Re-thinking decolonial concepts & practices: towards critical research and pedagogy

This article is grounded in my equal commitment to decolonising projects and academic freedom and makes four interventions in the current and ongoing efforts to decolonize knowledge production. The first is to interrogate and, call for re-conceptualising the taken-for-granted concepts that underpin decolonial movements. I argue that abstract, ways of thinking about the categories emerging from the notion of the ‘decolonial’ and ‘decolonisation’ are limited. I propose that it is meaningful to centre the principles of multiplicity and inclusion in conceptions and practices of a ‘decolonial’. The second critiques the expectation that all projects should be decolonial. I make a case for resisting a normative stance in the expectation that all academics must privilege the problematic of decoloniality in their work. The third is to demonstrate concretely how scholars can incorporate critical decolonial concepts into their everyday academic practices relating to research and education efforts. I caution that concepts – like ‘decolonial’ - and ‘decolonisation’ – and their dominant characterisations could themselves become co-opted by the very institutions and systems of oppression that these critique. This would ironically, undermine democratising impulses inherent in calls to decolonisation. Thus, the fourth intervention specifies how institutional attempts to appropriate decolonisation agendas can be resisted.