge of psychosocial wellbeing through trauma-informed, culturally safe, and decolonial research methods.