Decolonial Dreamers and Dead Elephants

Abstract

The 11 articles in this special themed issue examine the complexity of issues of power between individual researchers, between researchers and community organisations or higher education institutions, and between community organisations and institutions in relation to community-engaged research and scholarship. The articles uplift the pain and joy in community-engaged research, the harm and the benefits, the contradictions and tensions, and the true gifts and understanding gained in research with communities for the purpose of co-creating transformational change. We weave our own knowledge and experiences together with these individual articles as we seek ways to reimagine the future of community research and engagement. Specifically, we connect the near obliteration of African elephants and loss of Indigneous ways of knowing in Africa with the diverse communities, contexts and issues of power in community-engaged scholarship represented in this special volume. We, like the authors, hold a dream for the future of engaged scholarship that is more equitable, inclusive and morally just. We believe this dream is not only possible but achievable, as evidenced by the work of the authors in this volume. We present an African indigenous knowledge system, Ubuntu, whose principles, values and tenets simultaneously promote the conservation of the community as a whole and the harmonious existence of the individual within the community. We posit that the adaptation and adoption of this knowledge system within the scholarship and practice of community-university partnerships and community research relationships may enable the development of a mutuality and reciprocity that levels power hierarchies within the personal, organisational and societal arenas of community-university partnerships. We demonstrate that many of the cases described by contributors to this special volume resonate with this knowledge system, which itself has survived colonisation and its concomitant epistemicide. Together, the authors help paint a pathway for those who want to become decolonial dreamers (la paperson 2017) daring to reimagine the nature of power in research as we collectively find ways to dream bigger in order to uncover new and exciting possibilities for this work we call community-engaged scholarship.