How do we make sure that our efforts to diversify knowledge production go beyond a window-dressing/Benetton operation? How can we move beyond merely adding some colour and other markers of ‘diversity’ to existing structures—a move that too neatly serves the neoliberal project embedded in our institutions, and their related unquenchable thirst for all that looks new, ‘shiny’ and exciting?
These are the questions that are asked - and answered - by Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa in her post, 'Understanding epistemic diversity: decoloniality as research strategy' on the International Institute of Social Studies' blog on Global Development and Social Justice, BLISS.
She highlights two important concerns:
- Epistemic diversification needs to explicitly speak to the issue of coloniality.
- We need to address the practical and institutional implications of anticolonial epistemic diversity.
In the rest of the post, Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa delves more deeply into these two issues.
About the author
Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is senior lecturer in European and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Her research centres on ways to decolonise thinking and practices of International Solidarity by recovering and reconnecting philosophies and enactments of dignity and self-determination in the postcolony: autonomous recovery in Somaliland, Agaciro in Rwanda and Black Power in the US. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (2018) and is associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics.
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Read the full post on the ISS blog - Understanding epistemic diversity: decoloniality as research strategy
