Paper short abstract:

In this paper four female PhD African researchers studying in the Netherlands grapple with constituting themselves as ‘expert’ or capable researchers in a context where the global economy of knowledge continues to feed from global coloniality. What does decolonising knowledge production mean?

Paper long abstract:

For starters is it a bad thing to be focusing on problems particularly given that this has been the trajectory for many African countries? Are African scholars able to think outside of the colonial experience when this history is indelibly printed on the collective memory? These questions draw from the widely criticized disproportionate inclination towards problems, or crisis-oriented research projects undergirding the African scholarship. This results from the pervasiveness of consultancy research characterizing the post-colonial ‘era of aid’ in Africa which aims to speak directly to policy. This no doubt hinders more critical, theoretical and curiosity driven research and consequently perpetuates the historical and contemporary asymmetries in knowledge production within the global economy as some scholars have aptly pointed out that ‘consultancy research' is inherently inferior to ‘basic anthropological research’. This in turn has resulted in the continued subordination of African scholars and their continued struggle in constituting themselves

as research ‘experts’ beyond their usually symbolic role as ‘local experts’. In this paper four female PhD researchers of African descent studying in the Netherlands grapple with these questions as they try to constitute themselves as ‘expert’ or capable researchers in a context where the global economy of knowledge continues to feed from global coloniality. The paper feeds into the current calls on decolonization of knowledge particularly within institutes of higher learning through calling to question the old power relations that continue to perpetuate

knowledge inequalities between global north and global south.