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.

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