Data-driven health technologies hold the potential to improve healthcare delivery. Yet they also facilitate the large-scale extraction and commodification of sensitive health data through a phenomenon often described as ‘digital health surveillance capitalism.’ This model has largely gone unchecked, as prevailing regulatory approaches prioritise privacy and security while neglecting broader societal harms arising from datafication. These societal harms of commodification are exacerbated by neoliberalism, which has led to the growing influence of technology corporations in healthcare and in shaping regulatory responses. The entanglement of data-driven commodification and neoliberalism has deepened inequalities between countries and regions, particularly in times of crisis. This has renewed calls for a decolonial turn in public health and a more deliberate focus on the Global South. Critical analyses of the intersections between regulation, health and surveillance capitalism, particularly in Global South contexts, are therefore of urgent scholarly importance. Drawing on interdisciplinary socio-legal analysis, this symposium collection focuses on case studies from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean Community, the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries and Asia, to examine how neoliberal pro-innovation agendas have reinforced asymmetrical power relations and regulatory failures, enabling extractive data practices that undermine health equity. The collection’s focus on the Global South as a site of decolonial possibilities enables us to critically examine how alternative regulatory governance models could be operationalised to advance equitable health outcomes.

ABSTRACT This intervention, designated as Letter Zero in a forthcoming series of epistolary reflections, is addressed to the Director of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre. It revisits the intellectual, institutional, and affective significance of the Centre’s pioneering role in rethinking English Studies in Morocco. Drawing on a mode of academic writing grounded in relationality, correspondence, subjectivity, and lived experience, the letter reflects on my own scholarly trajectory – from the early stirrings of postcolonial critique in Tetouan in the 1990s to my current engagement with expanding the Moroccan Cultural Studies turn across disciplines, languages, and arts. The letter foregrounds the foundational interventions of the Centre, including the creation of the MA programme Cultural Studies: Cultures, Identities, and Nationhood in Morocco, the launch of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal, and the re-editing of Anglo-American writings on Morocco. As Letter Zero, this intervention sets the stage for a broader, open-ended series of reflections, titled Letters from the South: Toward a Decolonial Moroccan Cultural Studies, which invites a new generation of scholars shaped by the Centre to collectively explore the unfinished project of decolonizing knowledge. The series, expected to consist of twelve letters, aims to extend this critical momentum across departments of French, Spanish, Arabic, History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Psychology, while embracing epistolary and relational forms of academic engagement as tools for reimagining the university from the South. This epistolary gesture is anchored in the conviction that the substantial foundation of knowledge serves as an epistemic correlative for emancipation, in alignment with the enduring decolonial ethos of the emancipation turn: to know is to emancipate.

ABSTRACT In The Museum of Babel I argued that the museum’s true vocation is to fail to represent anything other than its own history. Here I outline some implications of that thesis for the ‘decolonial’ and ‘decolonizing’ turns. My argument is heuristic. It should not be misread as a blanket dismissal of the thousand flowers of curating that bloom under the ‘decolonial’ or ‘decolonizing’ umbrellas. Instead, I am suggesting that, in our Metamuseum Age, the task at hand is to colonize the museum with its own ghosts. In short, the caring and critical charge of museography today is not ‘decolonial’ but metahistorical and metacolonial. I illustrate my argument with a handful of illuminating examples drawn from recent exhibits staged in the museums and galleries of Madrid, Venice, and Coimbra.

Power animal journeying in Western psychotherapy: Applications, therapeutic safety, and future promises.

Despite six decades of post-independence reform, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to structure teaching, learning, and knowledge production in Anglophone African higher education. The decolonial turn catalyzed by the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement has remained geographically skewed toward South Africa and the Global North, leaving the experiences of East and West African institutions significantly underrepresented in the literature. This paper synthesizes evidence on how decolonizing curriculum and culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) are understood, enacted, and constrained across four Anglophone African countries: Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. A critical literature review was conducted, drawing on 40 peer-reviewed and institutional sources published between 1986 and 2025. The analytical framework integrates Shahjahan et al.'s tripartite decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy (DCP) model with Gay's culturally responsive teaching theory. Three cross-cutting tensions structure the literature: the tension between cosmetic curriculum diversification and genuine epistemic transformation; the tension between international accreditation requirements and locally grounded knowledge systems; and the tension between individual faculty agency and institutional inertia. Decolonizing curriculum and embedding CRP require not only policy declaration but structural reform of assessment frameworks, faculty development systems, language policy, and research incentive structures. The paper proposes four institutional pathways for translating decolonial intent into pedagogical practice across Anglophone African higher education contexts.

Abstract In the prologue to The Zulus of New York , Zakes Mda acknowledges studies that inform his 2019 novel. He singles out a 2007 article by Robert Trent Vinson and Robert Edgar entitled “Zulus Abroad: Cultural Representations and Educational Experiences of Zulus in America, 1880–1945” for inspiring him to write the novel. Mda also cites Shane Peacock’s “Africa Meets The Great Farini,” a book chapter in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business edited by Bernth Lindfors. Both works foreground the contributions of Zulus to modernity, notably through the agency of circus performance. Indeed, The Zulus of New York , as the title indicates, traces the circus career of the protagonist, Mpiyezintombi Mkhize. After committing treason in kwaZulu Kingdom, he escapes to Cape Town, where an impresario named William Leonard Hunt (also known as The Great Farini) transports him to London and New York as a circus performer. By fictionalising historical events and personages within the setting of nineteenth century New York, London, and South Africa, Mda invests his novel with an African decolonial politics. That is, as a black South African writer based in the USA , he interrogates racialised practices of modernity, diasporisation, exoticisation, and dehumanisation. I argue that, in doing so, Mda instantiates Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s sustained critique of the decolonial turn in Against Decolonisation: Taking the Agency of Africans Seriously (2022). Therein, while endorsing the epistemic delinking from Euro-North-America imperialism, Táíwò problematises the condescending sloganeering, pseudo-radicalism, and posturing associated with decolonial theorists such as Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel. Consequently, the contributions of Africans to modernity are overlooked under the wrong assumption that civilisation is atavistically Western. It is against this critical vacuum that this article builds on Táíwò’s book to tease out slippages, omissions, and contradictions of the decolonial turn.

ABSTRACT The 2014 publication of Yuin historian Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu signalled a shift in Australian agricultural discourse and practice. Prior to its publication, little attention was given to the intersection between food practices and (de)colonisation. Over the past decade, small-scale alternative food movements as well as large-scale export-oriented producers have responded unevenly to Pascoe’s provocation. While the former sought to develop a decolonial approach in response to a growing awareness of settler complicity in colonial food systems, the latter, represented by government agencies and peak organisations, adopted a milder reconciliatory turn of Indigenous–settler relations within conventional agriculture. This article argues that Dark Emu presents a pivotal moment and rupture in Australia’s agricultural practices and food discourses. We examine the sociopolitical conditions surrounding Dark Emu and ask how its publication produced an urgency towards decolonial thinking across alternative food actors, and reconciliatory thinking in agriculture more broadly. We conceptualise the “Pascoe Moment” as a set of contingent conditions around Dark Emu that activated an urgent need to reassemble food systems in response to the (de)colonial question of agriculture. In doing so, this article untangles how agricultural actors differently engage in decolonial questions.

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of the leftist critique of the idea of the rule of law within the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. The author constructs a coherent picture of the discourse’s transformation: from a moderate approach that views formal rule of law as an “unqualified human good” and a necessary barrier against despotism, to its radical denial of neutrality. The work scrutinizes the assertion that law serves as an instrument for legitimizing the capitalist order and oppression (M. Horwitz, M. Mandel). Par-ticular emphasis is placed on the contemporary “decolonial turn” in critical jurisprudence, which exposes the ideological and violent nature of legal procedures, their connection to colonial legacy and global inequality (J. Desautels-Stein, J. Martel). The author concludes that the rule of law is not a static ideal but a field of ideologi-cal struggle requiring radical rethinking. Overcoming conceptual diffusion and methodological crisis is seen in shifting the focus from defending the existing status quo towards transforming law into an instrument of social justice and emancipation.

ABSTRACT This article examines the emergence of a Southern European decolonial turn in contemporary leisure culture, focusing on how music production in Portugal, Italy and Spain during the 2020s enacts a cultural (re)generation that reconfigures Europe’s epistemic hierarchies from within. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, the article analyses how Southern Europe has long been constructed as a marginal, peripheral and internal Other within a Eurocentric norm exclusively embodied by the European North. Building on borderlands theory and Southern European decolonial thought, it deconstructs the subaltern status of Southern Europe within Europe and explores the cases of music artists Pedro Mafama, La Niña del Sud and La Plazuela as forms of epistemic resistance against the Northern European canon of modernity. By reclaiming Arab, Roma and Mediterranean genealogies long disregarded by Eurocentric music culture, these artists perform a form of re-existencia (Achinte, 2006), offering new ways to (re)imagine European identity. Rethinking Europe from its internal borderlands rather than its imperial core, the article positions Southern Europe as a living borderland: an ambivalent and generative space where colonial difference and creative resistance converge, holding the potential to articulate new ways of being European beyond the epistemic authority of the North.

Artificial intelligence and epistemic justice: a decolonial turn through indigenous knowledge systems

ABSTRACT This intervention, designated as Letter Zero in a forthcoming series of epistolary reflections, is addressed to the Director of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre. It revisits the intellectual, institutional, and affective significance of the Centre’s pioneering role in rethinking English Studies in Morocco. Drawing on a mode of academic writing grounded in relationality, correspondence, subjectivity, and lived experience, the letter reflects on my own scholarly trajectory – from the early stirrings of postcolonial critique in Tetouan in the 1990s to my current engagement with expanding the Moroccan Cultural Studies turn across disciplines, languages, and arts. The letter foregrounds the foundational interventions of the Centre, including the creation of the MA programme Cultural Studies: Cultures, Identities, and Nationhood in Morocco, the launch of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal, and the re-editing of Anglo-American writings on Morocco. As Letter Zero, this intervention sets the stage for a broader, open-ended series of reflections, titled Letters from the South: Toward a Decolonial Moroccan Cultural Studies, which invites a new generation of scholars shaped by the Centre to collectively explore the unfinished project of decolonizing knowledge. The series, expected to consist of twelve letters, aims to extend this critical momentum across departments of French, Spanish, Arabic, History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Psychology, while embracing epistolary and relational forms of academic engagement as tools for reimagining the university from the South. This epistolary gesture is anchored in the conviction that the substantial foundation of knowledge serves as an epistemic correlative for emancipation, in alignment with the enduring decolonial ethos of the emancipation turn: to know is to emancipate.

ABSTRACT This article maps the emergence of Moroccan Cultural Studies within Departments of English in Morocco, tracing how postcolonial critique evolved from a critical sensibility into an institutionalized intellectual project. Postcolonial critique first emerged in Tetouan, where Mohamed Laamiri, Khalid Bekkaoui Jamal Eddine Benhayoun and Sadik Rddad – drawing on Edward Said – challenged the English literary canon by engaging non-canonical texts, including dramatic works, captivity narratives, and travel writing, to interrogate colonial representations of the Moors, Barbary, and North Africa. Building on this foundation, Moroccan Cultural Studies was institutionally founded in Fes through the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, under Khalid Bekkaoui’s leadership. There, these early interventions were transformed into a collective project of scholarly emancipation, grounded in location-specific practices of re-editing, re-reading, and re-writing. Moroccan Cultural Studies reframes English not as a lingua franca of imperial domination but as a discursive medium for critical knowledge production, enabling a decolonial turn in English Studies. By institutionalizing postcolonial critique and extending its analytical reach, this study positions Moroccan Cultural Studies as a model for future decolonial projects in English Studies that can be pursued across the Maghreb, Africa, and the Arabo-Islamic world, highlighting the interplay between place, pedagogy, and power in the formation of new postcolonial knowledge practices.

Objective/context: This introductory essay to the Special Issue “Urban Environmental History of Latin America and the Caribbean” examines the development of this historiographical field, by pointing out the relationships, differences, and particularities in contrast to the historiography of the Global North, and also by establishing the problematizations, approaches, and challenges that emerge from urban environmental history made about and in Latin America. We argue that the ecosystemic diversity of the subcontinent allows for a wide range of topics and theoretical-methodological approaches to research. Thus, periodic historiographical reviews are an essential contribution for the field. Originality: The article undertakes an assessment of the contexts of historical knowledge production on urban environmental historicity, its ecosystemic and ontoepistemological relations, and its constitutive tensions between colonial legacies and localproduction. Methodology: We discuss the contributions and connections between urban history and environmental history that are reconfigured as urban environmental history, and propose new perspectives open to the material, post-human, and decolonial turns, redefining the idea of the city and prompting a dialoguewith the works that constitute the dossier. Conclusions: The article sheds light on the developments of urban environmental historiography in Latin America, as a field that is distinct, diverse, and growing.

Travel was one of the means by which objects were amassed and, if viewed from afar, in space and time, these artefacts may be considered as discursive repositories, other than textual, which compile narratives of journeys. Investigating the mechanics of mediation of these objects (as for text and image) may then be understood as research work in the field of Travel Studies. Artefacts in ethnographic collections have been the object of decolonizing attention and scholarship which challenge for example static, exhibitive on-site praxes. I will thus approach what I will consider as the connected triptych of Travel Studies, “cargo” and the decolonial turn within the framework of a case-study, using the online presentation of the Cook-Voyage Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) (PRM) as an entry point. The focus will be on specifically digital showcasing, not of exhibitions but of catalogues of online collections /databases of ethnographic objects, which in the absence of decolonial enquiry and action, may well continue to generate elliptical, partial or fragmented experiences of virtual journeying.

Pedagogy after the Decolonial Turn: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The selection of indigenous philosophies by global professional associations as the thematic focus for World Social Work Day (WSWD) from 2021 to 2026 signifies a systemic decolonial shift in the global discourse, which has historically been dominated by Western models. Purpose of this paper is to analyze the philosophies of Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, and Harambee, assessing their decolonial potential in counteracting professional imperialism and identifying the critical risks associated with their globalization and universalization. The paper is grounded in the critical paradigm of social work and combines the theoretical frameworks of professional imperialism and decolonial studies. It utilizes qualitative content analysis of official IFSW statements and a comparative analysis of the aforementioned Indigenous concepts. The analysis demonstrates that the integration of Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, and Harambee forms a powerful decolonial paradigm that counters Western individualism and the neoliberal logic of development by emphasizing collective responsibility, social, and environmental justice. These concepts fulfill an indigenization function, legitimizing local practices and demanding epistemic justice. However, the study revealed key risks: official communications tend toward depoliticization, diluting the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial content of the philosophies. This creates a threat of co-optation, where the call for collective self-help (as in the case of Harambee and Ubuntu) may be exploited to justify shifting responsibility for social welfare from the state onto communities. The thematic direction of World Social Work Day is a crucial yet two-sided process that requires ongoing critical reflection. For Ukraine, which is undergoing its own process of decolonization, this discourse is highly relevant, underscoring the importance of integrating Ukrainian social work epistemologies as a valuable contribution to global knowledge.

This conceptual article explores Silih Asah , Silih Asih , and Silih Asuh —a triadic Sundanese philosophy rooted in mutual learning, affection, and care—as a culturally embedded pedagogical foundation for decolonizing early childhood education (ECE) in Indonesia. As global perspectives on childhood increasingly influence national curricula, dominant early education models, shaped by Eurocentric frameworks, tend to prioritize cognitive outcomes, individualism, and standardized behaviors. These models often marginalize relational, affective, and community-based dimensions of learning that are central to many Indigenous worldviews. In the Sundanese context of Indonesia, such global pressures intersect with local realities, reshaping how childhood is socially constructed and lived. This article argues for a decolonial turn in ECE by centering Indigenous knowledge systems and moral ontologies such as Silih Asah, Asih, Asuh , which position the child as an emotional, social, and communal being. This framework is translated into classroom practice through the use of local folktales, cooperative games, empathetic teacher-child dialogue, and group-based activities that reflect gotong royong (mutual cooperation). Assessment practices shift from standardized testing to the observation of empathy, participation, and collective responsibility. As the first framework to systematically apply Silih Asah, Asih, Asuh within early childhood pedagogy, this article contributes a Southeast Asian specifically Sundanese relational learning model that resists the instrumentalization of early learning. It offers an alternative vision for schooling rooted in ethical interdependence, cultural identity, and the lived experiences of children within a globalizing world.

Scholars from across the Global South recognise the enduring significance of radio as a site for the preservation, revitalisation, and promotion of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and culture. In recent years, there has been a growing corpus of knowledge that documents efforts by the media to promote IKS and indigenous languages. In South Africa, however, this effort is limited given that some indigenous language outlets dovetail towards advancing the colonial language hegemony by adopting, or code-switching with, English in their programming. This article explores how the Ka Setswana (i.e., in Setswana) segments on Kgolo (i.e., to grow), a programme on South Africa’s indigenous language radio station Motsweding FM, contribute to the preservation of Setswana cultural knowledge and practices. Anchored in Govenden’s (2023) media decolonial theory, this qualitative study analyses 50 purposively selected episodes archived on Motsweding FM’s podcasts. The findings demonstrate that Ka Setswana operates not only as a cultural archive but as an epistemic intervention that challenges the coloniality of language, power, and knowledge. The programme revives Setswana values and highlights indigenous media’s role in African cultural resurgence. The article argues that language-based broadcasting, when grounded in community memory and critical reflexivity, can advance epistemic justice and model decolonial futures.

Why EU democratic theory needs a decolonial turn: Racism, colonialism and the ‘we’ of democracy

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 posed an existential challenge not only to Ukrainian society but also to sociology as a scientific discipline. This article explores how war erases conventional boundaries between academia and society, researcher and participant, neutrality and engagement, theory and action. It focuses on the triple crisis of Ukrainian sociology — institutional, epistemological, and ethical. Drawing on the frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and postcolonialism approach, the article develops the concept of “hybrid knowledge”, which balances scientific rigor, civic responsibility, and ethical involvement. It examines the adaptation of academic institutions under wartime conditions, shifts in research agendas, methodological compromises, and the expanding public role of sociologists. The war has accelerated the decolonial turn, foregrounded the transnational dimension of inquiry, and catalyzed the search for a new conceptual language to capture Ukrainian realities. Ukrainian sociology emerges as a sociology of action — a form of knowledge that resists, bears witness, and sustains collective subjectivity amid historical catastrophe.