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- Convenors:
-
Markus Rudolf
(AAU)
Fekadu Adugna Tufa (Addis Ababa University)
Doudou Gueye (Uasz)
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- Chairs:
-
Doudou Gueye
(Uasz)
Richard Boateng (University of Education, Winneba)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel revisits a decade of decolonial discourse, exploring whether academic collaboration has expanded intellectual freedom or is increasingly constrained toward compliance-oriented practices that limit diverse epistemologies.
Long Abstract
More than a decade after calls to decolonize academia gained momentum, this panel examines whether institutional reforms and funding frameworks have produced genuine transformation—or merely rebranded existing hierarchies. While the decolonial turn has made collaboration with Global South scholars a normative expectation, control over funding, authorship, and epistemic legitimacy largely remains concentrated in the Global North.
This panel foregrounds perspectives often absent from these debates—students, activists, and researchers in the Global South who face structural barriers such as limited funding, visa restrictions, and precarious employment. Through preparatory workshops in Dakar, Accra, and Addis Ababa, their reflections on collaboration, authorship, paternalism, and academic autonomy will form the basis of the panel discussion at EASA.
Starting from these voices, we will jointly reflect on whether decolonization has truly expanded intellectual freedom or instead narrowed it within bureaucratic frameworks of inclusion. Are current models of “collaboration” fostering equitable exchange, reproducing new forms of dependency, or extending existing exploitation and rigid epistemic orthodoxies globally?
Responding to the conference theme—“what possibilities can we open up through our engagement”—this panel seeks to move beyond rhetorical commitment toward practical reconfiguration. By centering Global South experiences and shifting the geography of knowledge production, it asks whether decolonization can evolve into a genuinely transformative practice that expands alternative, emancipatory intellectual debate—or whether, as current trends indicate, it will be increasingly constrained toward outsourcing research into standardized, compliance-oriented forms that limit epistemic diversity and reinforce entrenched hierarchies.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing on the experience of Nigeria from 2003–2004 Polio boycott, the paper examines how local opposition to polio vaccination in Northern Nigeria was shaped by international medical skepticism triggered by statements made by Nigerian prominent religious figures, and global geopolitical events,
Paper long abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations(UN), and other international organizations play pivotal roles in addressing health challenges faced across Africa, including Nigeria. In Nigeria, local resistance during the Northern Nigeria polio vaccine boycott(2003-2004) was driven by multiple factors, such as religious manipulation, mistrust of Western Programs that vaccines were part of a foreign plot against Muslims, historical grievances, religious and cultural beliefs on local interpretations of health, fertility, and divine protection. T. This adversely affected the World Health Assembly, 1988 launched a campaign to eradicate polio by 2000. Drawing on the experience of Nigeria from 2003–2004 Polio boycott, the paper describes how the success of health interventions depends on the cooperation and engagement of local communities.
It examines how local opposition to polio vaccination in Northern Nigeria was shaped by perceptions of Western intrusion, American conspiracy , religious leadership, international political issues, and statements made by prominent religious figures, as well as global geopolitical events, such as the Iraq War, and how these perceptions influenced community reactions to international health interventions. The paper employed data from archival sources, news media mapping, oral history and documentary sources.
Results indicate that political manipulation led to some seeing vaccination campaigns as instruments used by the federal government or foreign powers to suppress Muslim communities in the North. However, through local volunteers, community-directed interventions, and culturally appropriate education, programs were able to evolve as a result of community involvement, which increased compliance and success.
Paper short abstract
Combat is neither a virtue nor a new normal but a call to transform untenable material realities. This conceptual paper expands on Authentic Dialogic Cultural Synthesis Decolonial Theorising as a theoretical framework for a beyond the decolonial turn South-North and North-South collaboration.
Paper long abstract
Authentic Dialogic cultural Synthesis Decolonial Theorising is a potential epistemic consciousness that can contribute towards a beyond decolonial turn collaborations that I gleaned reading the pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire and coloniality and Modernity/Rationality by Anibal Quijano as foundational texts. The aim of this library paper is to argue that epistemic combat is not a new normal but a strategy to level epistemic ground and to expand epistemic options. The first section of this paper is background to epistemic decolonisation which is pitched on the question, decolonising from what? The second section explores the idea of saving decoloniality from itself by unpacking the value of nomenclature, meta-narrative and discourse in decoloniality. Thirdly , the Freirean idea of authentic dialogic cultural synthesis and Animal Quijano's idea of decoloniality and compliance theorising are brought into a conversation to propose the Authentic Dialogical Cultural Synthesis Decolonial Theorising as a frame that can contribute to both the construction of other options of collaboration as well as to North-South mutual collaboration because worlds built on mutuality is better than ones built on difference. The last section proposes a model of dialogical cultural synthesis decolonial collaboration model. The conclusion will suggest possible ways forward in terms of Authentic Dialogic Cultural Synthesis Decolonial collaborations in a trans-epistemic geographies.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazilian universities, this paper examines the gap between inclusion policies and Indigenous students’ lived experiences, showing how academic decoloniality is enacted through struggle, affective knowledge, and epistemic resistance.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted with Indigenous students and academics in Brazilian universities to examine the tension between policies of inclusion and practices of resistance that shape Indigenous presence in higher education. While affirmative action and access policies have expanded Indigenous enrolment, academic spaces remain structured by the coloniality of knowledge, producing everyday forms of silencing, epistemic asymmetry, and conditional recognition.
Focusing on Indigenous students’ lived experiences, the paper shows how inclusion often operates through expectations of conformity to dominant academic norms. Indigenous knowledges are frequently accepted only as illustrative examples or cultural references, while Indigenous authorship and epistemic validity are marginalised. As Indigenous intellectuals such as Gersom Baniwa have argued, this dynamic allows Indigenous presence while limiting their authority as knowledge producers.
Against this backdrop, the paper argues that academic decoloniality is enacted less through institutional discourse than through resistance: luta, re-existência, and processes of territorialisation carried out by Indigenous students and scholars. These practices assert affective, spiritual, and embodied epistemologies, challenge epistemicide, and reconfigure academic spaces through collective and relational forms of presence.
By centring Indigenous experiences in Brazil, this paper contributes to debates on academic decoloniality by foregrounding resistance as a constitutive dimension of inclusion. It highlights the limits of inclusion when decoloniality is not grounded in lived experience and shows how Indigenous actors actively contest academic hierarchies while opening possibilities for pluri-epistemic futures within universities.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines the Northern Kenya Rangeland Carbon Project (NKRCP) in Northern Kenya. Applying the concept institutional bricolage, the article explain how carbon scheme in Kenya reflects a neo-colonial attributes rather than the intended benefit to the indigneous communities.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the contentious role of carbon offset in Northern Kenya, and the Northern Kenya Rangeland Carbon Project (NKRCP) operated by the Northern Rangeland Trust (NRT), a non-governmental organisation helping to manage 43 community-based conservancies (CBCs) in Northern and coastal Kenya. While proponents argue that carbon offset offers a framework for climate finance, facilitating a transition to green economies, critics raise concerns about the potential for neo-colonization and exacerbation of environmental injustices in Africa. Employing the concept of institutional bricolage, this study explores how implementing carbon offset projects intersects with local natural resource management practices and power dynamics. Through critical institutional analysis, we examine interviews and focus group discussions collected from 7 years of fieldwork experience on CBCs in Samburu and Isiolo Counties in Kenya and triangulate it with organisation reports and academic literature. We shed light on the complexities surrounding Northern Kenya's carbon offset schemes and call for a more nuanced understanding of their impact on pastoralist livelihoods and environmental sustainability.