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Presentation short abstract:

Contemporary scientific practices and policies are marked by a complex and often subtle coloniality of knowledge/power and the decolonial debate is not immune to that. In this paper, I address the limits of the appropriations of decoloniality by Northern universities.

Presentation long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research on academic circulations between India and Europe in the present, I discuss the contemporary appropriations of decoloniality by Northern universities. To that end, my contribution to this debate will be structured in two parts:

(a) A reflection on the idea of coloniality and its most recent avatar, decoloniality. I propose a brief review of the concept's history, which is eminently Latin American, in order to demonstrate that the contemporary use of this concept, especially in Europe, reiterates extractivist, and therefore neo-colonial, intellectual practices - albeit through other names, ideologies and mechanisms of legitimation. This, I argue, is achieved, in part, through the obliteration of the intellectual history and political critique of the concept.

(b) Based as much on my research as on my own experiences between Brazil, Europe and India, but also the US. Rather than falling into some well-known trap, namely navel-gazing, I seek to render some 'ethnographic elements' of these complex dynamics to which I refer above. These examples explore: a mapping of epistemic legitimacy that conforms the possibilities of intellectual work according to the global origin of the researcher; scientific policies associated with a knowledge economy that have a local effect on the possibilities of intellectual work and recognition; editorial practices that function as gatekeepers of careers in a scientific world increasingly monopolised by a few large publishers in the North, etc.

Finally, I propose some possible horizons for a more symmetrical global academia interested in challenging its constitutive coloniality of knowledge/power.