Unsettling Eurocentrism In The Westernized University

The westernized university is a site where the production of knowledge is embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies that are posited as objective, disembodied and universal and in which non-Eurocentric knowledges, such as black and indigenous ones, are largely marginalized or dismissed. Consequently, it is an institution that produces racism, sexism and epistemic violence. While this is increasingly being challenged by student activists and some faculty, the westernized university continues to engage in diversity and internationalization initiatives that reproduce structural disadvantages and to work within neoliberal agendas that are incompatible with decolonization. This book draws on decolonial theory to explore the ways in which Eurocentrism in the westernized university is both reproduced and unsettled. It outlines some of the challenges that accompany the decolonization of teaching, learning, research and policy, as well as providing examples of successful decolonial moments and processes. It draws on examples from universities in Europe, New Zealand and the Americas. This book represents a highly timely contribution from both early career and established thinkers in the field. Its themes will be of interest to student activists and to academics and scholars who are seeking to decolonize their research and teaching. It constitutes a decolonizing intervention into the crisis in which the westernized university finds itself.

Exploring the nature of possible relationships between Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies, this volume examines various ways in which Integrational Linguistics can be used to support the decolonizing interests of Southern Epistemologies, particularly the lay-oriented nature of Integrational Linguistics that Southern Epistemologies find productive as a ‘positive counter-discourse.’ As both an anti-elitist and antiestablishment way of thinking, these chapters consider how Integrational Linguistics can be consistent with the decolonial aspirations of Southern Epistemologies. They argue that the relationship between Southern Epistemologies and Integrational Linguistics is complicated by the fact that, while Integrational Linguistics is critical of what it calls a segregationist view of language, i.e., ‘the language myth,’ Southern Epistemologies in language policy and planning and minority language movements find the language myth helpful in order to facilitate social transformation. And yet, both Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies are critical of approaches to multilingualism that are founded on notions of ‘named’ languages. They are also both critical of linguistics as a decontextualized, and institutionalized extension of ordinary metalinguistic practices, which at times influence the prejudices, preconceptions and ideologies of dominant western cultures. This book will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and students not only within the field of integrational linguistics, but also in other language and communication fields, in particular the dialogic, distributed, and ecological-enactive approaches, wherein integrational linguistics has been subjected to scrutiny and criticism.

This book investigates how monuments have been used in Africa as tools of oppression and dominance, from the colonial period up to the present day. The book asks what the decolonisation of historical monuments and geographies might entail and how this could contribute to the creation of a post-imperial world. In recent times, African movements to overthrow the symbols and monuments of the colonial era have gathered pace as a means of renaming, reclassifying, and reimagining colonial identities and spaces. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall in South Africa have sprung up around the world, connected by a history of Black life struggles, erasures, oppression, suppression, and the depression of Black biopolitics. This book provides an important multidisciplinary intervention in the discourse on monuments and memories, asking what they are, what they have been used to represent, and ultimately what they can reveal about past and present forms of pain and oppression. Drawing on insights from philosophy, historical sociology, politics, museum, and literary studies, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars with an interest in the decolonisation of global African history.

This volume investigates performance cultures as rich and dynamic environments of knowledge practice through which distinctive epistemologies are continuously (re)generated, cultivated and celebrated. Epistemologies are dynamic formations of rules, tools and procedures not only for understanding but also for doing knowledges. This volume deals in particular with epistemological challenges posed by practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. These challenges arise in artistic and academic contexts because of hierarchies between epistemologies. European colonialism worked determinedly, violently and often with devastating effects on instituting and sustaining a hegemony of modern Euro-American rules of knowing in many parts of the world. Therefore, Interweaving Epistemologies critically interrogates the (im)possibilities of interweaving epistemologies in artistic and academic contexts today. Writing from diverse geographical locations and knowledge cultures, the book’s contributors—philosophers and political scientists as well as practitioners and scholars of theater, performance and dance—investigate prevailing forms of epistemic ignorance and violence. They introduce key concepts and theories that enable critique of unequal power relations between epistemologies. Moreover, contributions explore historical cases of interweaving epistemologies and examine innovative present-day methods of working across and through epistemological divides in nonhegemonic, sustainable, creative and critical ways. Ideal for practitioners, students and researchers of theater, performance and dance, Interweaving Epistemologies emphasizes the urgent need to acknowledge, study and promote epistemological plurality and diversity in practices of performance-making as well as in scholarship on theater and performance around the globe today.

Written in an accessible language, this book is a fully updated and revised edition of Latin American Development, a text that provides a comprehensive introduction to Latin American development in the twenty-first century and is anchored in decolonial theory and other critical approaches. This new edition has been revised and updated in a way that takes into account recent changes in political leadership, the retreat of the Pink Tide, the Colombian peace accords, new forms of political and territorial mobilization, the intensification of extractivism, murders of environmental defenders, major disasters, and the new contours of feminist and anti-patriarchal struggles. It features new chapters on decolonial theory, Latin America in the world, disastrous development, Afrodescendant struggles, and the Latin American city. The book emphasizes political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions of development and considers key challenges facing the region and the diverse ways in which its people are responding, as well as providing analysis of the ways in which such challenges and responses can be theorized. It explores the region’s historical trajectories, the implementation and rejection of the neoliberal model, and the role played by diverse social movements. It is an indispensable resource for students and university lecturers and professors in development studies, Latin American studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and cultural studies. In addition, it provides an invaluable introduction to the region for journalists and development practitioners.

This book brings together voices from the Global South and Global North to think through what it means, in practice, to decolonise contemporary higher education. Occasionally, a theoretical concept arises in academic debate that cuts across individual disciplines. Such concepts – which may well have already been in use and debated for some time - become suddenly newly and increasingly important at a particular historical juncture. Right now, debates around decolonisation are on the rise globally, as we become increasingly aware that many of the old power imbalances brought into play by colonialism have not gone away in the present. The authors in this volume bring theories of decoloniality into conversation with the structural, cultural, institutional, relational and personal logics of curriculum, pedagogy and teaching practice. What is enabled, in practice, when academics set out to decolonize their teaching spaces? What commonalities and differences are there where academics set out to do so in universities across disparate political and geographical spaces? This book explores what is at stake when decolonial work is taken from the level of theory into actual practice. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics.

With human-induced environmental impacts disrupting human life in deeper ways and at a wider scale than anything previously experienced, this multidisciplinary book looks at the ways that current knowledge bases seem inadequate to help us deal with such realities. It offers a critical appraisal of the current knowledge infrastructure, including science, technology, innovation, education and informal knowledge systems.

This book presents a transdisciplinary and transnational challenge to the enduring coloniality of political concepts, discussing the need to decolonise both their theoretical constructions as well as their substantive translations into practices. Despite the acclaimed 20th century decolonisation waves, coloniality still remains in subtle and obvious practices, in visible and invisible mechanisms of power, in the privileging of certain knowledges and the dismissing of others. Decolonising Political Concepts critically addresses the role political concepts play in the continuing legacies of colonialism and ongoing coloniality. This book, building on postcolonial and decolonial thinkers and ideas, demonstrates how concepts may be used as oppressing political and epistemological tools. By presenting efforts to decolonise political concepts, the book signals the potential for genuinely postcolonial academic and political contexts. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and engaging with a wide array of geographical contexts, the chapters examine concepts such as agency, violence, freedom, or sovereignty. This book enables readers to critically engage with concepts used in political discourse and allows them to reflect on their impact and alternatives. It will appeal to graduate students and scholars from international relations, social sciences, or philosophy, as well as to socio-political actors engaged in decolonisation agendas.