Epistemic Disobedience: Theorising Anti-Blackness, an Editorial Overview

Abstract

For most Afro-Black scholars, writing honestly, critically and authentically about Black and African experiences is a political act. Their resistance and what Tuck and Yang (2014) call a ‘refusal’ to be written for and about is an exercise in ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2009) or the expression of epistemic dignity. This disobedience is a form of reclaiming dignity that helps us to chart alternative paths that are de-linked from the colonial and white supremacist matrices of power that currently dominate Black anti-racism discussions and analyses. In this way, Afro-Black or Black-centred scholars are faced with the task of pushing the boundaries of knowledge in a direction that seeks to ‘re-position those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators’ (S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017, 4).

Decolonial, Indigenous and Southern scholars have long critiqued the hegemonic habits and practices that organise Western-centric knowledge systems (Chilisa 2011; Mignolo 2011; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Ndhlovu 2022; Ndhlovu and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024; S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). Central to these critiques is the insistence that knowledge production must move beyond the narrow epistemic boundaries established by colonial modernity, and instead ‘look at different beings who are capable of being knowledge producers’ (Makoni et al. 2024, 8). This requires a commitment to an ecology of knowledges and interknowledges, through which the work of re-membering, re-claiming and recovering the collective memory of formerly colonised peoples can be undertaken. Such work, as Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (2009) reminds us, cannot be carried out through the images, metaphors, symbols, languages, grammars, vocabularies and epistemic approaches of the coloniser.

Undisciplined scholarship calls us to disobey: to refuse, resist and invert the normative ‘common-sense’ assumptions that shape understandings of the role of academics in society. It invites academics, researchers and other knowledge producers to position themselves as ‘students of society’. The ‘students of society’ perspective requires researchers to learn in partnership with ‘others’ in the pursuit of solutions to complex societal challenges (Ndhlovu 2022). This orientation recognises that, while researchers hold considerable influence and privilege by virtue of their expertise and disciplinary affiliations, the knowledge they possess is not the ultimate panacea for the myriad problems confronting humanity across cultures, geographies and epistemic traditions. A ‘students of society’ approach understands solutions as emerging from within diverse social communities of practice, with academic expertise constituting only one part of a much larger ecology of knowledge. In practical terms, this approach is decolonial because it urges scholars to seek connections rather than separations, points of confluence, and opportunities for the transfer of methods and concepts across different knowledge traditions (interknowledges). This includes exchange not only among academic communities, but also between academic institutions and members of non-academic communities. It requires negotiation, communication, collaboration and sustained engagement with non-academic knowledge holders, or what we might call ‘living archives’, from positions of Ubuntu, mutual respect and equality. The African philosophy of ubuntu refers to the importance of mutual dependence and interconnections: that we are because we belong, and that our humanity is inextricably connected to the humanity of others.

This special issue is a provocation on how we might become more undisciplined, in the way we push back the re-scripting of neo-colonial habitus and hegemonic supremacy of colonial thinking (Ndhlovu 2018) that currently underpin mainstream anti-racism theorisations. It functions as a timestamp in Australian scholarship on anti-blackness, as one of the first special issues to have an Afrocentric focus. Collectively and individually, the seven articles stimulate critical dialogues about African-anti-black racism to challenge and unsettle ‘the god-gaze of the objective knower, refusing to draw conclusions about communities [and] choosing to write instead about power’ (Tuck and Yang 2014, 15).

The articles that constitute this special issue bear witness to the lives and experiences of Afro-Black scholars and provide a channel through which their diversified scholarship is produced and consumed. The contributors are confronting deeply held assumptions that have ‘often painted Black perspectives and knowledge as illegitimate within the white racial and spatial imaginary’ (Gilmore and Maika 2021, 1). Their goal is to promote dialectical conversations aimed at finding opportunities for critical reflexivity about Afro-Black epistemologies, systems of beliefs and ways of being, and how they contribute to disentangling webs of deceit spun by the trickster of coloniality and white supremacy (Ndhlovu 2024).

At both theoretical and practical levels, the collection of papers draws attention to the task of establishing what it means for Afro-Black scholars to ask and investigate their own research questions using their own methodologies and conceptual frames. The authors do this in several ways that foster alternative languages, vocabularies and grammars that we can use to advance the standing of marginalised knowledges on anti-racism that do exist in the intellectual labour of Afro-Black scholars but have historically been ignored. In this connection, the articles in this special issue, build upon and extend Tuck and Yang's (2014) notion of ‘refusal’, which is a summary term for countering the claims made by colonial approaches to knowledge production and their regimes of representation.

Whilst the emphasis of the special issue is dedicated to Afrocentric, Black-African knowledge, the contributors also explore intersections of Afro-blackness in a more global sense with issues of the colonial empire creation. The theoretical, empirical and critical arguments advanced across all seven papers present a compelling case for an undisciplined scholarly practice in pushing boundaries of antiracist thought. Read together in their totality, the papers demonstrate a commitment to the promotion of Afrocentric scholarship on ‘marginalised knowledge’ that is produced by Black people at a planetary level. The exercise of epistemic reflexivity and deep thinking about racialised onto-epistemic positions is evident in the theoretical arguments advanced. These include critiques of the social, economic and material implications of structures of the global system of white supremacy on Black people of African heritage; empirical analyses of how white supremacy interacts with various institutions to produce or reinforce visible and invisible experiences of racial indignity towards Black Africans; engaging the enactment of Black-African Anti-Blackness (BAAB) within communities of colour towards Black Africans; theorising how Black Africans refuse and resist the domination of white supremacy and colonialities of power, knowledge and being through music, love, relationships, art, family and other forms of self or communal agency; illustrating how institutions such as schools, hospitals, policing, law and academia have become interrogative sites for the enactment of anti-blackness, consciously or unconsciously; taking up ‘refusal theorisation’ as a stance of objection that interrogates power and privilege in the academy and in society at large; setting out alternative pathways for doing research by adopting a counter-discourse that emphasises the role and power of scholars speaking from Black-centred perspectives; and decolonising the Eurocentric canon in research paradigms by privileging case studies, biographies and personal reflections that centre Afro-Black voices and stories as valid and legitimate ways of disseminating knowledge.

This special issue brings together seven critical papers developed by Afro-Black scholars and their allies in Australia, Ireland, the UK and South Africa. The key contributions of these papers are summarised below.

Firstly, writing from within a Higher Education context in Australia, theorist and philosopher Mukandi (2026) writes about the prospects of ‘Black Philosophy in Australia’. He offers a strong theoretical intervention into the absence of African philosophy and Black philosophers within Australian philosophy departments, treating this absence not as an accident of disciplinary preference, merit, or intellectual fit, but as a symptom of philosophy's racialised conditions of possibility. The article examines three recurring responses to the question of Black absence in Australian philosophy: (i) claims of Black disinterest, (ii) appeals to meritocratic competition, and (iii) the suggestion that philosophy itself is structured in ways that exclude others. Mukandi critiques each response carefully, showing how benign explanations can reproduce deficit thinking and obscure the possibility for philosophy to confront its own racialised flaws. Drawing on thinkers such as Anita Allen, Patricia Williams, Jacques Derrida and Frantz Fanon, he challenges the discipline's claim to political neutrality and asks whether philosophy can account for the social and institutional arrangements that determine who is recognised as a philosopher. The article is especially powerful in its movement between conceptual analysis and lived experience, including reflections on students who leave philosophy because of its exclusionary rules of engagement and on the backlash faced by scholarship that names these exclusions.

Vaughan and Ravi's (2026) article on Navigating Whiteness in Australia's Anti-Racism Movement offers a critique of Australia's anti-racism movement, arguing that anti-racist work can reproduce the very racial hierarchies it seeks to challenge when it remains governed by whiteness. Using duoethnography, Critical Race Theory, and their lived experiences as women scholars of colour, the authors show how whiteness operates as a system of power within academic and activist spaces, shaping who is heard, who leads, and whose knowledge is treated as authoritative. The article highlights the persistence of systemic racism in Australia despite formal legal protections and reveals how anti-racism is often diluted through white saviourism, paternalism, symbolic diversity work and the positioning of racialised scholars as cultural brokers rather than decision-makers. The article exposes the contradictions of anti-racist spaces that rely on the labour, testimony and pain of people of colour while withholding meaningful power from them.

The article on Black Joy and Maroon Moves in an Academic Marronage by Magoi et al. (2026) examines how Afro-diasporic graduate students and supervisors cultivate spaces of resistance, care and possibility within predominantly white universities. Through the concepts of academic marronage and maroon moves, the authors show how Black students contend with anti-Black racism, racial battle fatigue, institutional neglect and the dominance of Eurocentric academic norms. The paper highlights the collective practices within these maroon spaces where students and supervisors foster culturally safe supervisory relationships, affirm Afrodiasporic epistemologies, and nurture experiences of joy in Higher Education. The article contributes to decolonial scholarship in higher education by demonstrating that transformation involves not only structural and curricular change, but also the cultivation of relationships and environments in which Black students can belong, think and flourish on their own terms.

In Experiences of Agency, Power and Epistemic Disobedience Among Black African International Doctoral Students, Adan et al. (2026) provide a timely and important account of the experiences of Black African female PhD students within UK universities. The authors describe how these students' intellectual contributions are frequently dismissed, constrained or made contingent upon compliance with dominant academic norms through everyday institutional practices. The paper argues that doctoral education is shaped by colonial histories, anti-Blackness and Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies, which gatekeep academic belonging, intellectual recognition and scholarly agency through supervisory relationships. Such relationships often position Western knowledge as the normative standard against which other epistemologies, theories, languages and ways of knowing are assessed. The paper argues that doctoral supervision must be understood as an epistemic, racialised and political relationship and maintains that, if universities are serious about decolonising knowledge, they must move beyond symbolic commitments and critically confront the supervisory cultures, assessment norms and institutional expectations that continue to marginalise and devalue non-Western knowledge systems.

In The Insistence of Blackness and the Persistence of Antiblackness in Ireland, Mullen (2026) makes a significant theoretical contribution by framing anti-Blackness as a generational force that produces racial boundaries across time. At the same time, it refuses to treat Blackness only as an imposed racial category. Instead, as Mullen shows, Blackness must be theorised as both product and poiêsis: shaped by racialisation, but also generative of resistance, relation and diasporic possibility. By foregrounding the emergence of Irish Black Studies, particularly at Trinity College Dublin, the paper challenges dominant Irish historiography and sociology for their erasure of Black presence, thought and experience.

In ‘Turkeys Cannot Vote for Christmas’: Why Epistemic Disobedience in an Anti-Black World Matters, Ndlovu (2026), theorises epistemic disobedience as a form of decolonial agency that refuses the authority of colonial knowledge systems. The article's main argument is that epistemic disobedience is not simply about critiquing colonial knowledge, but about repositioning oneself against the structures that use knowledge to sustain domination. In so doing, the article distinguishes between forms of agency that reproduce colonial power and those that interrupt it. A significant distinction is made between oppositional and propositional epistemic disobedience. Oppositional disobedience challenges colonial epistemologies but may not always provide alternatives, especially where epistemicide has damaged Indigenous and African knowledge systems. Propositional disobedience goes beyond critique by recovering, creating, and asserting alternative ways of knowing as a generative practice of liberation.

Finally, the article Racial Misrecognition and Micro-Practices That Undermine Dignity by Gatwiri and Kim (2026) develops a nuanced theorisation of racial indignity as a lived and structural condition affecting Black Africans in Australia. The article examines how racial misrecognition, manifested through dismissal, disrespect, silencing, erasure and inferiorisation, functions to diminish Black personhood. It provides critical vocabulary for naming the cumulative emotional, psychological and psychic consequences of racial misrecognition while demonstrating how everyday racialisation structures the conditions under which dignity is experienced within Australia's socio-political landscape. It argues that Australian institutions and public cultures have yet to adequately confront the histories and ongoing practices of anti-Blackness that underpin these conditions, and that dignity is an essential structuring framework for anti-racist praxis.

The collection of articles in this special issue—individually and combined—constitute a timely intervention into the well-trodden, yet still ongoing debates and conversations about the true purpose of the anti-racist and anti-blackness academic discourse. Proceeding from provocative and radical standpoints of ‘undisciplined scholarship’ and ‘epistemic disobedience’, the articles invite relevant scholarly communities into dialogic conversation, to engage in reflexive thought work about how best to advance anti-blackness theorisation in ways that demonstrate commitment to the pursuit of anti-colonial and decolonial counter-hegemonic values. A key cross-cutting theme of the special issue is one about how decolonizing scholarly practice cannot be expressed in terms of a universal academic language of what valid and legitimate knowledge production must look like in theory and practice. Across the seven articles, the importance of considering various loci of enunciation from which to do anti-blackness theorisation is advanced.

Kathomi Gatwiri: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing – review and editing. Finex Ndhlovu: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing – review and editing, writing – original draft, project administration.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.