Short Abstract

This panel examines the evolving intersections between activism and academia in the Global South, addressing decolonial identity and knowledge production, local resistance, and critical pedagogy as frameworks for driving social transformation (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Mbembe, 2016; Santos, 2018).

Description

For decades, academia in the Global South has experienced intellectual and activist shifts in rethinking the university as a site of resistance, solidarity, and transformative learning (Arowosegbe, 2021). No doubt, postcolonial contexts have encouraged less academic freedom, lack of institutional autonomy and Western paradigms that marginalize indigenous knowledge productions (Folabit, Jita & Jita, 2025). However, Activist-scholars are challenging rising colonial legacies in research, curricula, institutional structures, inequality, authoritarianism and growth-oriented capitalist logics to rethink academic identities linked to Eurocentric knowledge systems (Racimo, Chertkovskaya, Rutt & Ejsing, 2025). In challenging knowledge systems, power imbalances and methodologies, the ideologies of Achille Mbembe (2016), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018), Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020) and Ekaterina Chertkovskaya (2025) are perceived as activist frameworks for epistemic justice and intellectual freedom. We therefore ask: How do these frameworks interrogate activist scholarship in feminist, environmental and decolonial studies? How do academic identities intersect and diverge with activism to nurture a sense of self? How are social movements and decolonial thoughts shaped to challenge hegemonic epistemologies? How does the academia function as an institution for ‘degrowth’ and sustainable future? This panel argues that intellectual and activist practices are complicated, characterized by shifts that reshape pedagogy, research and institutional politics. It further interrogates academia through activist praxis with multiple epistemologies via multidisciplinary modes of inquiry on decolonial orientation of scholarship. This panel seeks local inquiries carved out of critical reflexivity and collective agency—what Santo (2018) referred to as the coexistence of the “ecology of knowledges”.

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