Addressing calls to decolonise the Academy, this studio puts the term ‘decolonisation’ in question. Might it promise more than it can deliver? We already live in a world so irrevocably shaped by colonialism that the reversal of de-colonisation seems hopeless. A more fruitful approach could lie in first acknowledging the effects of colonisation, and then seeking to establish more inclusive and caring ways of living. We suggest two terms that might replace or sit alongside ‘decolonisation’. These are ‘disenclosure’ and ‘worlding’. In this studio we will consider how these concepts, taken together, might help us devise a better, more equitable academy.
Description:
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has the following entries for the prefix ‘de’:
• 1a: do the opposite of deactivate; b: reverse of de-emphasis
• 2a: remove (a specified thing) from delouse; b: remove from (a specified thing) dethrone
• 3: reduce devalue
• 4: something derived from (a specified thing) decompound; derived from something (of a specified nature) denominative
• 5: get off (a specified thing) detrain
• 6: having a molecule characterized by the removal of one or more atoms (of a specified element) deoxy-
This studio will explore growing calls to decolonise the Academy, the university and Anthropology. While sympathetic to many of these calls, we suggest (by way of the interrogative) that the term decolonisation may promise more than it can deliver. We already live in a world that colonialism and its cousin, capitalism, have shaped not only through territorial conquest but in many other ways as well, leaving legacies of racial hierarchy, state sovereignty, land settlement and sedimented forms of governmentality. In such a world, ‘de’- colonisation in the sense of reversal seems a forlorn hope. A more fruitful way forward might be by first acknowledging that the contemporary world has indeed been irrevocably shaped by European colonisation, and then attempting to establish more equitable and less exclusionary principles by which all of us, within and beyond academia, could live in ways that are both inclusive and caring. ‘Decolonization’ would then entail recognising the historical legacies of colonization and reckoning with these legacies to create more liveable worlds. To this end, we suggest two other terms that might either replace or sit alongside ‘decolonisation’: the first is Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘disenclosure’ (in French: declosion du monde); the second Gayatri Spivak’s ‘worlding’, as subsequently taken up by Aihwa Ong. By ‘disenclosure’, Mbembe means the following:
‘[To] lift closures in such a way that what had been closed in can emerge and blossom. The question of disenclosure of the world – of belonging to the world, inhabitance of the world, or the conditions in which we make a world and constitute ourselves as inheritors of the world – is at the heart of anticolonial thought and decolonization.’
What Ong identifies as ‘worlding’ include
‘ambitious practices that creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations – that is, “worlds” – than what already exists in a given context. Worlding in this sense is linked to the idea of emergence, to the claims that global situations are always in formation. Worlding projects remap relationships of power at different scales and localities.’
In this studio we will put these two concepts together in order to ask how we (anthropologists) can generate forms of worlding and disenclosure which, even if they might not fully decolonise, at least overcome the more pernicious forms of exclusion, whether physical or epistemological, that hamper flourishing and cause harm. This is about lifting closures – that is, creating openings – and imagining and shaping alternatives. In thinking pragmatically about what colonisation and decolonisation might mean, and by identifying their manifestations on the ground, participants will be encouraged to think of pedagogical initiatives that might help open up to a better, more equitable academy.
What are the challenges that an indigenous teacher from South America faces in Austria?
Navigating between local and international institutions my question is should I do the colonizers reverse trip and decolonize my little Europe?
Paper long abstract:
I have been teaching Latin American social studies and cultures for five years through language courses at a school in Vienna. My personal mission, as an anthropologist and an indigenous person, has been to bring the anthropological perspective into the classroom. I lack a theory, but not much; the practice has transformed my classroom into an ethnographic field that raises more questions than answers, as my audience is made up of international students.
Faced with this, questions about who and the other, how do I know the other? what is knowledge, how the past of other peoples and their present problematize ideas of time, space and development? And what about my indigenous perspectives on science and Western knowledge? how to deal with the term race when it translates into the culture? Is it possible to decolonize young minds? Do they express racist perspectives? How to deal with this in the classroom?
Some things studied in geography can also be categorized under the natural sciences, while other aspects are strongly related to world religions and indigenous knowledge.
How do people think an indigenous culture stop and more general society begin?
Why does IP matter for other countries?
• If we have our own strong cultural traditions how are we different from indigenous peoples?
• How many generations should there be in a particular place for a population to be regarded
as indigenous?
• If members of a recognized indigenous group such as the Yanomami of Brazil/Venezuela move from their recognized homeland to a multicultural city, for how many generations could we regard their descendants as being indigenous? Am I still Indigenous?
To what extent can indigenous knowledge be applied to situations outside the environment in
which the people who develop that knowledge lives?
How might we evaluate a knowledge claim that is based on indigenous knowledge?
With reference to at least two ways of knowing, explain the difference between superstition and indigenous knowledge.
Cultural appropriation is a tricky concept, and although students and teachers are not really interested in the rightness and wrongness of museums, we are interested in the process of arriving at a judgment about them.
How should we define cultural appropriation without delegitimizing the institutions? What are the difficulties in applying the term ethically? Are certain styles and modes of behavior owned by specific cultural groups - and how do we ascertain this ownership?
Therefore, my contribution will be to bring my questions and perhaps my experience to the Studio, which specifically theories or pieces of literature.
This contribution explores East-West hierarchies since the fall of state socialism. It suggests that the early struggles of eastern European scholars show how institutional structures and global dynamics reproduce enclosures. A look at younger scholars shows the costs of producing worlded academia.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution seeks to extend the discussion from a focus on colonialism and the global south to an exploration of East-West hierarchies in academia since the fall of state socialism. Since the 1990s a number of short but poignant exchanges highlight hierarchies in knowledge production that continue to benefit scholars from the Anglophone world based at such institutions and disadvantage scholars 'at home' in the former state-socialist countries. The reasons for this are manifold including ideological othering, language, finances, and they affect in particular scholars who were already academics at the time of state-socialism's fall. However, while younger scholars seem less affected, their seeming 'success' is likely predicated on a willingness to be hypermobile as PhD students and graduates. As being able 'to make it' in academia seems dependent on a graduate education at an institution in the USA or UK, we need to ask whether the growing diversity of our scholarly community is coterminous with the production of an academic precariat.
This paper will explore what the early exclusion and struggles for recognition and value of eastern European scholars tells us about the institutional structures and global dynamics that reproduce enclosures. It will go on to begin interrogating what the seeming success of a younger group of scholars tells us about what it takes to produce a worlded academia and whether that is indeed the direction of travel of the discipline. It will end with some more positive considerations of the small steps we can take to begin to disenclose by bringing such debates into the classroom early on producing undergraduates that not only understand concepts and theoretical debates but also the material and institutional structures and dynamics of academic knowledge production.
In fieldwork research with university teachers in Rotterdam (NL) I see how whiteness and normalcy ‘recede from view’. Can we talk about decolonization if the colonial academy is not acknowledged?
Paper long abstract:
Can we talk about (de)colonization or disenclosure if that what is fixed is not acknowledged as such by those who engage with it? In other words: which closures are present in current academy that we want to lift in order for that what is present to blossom?
In my ethnographic research with higher education teachers in Rotterdam (NL) I see how whiteness and normalcy ‘recede from view’, despite good intentions and a wide range of efforts these teachers make the enhance inclusion in their institute. Everyday practices and discourses of teachers are intended, perceived, and as such, presented as equity enhancements. Yet, it seems broad conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion reproduce organizational inequalities, due to the absence of norm-thinking.
Using the experiences of university teachers to explore processes of in/visibilities, I would like to contribute to the conversation on decolonization, inclusion and racism in higher education. If disenclosure is about opening, creating space, and inviting new perspectives, then clarifying, indicating and explicating what becomes hidden from view, can be one way to encourage disenclosure in the academy.
'Decolonisation in practice' for indigenous scholars in Brazil is the process of recognition and validity of 'peripheral' epistemologies (such as 'indigenous') and of their bodies/territories in universities. Their presence is considered an epistemological rupture and active decolonisation.
Paper long abstract:
During the last two decades, Brazilian universities have witnessed an entry increase of indigenous and other minorities peripheral to the Academy. Their presence has raised debates about the coexistence of different knowledge regimes and the impacts that a dialogue between these regimes can have on the academic system and society. The debate leads to a reflection on possible changes in the dominant epistemology, teaching methodologies and curriculum structure. It also allows to (re)think and embrace indigenous theories within the academic system, open to all voices and ways of knowing.
Decolonisation in practice is a movement led by the collective of indigenous scholars. The purpose is to embrace the varieties of ways of knowing as part of the academic body of knowledge and think of these varieties as more than just examples that serve the work of Western scholars. The effort is to decentralise the knowledge produced (and how it is produced) in the 'centre' (Western academic system) that devalues 'peripheral' knowledge regimes to universities. Which means to decolonise the educational system, that is, rupture with 'colonialist epistemologies'. In the experience of indigenous academics, the rupture with 'colonialist epistemologies', means to live the decolonisation through their bodies, through the collective being. Decolonisation is more than an abstract concept, it is practice, it is what Brazilian indigenous academic and activist Célia Xakriabá calls 'sentimento de cura' (a 'sense of healing'). Decolonisation in practice for indigenous academics happens with the presence of their bodies in universities. They use the term 'University Indigenous Territory' to represent what happens when they go to university. Their collective bodies are an extension of their territories, their struggles, their identities and epistemologies in this environment. The university, by right, is also an indigenous territory.
The focus of this contribution will be precisely to expand the notion of decolonising the Academy beyond the parameters of Western academic vocabulary. We will try to contribute by highlighting what is being done in practice, by indigenous scholars subscribing to the process of decolonisation of bodies and minds.
How do the Arab revolutions give birth to alternative education initiatives? What’s the significance of political training in repressive contexts? How do social actors translate their “waiting for the revolution” into long-term practices of self- and social change?
Paper long abstract:
Al Sharq Academia is an online platform that offers a range of academic courses in social sciences and humanities in Arabic to enhance political action among civil and political activists in the Middle East. In addition, they work on developing long term strategies to consolidate the values of pluralism and justice among activists from the region. While its original idea was inspired by the events of the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the Academia started in 2017 in Istanbul, a city that hosts displaced populations after the ‘Arab Spring’.
The academia provides convenient, context-related content in Middle Eastern politics. It aims at opening virtual learning spaces and disseminating critical knowledge in Arabic. I explore the kinds of questions on the role of knowledge in social change that the academia staff struggle with. I show the debates they go through while discussing which topics to be presented in the academia and why, what's relevant and what's not.
This open discussion paper highlights the areas of focus and challenges in decolonising research, both in relation to the past (Archives & Collections) and the present (conducting systematic reviews) at the Library Services of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Paper long abstract:
This paper calls for an open discussion between anthropologists, librarians, and researchers over the shift in Library Services across the University of London towards projects associated with the "decolonizing the curriculum" national project in the UK. Traditional British organizations, such as the London School of Hygiene an Tropical Medicine, the British Museum & British Library, as well as the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK & Commonwealth, have been at the centre of this discussion as their historical past is directly associated with colonalism. This reflects upon the way Archives have been collected and catalogued in the past, as well as, in relation to the present and future research and the means of opening systematic research to the world. In this context, the paper will open/ contribute to the ongoing discussion between academics and those who work in administrative and library services, focusing on the challenges and limits in describing the shift of focus in Library Services towards processes of 'decolonisation,' 'disenclosure,' and 'worlding,' questioning and comparing their pragmatic value in relation to emerging research taking place at the LSHTM. The discussion paper investigates the hypothesis that although the educative role of Anthropology has been long discussed as central in relation to the engagement of anthropology with the world society, it is the way the past is catalogued, interpreted, and represented via archival material and other Library sources that form the national curriculum according to certain values and often unconscious biases. This methodological issue calls for a self-reflective manner in engaging and re-cataloguing these sources as a means of liberating worldly institutions from their historical association with both colonialism and/or nationalism. On the other hand, it is also the way by which systematic reviews are conducted by researchers via the use of Library sources and other resources that defines the focus of research, hence, equally demanding the openess of the focus of research via networking -beyond the exclusiveness of dominant English-speaking institutions and publishers. A further aspect of the paper will highlight the rapid changes taking place in Open Access and the challenges emerging from the publishing industry to researchers and their funders -with additional implications for anthropological research.
In this contribution I share some of the collaborative work that has led to working on proposals for 'A college for regenerative scholarship'
Paper long abstract:
I share here some of the work that resulted from a number of collaborations in which we asked ourselves in practice the following questions: How could anthropology be carried out and taught in a way that did not domesticate or subjugate different ways of being and knowing? How we could carry out scholarship in ways which led to flourishing of all sorts, human and ecological? How could such learning be shared with audiences who did not participate in the actual exchanges? How can we engage with print and other media in ways that make sense to different ways of knowing? Considering how Western notions of abstractable knowledge have led to what Savranski (2016) has described as 'an ethics of estrangement' underpinning most scholarship, how can we reimagine scholarship in which knowledge and study are embedded, accountable and enabling of communities, persons and kin and oddkin of all sorts?
In sum these questions incorporate a critique of the ongoing benefit universities gain from colonialism and neocoloniaslim, epistemological colonialism, exclusions of different ways of knowing of all sorts, which following Freire's pedagogy of liberation, is what generates otherness. The approach we took was to explore what possible ways of working already exist that could lead away from coloniality towards possible forms of regenerative scholarship.
The group of collaborators include: Joss Allen, Germain Meulemans, Anaïs Tondeur, Alan Vergnes, Marine Legrand, Yesenia Thibault-Picazo, Gey Pin Ang, Adriana Josipovic, Francesca Netto, Cinzia Cigna, Francesca Marin, Luca Rigon, Jan Peter Laurens Loovers, Gladys Alexie and GSCI, Cassis Kilian, Amanda Ravetz, Michaela Jones, Jayne Gosnall
This paper builds upon Amerindian epistemologies and develops a perspectival ethnography of industrial North-Western European skilled modes of engaging wild fish.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores Amerindian perspectivism as an ethnographic methodology grounded on animic premises: subject or object status are relative and relational, experience is intersubjective; the body is permeable, and its perspectives can be exchanged through tools and mimetic processes. Thus subjectivity is collectively constituted and the fundamental means of knowing, leading to acknowledge subjectivity in others. Documenting a perspectival exchange guided by Shetland fishers trawling for monkfish, the paper focuses on some possible dynamics and affective affordances involved in gutting processes. Gutting is a physically and emotionally taxing labour that involves brief but intimate encounters with responsive beings that may offer effective resistance, affecting fishers or damaging their own value as catch. It entails the possibility of developing an intimate knowledge of fish anatomy, ecology, and behaviour, as well as potentially awareness of fish suffering and fishiness, an empathic quality. The research questions assumptions about Western European ontologies and reveals how Shetland fishers maintain animic modes of learning and being in their understandings of the body and fish. The ethnography presents first-hand insights into 'relations of trust', which, albeit widely reported, continue to be dismissed as implausible. These relations and their dynamics are further attested through Shetlands háfwords and other language practices that establish synecdochical relations between fishers and fish, restricting violence and making it endurable. These insights problematise violence, illustrating the social skills of fishing and the political dynamics of predation, suggesting paths towards addressing cruelty.
Through this contribution, I intend to draw attention to the relation between colonially-rooted practices of extractivist research and the production of hermeneutic injustice in anthropology, and thereupon reflect on the decolonial visualities of lived experience and multiple temporalities.
Paper long abstract:
With increasing scholarship on mobility, the traditional understanding of a bounded and spatio-temporally restricted field ‘out there’ in anthropological research, along with the presumed sedentariness of the subject and the supposed mobility of the anthropologist, has been thoroughly challenged. But this has also been accompanied by the need to critically reexamine the idea of coevalness in research narratives, so as to instead harp on the existence of multiple temporalities that in turn direct our attention to questions of power, social invisibility and injustice. Rethinking the conventional idea of field in a spatial sense and also in an epistemological sense as a site of injustice, my contribution seeks to critically reflect on the incidence of extractivist research in anthropology concealed through ethnographic ‘encounters’ that not only carry with it the colonial proclivities of subject formation but also the notion of unexpected contact. The recognition of the exclusive tendencies of such extractivist research, also turn our attention to the connection between extractivism (concerning labour as well as knowledge formation) and its discursive reproduction that constitute practices of othering. Building on how the visualization of difference has been central to the project of colonial domination, knowledge production and the construction of the distanced subject, I suggest that an attempt to decolonize academic scholarship in general and anthropological research in particular, then requires a visualization of how such exclusivist and extractivist practices have resulted in and continue to contribute towards the production of hermeneutic injustice and social invisibility. This does not refer to mere pictorial representations of domination, but the visualization and epistemological recognition of injustice through an accentuation on lived experience and social exclusion. Recognizing the incidence of hermeneutic injustice in extractivist anthropological research through the problematic definition of the field and the distinction of the ‘subject’ of knowledge-production, also reveals how such exclusivist tendencies denies the existence of multiple temporalities and contributes to the social invisibility of the marginalized. Reflecting on the politics of meaning-making implicit in extractivist research/ 'encounters', I intend to highlight the importance of seeing, through the lens of the interlocutors, and interpreting their lived experiences as crucial in challenging colonial remnants of relative elitism in academia. Dwelling on the possibility of alternative decolonial pedagogic practices, I wish to draw attention to the need of recognizing field-based interactions between the researcher and the interlocutors as reflective of their interconnectedness, embeddedness and the acknowledgment of multiple temporalities, and consider its potential in being viewed as a practice similar to weaving rather than encounter.
Applying an approach of world anthropology to local debates and local struggles for human and cultural rights allows us, I argue, to contribute to a peace culture that relies on the expertise and the experience of local communities.
Paper long abstract:
Applying an approach of world anthropology to local debates and local struggles of human and cultural rights allows us, I argue, to contribute to a peaceful culture that relies on the expertise and the experience of local communities. World anthropology makes disadvantaged communities visible and uses the resources available in the Western world to support social movements in the Global South. Anthropological methods, especially Participatory Action Research, is used to change the game the academia works in theory, pedagogy, and practice and to include the local communities we work with in the project design and implementation. We should use the community experience and expertise to design our teaching materials. Global anthropology uses languages other than English.
World anthropology is primarily interested in developing non-Western, community-centered and gender-sensitive concepts. World anthropology explores non-Western epistemologies by employing world ethnography with communities on the move. World anthropology is not limited to participant observation or thick description but includes commitment, empathy, and social intervention. World anthropology applies anthropological concepts and ethnographic methods to the real world and uses them to contribute to the development of eco-peace systems.
References:
Horstmann, Alexander 2021. Non-Western Epistemology and Decolonizing Peace Education in World Anthropology, IUAES Congress, Coming of Age on Earth: Legacies and Next Generation Anthropology, March 9-14 2021.
Restrepo, Eduardo and Arturo Escobar 2005. Other Anthropology and Anthropology Otherwise. Steps to a World Anthropologies Framework. Critique of Anthropology, 25, 2: 99-129.
Ribeiro Lins, Gustavo and Arturo Escobar 2006 (eds.). World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations. Oxford & New York: Berg.
As the academy is made to grapple with mandates of inclusivity under decolonising compulsions, an underexplored space relates to pedagogical authority vis-à-vis the 'ethnic body' and non-ethnic spaces. In kind contestations of privileged (in)visibility unveil the embedded role of power
Elsayed Elsehamy Abdelhamid (The University of Manchester)
Short Abstract:
Addressing calls to decolonise the Academy, this studio puts the term ‘decolonisation’ in question. Might it promise more than it can deliver? We already live in a world so irrevocably shaped by colonialism that the reversal of de-colonisation seems hopeless. A more fruitful approach could lie in first acknowledging the effects of colonisation, and then seeking to establish more inclusive and caring ways of living. We suggest two terms that might replace or sit alongside ‘decolonisation’. These are ‘disenclosure’ and ‘worlding’. In this studio we will consider how these concepts, taken together, might help us devise a better, more equitable academy.
Description:
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has the following entries for the prefix ‘de’:
• 1a: do the opposite of deactivate; b: reverse of de-emphasis
• 2a: remove (a specified thing) from delouse; b: remove from (a specified thing) dethrone
• 3: reduce devalue
• 4: something derived from (a specified thing) decompound; derived from something (of a specified nature) denominative
• 5: get off (a specified thing) detrain
• 6: having a molecule characterized by the removal of one or more atoms (of a specified element) deoxy-
This studio will explore growing calls to decolonise the Academy, the university and Anthropology. While sympathetic to many of these calls, we suggest (by way of the interrogative) that the term decolonisation may promise more than it can deliver. We already live in a world that colonialism and its cousin, capitalism, have shaped not only through territorial conquest but in many other ways as well, leaving legacies of racial hierarchy, state sovereignty, land settlement and sedimented forms of governmentality. In such a world, ‘de’- colonisation in the sense of reversal seems a forlorn hope. A more fruitful way forward might be by first acknowledging that the contemporary world has indeed been irrevocably shaped by European colonisation, and then attempting to establish more equitable and less exclusionary principles by which all of us, within and beyond academia, could live in ways that are both inclusive and caring. ‘Decolonization’ would then entail recognising the historical legacies of colonization and reckoning with these legacies to create more liveable worlds. To this end, we suggest two other terms that might either replace or sit alongside ‘decolonisation’: the first is Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘disenclosure’ (in French: declosion du monde); the second Gayatri Spivak’s ‘worlding’, as subsequently taken up by Aihwa Ong. By ‘disenclosure’, Mbembe means the following:
‘[To] lift closures in such a way that what had been closed in can emerge and blossom. The question of disenclosure of the world – of belonging to the world, inhabitance of the world, or the conditions in which we make a world and constitute ourselves as inheritors of the world – is at the heart of anticolonial thought and decolonization.’
What Ong identifies as ‘worlding’ include
‘ambitious practices that creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations – that is, “worlds” – than what already exists in a given context. Worlding in this sense is linked to the idea of emergence, to the claims that global situations are always in formation. Worlding projects remap relationships of power at different scales and localities.’
In this studio we will put these two concepts together in order to ask how we (anthropologists) can generate forms of worlding and disenclosure which, even if they might not fully decolonise, at least overcome the more pernicious forms of exclusion, whether physical or epistemological, that hamper flourishing and cause harm. This is about lifting closures – that is, creating openings – and imagining and shaping alternatives. In thinking pragmatically about what colonisation and decolonisation might mean, and by identifying their manifestations on the ground, participants will be encouraged to think of pedagogical initiatives that might help open up to a better, more equitable academy.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Edson Krenak (Vienna University)
Anselma Gallinat (Newcastle University)
Sofie Smeets (Utrecht University)
Camila Ferreira Marinelli (University of St Andrews)
Elsayed Elsehamy Abdelhamid (The University of Manchester)
Michelangelo Paganopoulos (Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam)
Caroline Gatt (University of Graz)
César Enrique Giraldo Herrera (Leibniz-ZMT Centre for Marine Tropical Research)
Urmi Bhattacharyya (Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi)
Alexander Horstmann (University of Bielefeld)
Narmala Halstead (University of Sussex)