Decolonial Lens Research Articles

One myth to rule them all and in the darkness bind them: a critical examination of Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey

ABSTRACT This special edition embarks on a critical exploration of Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, challenging its dominance as a universal narrative framework and its implications for contemporary storytelling, particularly in the context of evolving media landscapes. Drawing on C.P. Nield's critique of Campbell's monomyth as a "Hollywood McMyth," the collection of articles within this edition seeks to unravel the monomyth by advocating for a narrative plurality that reflects a more inclusive and diverse spectrum of stories. Contributors to this edition engage with alternative narrative paradigms that emphasise community, companionship, and commonality, moving beyond the individualistic focus of Campbell's framework. This shift is underscored by the rise of interactive and immersive storytelling technologies, such as VR, AR, and XR, which demand a re-evaluation of narrative structures to accommodate the dynamic and fluid nature of contemporary storytelling. Through a decolonial lens, the articles collectively argue for a decentring of narrative meaning, proposing new approaches that embrace the complexities of global challenges and the multiplicity of human experiences. Setting the stage for a critical examination of The Hero's Journey, inviting readers to consider the ethical implications of narratives in shaping socio-cultural values and norms in an era of immersive and participatory media.

Language ideologies and language teaching in the global world: An introduction to the special issue

Aims: This special issue delves into language ideologies shaping multilingual education, aiming to unravel their impact on pedagogical practices and emergent multilinguals. By presenting empirical studies and critical analyses, the collection seeks to foster a nuanced understanding of language ideologies in diverse educational contexts. Approach: This guest editorial introduces language ideology as a lens, guiding an exploration of its manifestations in educational settings. Ten papers, spanning diverse linguistic landscapes, offer a comprehensive examination of language ideologies through varied methodologies. From scrutinizing teacher objections to linguistic pluralism to dissecting bilingual kindergarteners’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection employs qualitative research, case studies, and critical reviews to critically engage with language ideologies in global language education. Conclusion: The special issue concludes by emphasizing the critical role of language ideologies in shaping educational landscapes and influencing emergent multilinguals’ experiences. Authors underscore the need for macro-level research, recommending a decolonial lens to address inequalities perpetuated by monoglossic practices. The collection advocates for inclusive spaces and challenges educators to reflect on their pedagogies, promoting a multilingual-as-a-resource orientation. By extending the scope beyond individual classrooms and examining sociopolitical and economic dimensions, the special issue contributes to ongoing efforts to reframe language ideologies and advance inclusivity in multilingual education. Originality: This special issue stands out for its originality in dissecting language ideologies through diverse lenses, spanning linguistic, sociocultural, and pedagogical dimensions. Notably, studies like Chang-Bacon and colleagues’ examination of objections to linguistic pluralism and Mendoza’s exploration of stylization in English-medium instruction enrich the discourse. The collection encourages scholars to engage with plurilingualism as a theoretically robust alternative to late translanguaging theory, promoting empirical grounding and fostering a deeper understanding of language ideologies.

Understanding ‘violence’ within protest: A call for further research within occupational therapy and occupational science

ABSTRACT There is a dearth of research in occupational science towards understanding ‘violence' within the context of protest, including why and how these two phenomena occur in and of each other and why both are characteristic of Post-Apartheid South Africa. This gap in knowledge is particularly concerning as both the profession of occupational therapy and the discipline of occupational science are concerned with human occupation as a means of analysing everyday doing as shaped by context. Efforts towards contextually reflexive research, practice, and education in the discipline and profession cannot continue to ignore this issue, especially as it pertains to the impact of violence within protest on the health and well-being of activists. This article offers a historical analysis of protest ‘violence’ across key political shifts in South Africa, using a decolonial lens. This perspective foregrounds colonial configurations of context, and the need to critically interrogate structures, practices, and processes that are potentially complicit in sustaining and reproducing this social order. The conceptualisation of what is termed ‘violence’ within the context of protest is problematised throughout, highlighting the contested nature of this term. Lastly, this article identifies occupational science constructs that may offer insights into this complex phenomenon and notes pertinent questions for theory and practice developments.

<i>Kshetra</i> and the nurturing of a plurilingual ethos

This article discusses a family’s plurilingualism from a southern and decolonial lens, looking at the role of language ideologies in its plurilingual practices. It focuses on the concept of space as kshetra and its accompanying plurilingual ethos, originating in the Asian origins of the family. The overarching claim is that by holding on to its legacy of a plurilingual ethos, the family has maintained its ever-changing plurilingualism over three generations by navigating a tension or duality between an out-group assimilation to the prevalent monolingualism that it encounters outside the home in its transcontinental migrations and an in-group maintenance of plurilingualism within the kshetra of the family. The article concludes that it appears to be the ethical attitude to linguistic and cultural heterogeneity, rather than the actual use or maintenance of a specific heritage language, that is of more value to transnational and transgenerational plurilingual families.

Decolonial identities in the leadership coaching space: against neoliberal leader identity regulation.

The study uses the decolonial lens to disrupt the contentious dominance of whiteness in leadership development, not to mention in coaching, in management and organization studies (MOS). It contributes insights into how a decolonizing coaching space enables and guides a coachee to reflect and rethink the navigation of the realities of her decolonial identity. The decolonial identity encapsulates the authentic self and the neoliberal identity is the plastic self in a neoliberal university context. Universities' pervasive and normalized neoliberal discourse has become a "paradigm"-the overarching worldview through which universities' visions, missions, strategic objectives, and values are constructed. For academics to thrive in their performance and "walk on water" in achieving performance targets, they ought to embrace being academic capitalists, which shapes idealized neoliberal identities-conforming identities, complicit in undermining social, economic, and epistemic justice. Qualitative research methods were utilized to conduct a reflexive study, and data collected from the reflections and reflexive dialogues in leadership development coaching sessions and journals were thematically analyzed. The study reveals that the coach and coachee's shared decolonial identity offered counter-narratives that unmask the dominant great "white" man leadership in organizations. It also illuminates insights into the significance of black feminist pedagogy in the coaching process to honor the coachee's decolonial identity and rich cultural experiences. It enabled her to explore them critically and derive meanings from developing decolonizing, critically conscious leadership strategies for emerging transformation challenges. Meaningful dialogue dimensions emerged, which served as lenses that steered a decolonial approach in supporting the coachee to reflect and rethink the leadership performance vision, strategic objectives, action plans, implementation, and monitoring.

A decolonial reading of the Third Chapter of the Gospel of John in Moffat’s Translation of the Catechism into Setswana (1826)

The Setswana language is one of the Southern African languages that was “reduced” into a written language through the translation of Christian literature by the London Missionary Society. The introduction of the Setswana spelling book in 1826 epitomised the vernacularisation and standardisation of Setswana. In 1826, Robert Moffat also translated the first Setswana catechism. Rev. William Brown’s Catechism served as a source text. He also added the third chapter of the Gospel of John and the Lord’s Prayer. This paper focuses on the second section of the 1826 Setswana catechism, namely the third chapter of John’s Gospel. It is argued that translation does not happen in a vacuum; rather, it also has the ideological intentions of the translator. Through the translated texts, Moffat performs a technology of power by eroding, dislocating, and disassociating the Batswana from their epistemic and spiritual heritage. The paper applies a decolonial lens to analyse the theme of conversion (metanoia) in the Gospel of John, as translated by Moffat.

Apprehending HIV Stigma

AbstractThe literary narrative Kiss of the Fur Queen, by Indigenous author Tomson Highway, calls for applying a decolonial framework that brings together different disciplinary systems to investigate responses to the stigma associated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Approaching the narrative as testimony in which Highway foregrounds Indigenous knowledges, the text allows for a reframing of stigma as working within much larger systemic violences and operations of power than can be anticipated within a politics of recognition, indexed to the expository logic of Eve Sedgwick's paranoid position. Locating HIV‐related stigma as emerging within the context of intergenerational collective trauma rooted in colonial violence makes possible the kind of reparative work that Sedgwick envisions, as well as allowing for an engagement with the infinite possibilities of encounter as an ethical response to this socially polarizing behavioural phenomenon that has proven so difficult to dislodge. Attentive to specific racialized and minoritized colonial histories, Highway's narrative unravels the entanglement of events and conditions surrounding HIV in a watershed moment when decolonial work collides with ongoing histories of colonial violence. Such a decolonial lens offers a non‐positivist framework to potentially unsettle the stasis of stigma reduction.

When planetary cosmopolitanism meets the Buddhist ethic: Recycling, karma and popular ecology in Singapore

AbstractBy thinking with and through Buddhist cosmology, this paper explores the emergence of an ethical sensibility—what we call planetary cosmopolitanism—that is based on not just a spatially expanded ethic of care to ecological worlds, but also a temporally extended sense of justice to the future Earth. This transtemporal sense of ethical becoming reflects how the possibility of future ‘rebirth’ and accountability for past actions can motivate new ecological consciousness in the present. We forge these ideas through an empirical focus on popular Buddhist ecological practices in Singapore, where green recovery visions have primarily been driven by a secular and technocratic ethos. In negotiating the prevailing modernist ecological discourses, many Buddhists tap into an alternative imagining of cosmological time that regards Earth not simply as a place to be left behind at the end of one's life, but a permanent home for all future beings. This reading of human–ecology relations emphasises a causal responsibility to secure planetary well‐being, moving the making of cosmopolitan sensibilities from the realm of beneficence into justice. Yet, this renewed cosmopolitan sensibility to Earth is not simply a prescriptive ethical framework articulated on an abstract level, but materially performed and negotiated at the level of everyday life. Recycling becomes a site of rapprochement that allows Buddhists in Singapore to promote and negotiate their ecological consciousness within the strictures of the secular state. In doing so, it opens up new spaces of postcapitalist possibility that enable Buddhists, alongside people of other or no faith, to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting the planet. By developing an alternative account of cosmopolitanism grounded in Buddhist cosmology, we identify Buddhism as a decolonial lens through which we can critically reimagine human–ecology relations, and illuminate diverse modes and practices of ethical becoming in this age of ecological crisis.

The intimate public as a decolonial lens: “cripping” affect, nationalism and imperial violence

AbstractThis article brings an intimate perspective to bear upon the violence of economic sanctions, shifting attention away from an exclusive focus on state actors, in order to examine how “‘wounds” enter politics’.1 In this research, I ‘stretch’ Berlant’s notion of the intimate public, reconfiguring it as a decolonial analytic lens on subaltern suffering in conditions of endemic imperial violence. I focus on the Facebook page of the Iranian chief negotiator, Javad Zarif, during Iran’s talks with the P5+1 powers over its nuclear programme, under the pressure of what the Obama administration itself termed ‘crippling’ economic sanctions. Examining Zarif’s audience’s readings of his back injury during the talks as representing the ‘crippled’ nation, I trace how subaltern injury is intimately narrated through a racialised framework of disablement and ‘recovery’, where ‘recovery’ signifies a desanctioned and deracialised national body. I firstly complicate the prevailing conception of the intimate public as oriented around a ‘national fantasy’, theorising it as an affective structure that simultaneously locates imperial power, as well as the nation-state, as sources of complaint and hope; secondly, I draw on a critical disability (‘crip’) lens to understand the intimate public as mediating both the debilitation of racialised underdevelopment, and the fantasy of a normative, ‘developed’ national body in a post-sanctions future. Through examining the intimate politics of economic sanctions, this study contributes to a decolonial perspective on the entanglements of affect, nationalism and imperial violence.

Desi Genderqueerness: The Mystery and History of Gender Diversity in India

Abstract: The goal of this article is to conceptualize a decolonial understanding of an Indian genderqueerness, trying to contest the false temporal binaries of coloniality and postcoloniality. Tracing India’s complex and rich queer and genderqueer history preceding British colonization, I dissect the impact of colonization on postcolonial transphobia and understandings of trans. Through a historical literature review and media content analysis of the controversial film The Pink Mirror (2003), I apply a decolonial lens to reimagine locally produced narratives of queerness and genderqueerness through local genderqueer communities, such as Hijras and Kothis.

Response to: “Looking back to launch forward: a self-reflexive approach to decolonising science education and communication in Africa”. Decoloniality opens up new epistemic vistas for science communication

Decolonial perspectives open up epistemic and practical insights for science communication. Following critiques of a deficit-model framing of the field, science communication has been redefined as an inclusive cultural space of meaning-making around science. From a decolonial lens, however, a cultural perspective necessitates a fundamental reckoning with the historical and contemporary politics of knowledge claims, including the erasure and devaluation of entire knowledge-systems in the process of Westernization. In recognizing and learning from these histories, science communication can learn from parallel developments within the sciences. It can also learn from contributions made by decolonial scholars to the global challenge of navigating sustainable futures. This piece briefly discusses one such example, drawing from scholarship on the ontological cosmovision of Ubuntu and its relevance to climate change dilemmas today.

Reconceptualising the notion of cross-linguistic transfer in multilingual spaces: A Global South perspective from South Africa

There is a growing consensus among applied linguists from the Global South that orthodox linguistic and applied linguistic paradigms, theoretical frameworks and methodologies do not adequately serve these contexts. As a result, there has been an increase in interest in challenging Global North paradigms, theoretical perspectives and methodologies. In line with these concerns, in this critical reflective paper, I interrogate the notion of cross-linguistic transfer, which remains popular in some studies on language and literacy learning and teaching in linguistically and culturally complex Global South contexts, including the South African context. Using two studies drawn from two complex multilingual South African universities as illustrative cases (Dyers and Antia, 2019; Makalela, 2014), and framing these studies from a decolonial lens and a translanguaging perspective, I show that the concept of cross-linguistic transfer is problematic because it fails to capture a range of the communicative repertoires, both linguistic and non-linguistic, of multilingual students in these universities, and by extension, in similar contexts. I also contend that the notion of “transfer” in cross-linguistic transfer undermines the multidimensional interdependence of communicative resources of multilingual users. Following this critical analysis, I call for the reconceptualization of cross-linguistic transfer, arguing that this conceptual vocabulary is not consistent with the ontological realities and epistemological perspectives of multilingual students in a complex multilingual South African context. I conclude the paper by briefly discussing the implications of the reconceptualization of cross-linguistic transfer for multilingual educational settings and language and literacy research in the geographic African context, in general, and the South African context, in particular.

Introduction

Abstract This special section draws on the dynamic new field of Indian Ocean studies to rethink key concepts such as space and circulation (Jeremy Prestholdt), gender and kinship (Mahmood Kooria), and popular media and infrastructure (Bindu Menon Mannil). Through fresh interdisciplinary insights from the contributors' archives and fieldwork, the articles critically interrogate these concepts from a distinctive intellectual vantage point. Historians and anthropologists based in different parts of the globe come together in this special section to “think with the Indian Ocean.” The authors take a concept that is in wide currency in the humanities and social sciences and then reimagine it creatively in the contexts that they study. In doing so, they decenter familiar ways of seeing and knowing, offering a new decolonial lens to make sense of the circularities and connections that constitute our world.

Gendered and Racialised Epistemological Injustice in FGM-safeguarding

This paper explores FGM-safeguarding in the UK through a decolonial lens. Based on an analysis of the development of law and policy relating to ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ in the UK alongside data collected in focus groups with people of ethnic Somali heritage living in Bristol, we argue that the current legislation and policies, as well as their delivery, are steeped in colonial Othering. We demonstrate that legislative and policy approaches operate through a gendered and generational binary in which non-White mothers are othered as migrants (regardless of citizenship status) for whom anachronistic culture is deemed determinative, whilst their daughters are claimed as British. In this construction, ‘FGM’ operates as the symbolic marker that designates un/belonging: the uncircumcised girl is rescuable and claimed as ‘one of us’, whilst the circumcised mother is considered a mutilated political subject for whom belonging is foreclosed.

Dealing with a Nuclear Past: Revisiting the Cases of Algeria and Kazakhstan through a Decolonial Lens

ABSTRACT Over 2000 nuclear weapons explosions were conducted worldwide between 1945 and 1996. Most of these high-yield explosions took place at nuclear test sites in the Global South: among them, the Algerian Sahara and the Kazakh steppe, where their respective colonising powers (at the time) France and the Soviet Union tested their nuclear arsenal. Contemporary Algeria and Kazakhstan still bear the egregious impact of these nuclear tests. The perceptions and demands of the local population, including victims and survivors of the testing, related to addressing the nuclear past have not been comprehensively investigated. Little is known about the local-regional resistance to these tests, aside from the Sahara Protest Team in 1959 and the anti-nuclear Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement in 1989. Our aim is to develop this line of research by considering the links between anti-nuclear movements and colonialism in Algeria and Kazakhstan. By revisiting these cases using a decolonial lens, we develop a more comprehensive understanding of resistance to nuclear testing in the Global South.

Take it Personally: What May it Take to Become Designers for Pluriversality?

This paper argues that if we aim to Design for pluriversality, we cannot do so from a universalist notion of what it means to be a Designer. This paper briefly describes the efforts of decolonizing Design, then looks into two Design approaches in socially engaged Design methods that frame how Designers connect to place and people: Situated Design and Design Empathy. These discourses are then further nuanced by adding a decolonial lens, nuancing how Designers are situated and engage through the colonial matrix of power. This then serves as a map of aspects to be taken into consideration for nuancing a Designer’s relation place, history, profession and people in the colonial matrix of power. This paper then suggest the notions of awarenessing, an action-oriented reflective awareness on one’s position, flexibility in Design processes and the incorporation of personal aspects into Designing as possible ways to open up for pluriversal Design stances. The paper concludes by outlining potential implications of opening up for such stances in doing, writing and teaching Design.

Decoloniality in danger or being boosted? An exploration of ECOWAS positions and conflict management in the Western African region

This paper aims to explore the notion of decoloniality by examining the decisions and actions of the ECOWAS in response to the coup d’état in Burkina Faso in 2022, as well as other comparable sanctions imposed on Mali and Guinea during internal crisis challenges. These topics were raised and debated in various mass media outlets. For this purpose, readers are invited to imagine, based on ideas interpreted from official positions of the ECOWAS, or perceptions of them, expressed in academic narratives and the media, if decoloniality could be boosted or is in danger, following the decisions, actions, and positions of the ECOWAS. The interpretations through the lens of decoloniality portrayed in African narratives, and these explorations are characteristic of qualitative analysis. In examining how ECOWAS manages potential crises in the region, particularly in the cases of Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso, we can identify basic features of decoloniality. Taking a social-constructivist perspective, we can explore how African narratives of development can inspire critical resistance. Specifically, we must consider how power and relationships based on power can be decolonized to prioritize a people-centric view of development. In analyzing the use of violence and safety in the actions of the ECOWAS, we can determine whether they boost or endanger decoloniality. The academic community has shown considerable interest in the impact of the ECOWAS on the political climate of Western African states. However, it is important to consider the philosophical perspective on how the portrayal of ECOWAS actions and decisions can affect the narratives of opposition, anti-ism, and power dynamics. Specifically, in the case of internal conflicts, these portrayals can direct the debate on whether decolonization, as a theory, cultural movement, or process, can continue the work of African resistance initiated during the decolonization process which remains unfinished.

Receipts and Receipts NB

This paper reports on two iterations of our ongoing Receipts project. The project serves as a means to experiment with and propose processes that use social practice and machine learning technologies to prepare testimonies and listeners to more clearly and impactfully speak, hear, and feel what it is like to respond to mimetic trauma and be part of an equity-deserving group in public space. The work is guided by the following question: How can the process of facilitating the preparation and presention of anonymized testimonies of discriminatory aggression in public spaces with the witnesses and victims of said agressions create structures of accountability, solidarity, healing, and community? The first project, Receipts (2020), was presented as part of The Bentway’s Safe in Public Space program in Toronto, and addressed anti-Asian aggression in public spaces. The second project, Receipts NB, in collaboration with ArtFix, an organization that works with artists with substance abuse and mental health lived experience in North Bay, will address the stigmatization and isolation of this community during the pandemic. It will be presented as part of IceFollies 2023, a week-long public art festival on frozen Lake Nipissing. These explorations emerge from and reflect upon a theoretical framework that connects visual culture, data creation, visual perception, cognition, machine learning processes, human-computer interaction, social practice and a practice-based framework for research-creation. The work is also informed by an approach to technoscience that uses a critical race, feminist, and decolonial lens. A necessary component of this framework is to prioritize equity through an emphasis on critical pedagogy, co-creation, and participatory art and design practice. The critical media art practices and processes of Receipts do not aim to replace identifying video as an important means of holding people accountable. Instead, we hope that the project can shape technical, social, cultural practices of testimony and listening and make collectivized community resistance resonate more deeply. We also reflect on how computer vision and artificial intelligence tools increasingly deployed as part of “smart city” infrastructures have been proposed as a means to address these issues in real time by predicting, identifying, and aggregating transgressions. Yet, in practice, these tools lack nuance, approximate and automate-out the importance of relationship building with communities, and have generally been used to identify patterns and build predictive surveillance that disproportionately disadvantages already discriminated-against groups. We hope that Receipts can serve as an example of how to engage the potentials of urban technology while also highlighting some of its pitfalls.

“It seems the women are taking over": Stereotyping around women in top-level leadership positions in Ghana's universities

abstract This article explores patterns of change in the advancement of academic women’s leadership at universities in Ghana. Referred to as the ‘glass ceiling’, women generally suffered great setbacks in their advancement in leadership positions, although recent events have led to the appointment and election of women into top-level leadership positions at universities. At a conference at the University of Ghana, organised by the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa in September 2022, one attendee commented that “It seems the women are taking over”, due to the number of women occupying top-level positions at the university. Existing literature on women’s leadership at the universities have not adequately explored the implications of the recent appointment of women vice-chancellors on the perception of women’s leadership and advancement of the careers of other women at universities. This article sets out to investigate the challenges women face in the advancement of their careers, and implications of the recent appointment of women into leadership positions. Using a feminist decolonial lens, it inductively analyses semi-structured interviews with key academic women as well as men in leadership positions at selected universities, backed with the authors’ experience as female academics, and employment records. It adds to knowledge on the gradual advancement of women to top leadership positions at universities.

Discourses on Global North and Global South Partnerships in Internationalization Strategies

This paper explores how international partnerships are conceptualized between core Anglophone, European and African universities. Internationalization strategies are examined from a decolonial lens to situate the findings within a global context that is entangled in the consequences of colonialism and ongoing coloniality that continue to perpetuate global inequities, including devaluing of indigenous and local knowledge. Findings suggest that institutions in the Global North still view Africa, and the Global South in general, from a deficit lens and in need of aid, knowledge and direction. Strategies from the Global North use terms like mentoring, development and poverty reduction when describing their partnerships in the Global South. In contrast, institutions from Africa highlight their desire to be knowledge producers and contribute to research excellence on a global level. Furthermore, institutions in all regions frame strategic international partnerships as those that will boost their reputation or image as they engage in a race for status and global rankings; however, strategies do not describe how they will approach such partnerships in a very uneven global playing field between the Global North and Global South. Finally, the Global South continues to be viewed as a source of international students and as such, partnerships pursued in Africa and the Global South by core-Anglo and European institutions focus on recruitment of students as one of the rationales or benefits of partnerships. Given these findings, international strategies for Global North-South partnerships continue to reproduce colonial hierarchies of privilege, preventing more equitable approaches to partnerships.