{"title":"African feminist epistemic communities and decoloniality","authors":"A. Okech","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2020.1810086","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Decolonization as a pathway to transforming higher education institutions in the United Kingdom has led to quick fixes such as ‘diversity’ hires and reviewing syllabi thus sidestepping the fundamental structural deficits that demand these efforts. The Eurocentricism that continues to shape knowledge production and transfer processes sits at the heart of demands for decolonization. Therefore, decolonization projects require an attentiveness to how power travels within universities as sites that are argued to be arbiters of knowledge production. This article examines how decolonization projects in universities in the United Kingdom and South Africa ignore the invisible labour and penalties that accompany this work by illustrating the wider constellations of gender and racialized power operating within them. I draw on the experiences of feminist academics to offer emancipatory teaching praxis emerging from African feminist epistemic communities to rethink decolonization projects.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"25","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical African Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2020.1810086","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 25
Abstract
Decolonization as a pathway to transforming higher education institutions in the United Kingdom has led to quick fixes such as ‘diversity’ hires and reviewing syllabi thus sidestepping the fundamental structural deficits that demand these efforts. The Eurocentricism that continues to shape knowledge production and transfer processes sits at the heart of demands for decolonization. Therefore, decolonization projects require an attentiveness to how power travels within universities as sites that are argued to be arbiters of knowledge production. This article examines how decolonization projects in universities in the United Kingdom and South Africa ignore the invisible labour and penalties that accompany this work by illustrating the wider constellations of gender and racialized power operating within them. I draw on the experiences of feminist academics to offer emancipatory teaching praxis emerging from African feminist epistemic communities to rethink decolonization projects.
期刊介绍:
Critical African Studies seeks to return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation within each of its constituent disciplines, including Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law and Economics. We offer authors a more flexible publishing platform than other journals, allowing them greater space to develop empirical discussions alongside theoretical and conceptual engagements. We aim to publish scholarly articles that offer both innovative empirical contributions, grounded in original fieldwork, and also innovative theoretical engagements. This speaks to our broader intention to promote the deployment of thorough empirical work for the purposes of sophisticated theoretical innovation. We invite contributions that meet the aims of the journal, including special issue proposals that offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into African Studies debates.