Thing 21: Towards Decolonising Research: Reflections as a white British woman researcher

Dr Amy Smail, University of Cambridge

Photo credit: Clay Banks on Unsplash

When it comes to decolonising research, I often draw on the words of the Argentinian scholar Walter Mignolo (2018). He writes that, decoloniality is about un-learning to re-learn. We must un-learn the dominant Euro-centric ways of knowledge, truth, and rationality to re-learn what exists outside of this. In doing so, we disrupt the colonial domination that still exists in our world, serving the white privilege and power of the Global North, and of course, the gatekeeping in our current academe. This enables us to re-world.

As a white, British, woman researcher and socialised in and through the Western episteme, I am not in the position to make any normative claims on how decolonising research should or should not be done in your context. If you self-identify as Black, Asian, dual-heritage, or ‘Indigenous’ to the Global South, of whom Campbell-Stephens (2020:1) describes as Global Majority peoples, I can only offer instead some reflections in contribution to the wider efforts to decolonise. These have come from my own learnings on seeking to enact decolonial praxis through the more radical, disruptive moments of my research as much as the mundane, everyday acts of researching and being a researcher.

Location

My first thought on decolonising research is about questioning location. What decolonial authors, like Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2017), Mignolo (2017), and Tuhiwai-Smith (2021) speak powerfully of is how the European episteme acts as the centre of all ways of knowing and being across the globe, subsequently entrenched throughout every stage of the research process. These authors alert us to how Eurocentric theories are only ever designed to be tested through Eurocentric methodologies and methods and which narrowly impose Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies onto how the data is then interpreted and analysed. And of course, further influences what we do with it afterwards.

There are many different ways in how we can re-think the role of location in our research and what this means practically. One way, for example, is to re-engage with Indigenous knowledges (in other words, knowledges that are not European/colonial). My experiences of researching in schools in several countries in the Global South have certainly taught me about the powerful role that methodology can play in either dismissing or re-instating local knowledges. As oral-based cultures and with storytelling part of everyday teaching, participatory approaches were potent in ensuring that the teachers were re-positioned not just as the ‘experts’ of their own social realities but the ‘theorists’ of their own knowledge. In one of my research projects, I learnt the inherent value in co-constructing a theoretical model with these teachers that helped capture their decolonial praxis in the classroom and further used to radically speak into national policy.

Irrespective of which discipline you might be in, our shared challenge, as academics, is the need for greater inclusion of those knowledges considered to be epistemically excluded. This might mean diversifying who you work with and from different locations, or seeking wider inter-disciplinary collaborations in your research. It might involve going after topics in your research that could expose and challenge established colonial norms and hierarchies. Out of this, I wonder what the world might look like if we all dare to question and re-think what is said to be ‘universal’? After all, with the wrong lens comes the wrong understanding.

Here are some questions to reflect on.... 

Q: How can you diversify the scholarship that frames your theory, literature review, or methodology, and who are writing about and speaking to knowledges that would be considered as epistemically excluded?

Q: Can you find ways to de-centre Eurocentric/white-centric methods to create space for alternative ontologies and epistemologies? Could this mean rethinking the types of methods that you are using to collect the data?

Time and ‘Progress’ 

My second thought on decolonising research is about challenging how we view ‘time’ which leads us to critically consider who defines ‘progress’ in our academic spaces. I have a concrete example to explain what I mean. While under-going peer review for one of my papers, I was surprised that one of the reviewers asked that I engaged more with contemporary theorists who write on decolonising/Indigenous modes of thinking. This was to replace the African philosophers (from the era of Independence) whom I had chosen. In our efforts to decolonise, I can’t help but see a paradox in this request, because the very problem with coloniality is that all ‘time,’ and thus what is seen as ‘progress’ (so somehow suggesting that our thinking has advanced), is that it is tied to Euro-modernity. The assumption is that, as time progresses, our research also progresses so we know more, including of what we know about decolonising. But I wonder what has been lost in time because of this dominant Eurocentric thinking.  

For each of us coming from our very different disciplines and locations, one way to disrupt this could be, for example, by looking back at our genealogies and histories of our disciplines and interrogating how colonial discourses have distorted whose voices are heard (and erased) and for what purpose? Ultimately, this means we can start to question better, whose knowledge counts? I also wonder how we can engage with radical (historical) thinkers who dared to enunciate non-white European existences, and, some of whom were already theorising what we would now call ‘decoloniality’ (while maybe not using the word directly). In my own research on Pan-Africanism, I have found historical archiving as a powerful way to re-learn some very radical but forgotten African thinkers (although I appreciate this isn’t the standard way of how we understand this method). I would suggest that the act of engaging with their thinking is a way of us now beginning to realise their decolonial imaginations. This is also important for disrupting the colonial tendency to universalise an ‘accepted’ narrative on decolonising which is basically characterised by Global North/Eurocentrism. Anything seen not to fit within this narrative is either questioned or rejected. Leon Moosavi (2020) has written a brilliant paper on this and is absolutely worth a read.

Here are some more questions...  

Q: What is the history of your academic discipline? How can you interrogate the colonial discourses that distort who and what is being written about?  

Q: What needs to be acknowledged in your writing about the historical context in which your theorists are writing from? 

• Were they entangled with, or even upheld imperial ideologies (I’m thinking predominantly about white European thinkers writing at the time of the European Colonial Empire who are still regarded as foundational to many of our disciplines)? 

• Or were they located, disruptive thinkers who wrote outside of the white European/colonial episteme? How did they view and see the world?

Reflexivity and Reciprocity 

My last thought on decolonising research is about reflexivity. Speaking again to the words of Mignolo, decolonising should evoke in us a continuous process, as researchers, of un-learning, learning, and re-learning. A starting point is to ask a question about our ‘self’ that should further prompt deep introspection of our identities. Identity is inherently complex and, of course, was used as a colonial site for oppression that I acknowledge is still a very real and personal struggle in our current academe. What the exercise can do (whether publicly or not) is help prime us to reflect on where coloniality might be hiding in our epistemological and ontological assumptions about the phenomenon that we are researching and how this might surface from the research questions we ask, what we read and cite, the methods we choose, through to what we are choosing to research.

Reflexivity should also prompt us to think about reciprocity, in terms of how we can actively engage with different people throughout our research (of the research project itself as much as the wider research culture in which we work) and gather their feedback and reflections as the research develops. This extends to the people we work with in our everyday research environments, whether in the laboratory or the office. As we develop as researchers, might this mean shifting access to opportunity (either stepping in or stepping out of the way)? From once working on a multi-country project (in UK, India and South Africa), I experienced first-hand the lasting impact of a Principal Investigator who worked to create space where the research term could continuously un-learn and re-learn from each other and who modelled how to work through the uncomfortable conversations on power and privilege, especially pertaining to gender and race.

With impact and engagement now being an imperative of our research, we have a prime opportunity to plan for reciprocity from the outset (with those we work with and with those who we assume will benefit from our research) and, as I have found, serves as a constant reminder to practise decolonising and, more crucially, enact it. 

Here are some final questions... 

Q: In what ways can you create spaces with those you work with to embed reflexivity and reciprocity, (and in commitment to un-learning for re-learning) in your everyday research environments?

Q: What opportunities could you create at different stages of your research to ask those whom you are seeking to support what change they seek, want, and why? 

Q: What opportunities can you create in your research for co-developing and co-producing your research, or maybe to partner with other community organisations, or industries outside of academia? 

In conclusion  

Despite its enormity, what makes decolonising research possible is that across our disciplines, our diverse identities and our global locations, we are all being trained to re-search. That is, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni explains, we are called, through decolonising, to re-think about re-search by ‘shifting the identity of its object so as to re-position those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators.’ It is also about enquiring as researchers into what we know and what we don’t know, and collectively expose and learn from the good, the bad and the ugly along the way. 

Suggested Readings. If you are unable to access these, please inform us! 

• Campbell-Stephens, R. (2020) Global Majority; Decolonising the language and Reframing the Conversation about Race.

• Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. US: Duke University Press.  

• Moosavi, L. (2020). The decolonial bandwagon and the dangers of intellectual decolonisation. International Review of Sociology.  30(2), 332-354.

• Tuhiwai-Smith, L (2021). Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Third Edition. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.  

Blogs from ‘The Conversation’ that are worth a read... 

• Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (2017) Decolonising research methodology must include undoing its dirty history

• Roy, D. R. (2018) Decolonising science. Time to end another imperial era

Amy is an academic within the field of Comparative and International Education. She has over twenty years’ experience of working and researching in international and UK-based educational policy and in schools, with a specialist focus on the role of pedagogies for facilitating Indigenous Knowledges and the teaching of the British Empire and its legacy in schools. Amy currently works at the Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Cambridge on enhancing the evaluation of teaching and learning.