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We are a group of PhD researchers partially funded by the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures*. We came together to read, discuss, learn, and unlearn about coloniality in research and academia. This guide is an outcome of our joint efforts that we hope will help others embarking on a similar journey. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments provided by Andrea Jimenez and Judith Krauss that greatly improved this guide.
We are a team composed of white and brown women, from different disciplines and different geographical spaces – including colonising, settler, and colonised nations in Europe, South America, and Asia. We’ve experienced accessing privilege based on our ethnicity/class where we’re from, but not universally. This intersected with our gender, making us aware of power disparities within academia (and outside). This motivated us to learn more about histories behind HEI and research, and the impacts of colonialism. We also wanted to contribute to building a more equitable and diverse world, which took us down the course of learning about decoloniality and the actions we can take. We are aware of the lack of representation of certain groups in our team and are thus keen to receive additional feedback.
We have shared our work on this guide to several UK Higher Education institutes and presented a poster version of this guide at an internal conference. This work was also featured as part of UKRIO's webinar series: "Decolonised research culture and practice".
* At the time of writing in 2022.
Contributors to this guide (clockwise from upper left): Caterina, Suma, Maria, Ella, and Jocelyne
Caterina is a PhD researcher in the School of Health and Related Research. Her research studies the contributions of forest and forest-related policies to rural livelihoods in the Amazon.
Suma is a PhD researcher in the School of Biosciences from India. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the impacts of woodland creation under rewilding on carbon and livelihoods in the Peak District, UK.
Maria did her PhD in the School of Biosciences but often felt out of place in the department. Her research considers the ecological, economic and social aspects of sustainability in the natural rubber value chain, a tropical commodity crop that is often associated with deforestation, land dispossession of local communities, labour rights abuses, and farmers struggling to make a living. She often ponders the irony that she had come to the UK from a tropical country to study a tropical crop. She hopes to continue her career in conservation empowering communities.
Ella is a PhD researcher in the Department of Geography. Her research focuses on community environmentalism and post-capitalist politics and uses participatory methods.
Jocelyne is a PhD researcher in the School of Biosciences from Singapore. Her work examines the contributions of Indigenous Peoples to conservation policy across the global tropics. Although her research uses global maps that exclude the voices and perspectives of local communities, she is constantly aware of inequalities in power dynamics and historical discourses and tries to produce work that will be of use in empowering Indigenous communities.
A PhD researcher's struggle with coloniality in her research
A PhD researcher's struggle with coloniality in her research
Seeing as a lot of these discussions may come across as abstract and theoretical, we thought we might give a real life example from a Grantham Scholar who is trying to apply some of these ideas to her PhD career.
Maria, “almost done” PhD student (School of Biosciences):
Since the beginning of my PhD, I had wanted my PhD to be useful to real people, and not just a bunch of words sitting in the “academic cloud”. However, very early on I learned that it is quite difficult to break the mould of academia, and trying to implement critical social sciences in a Biosciences department was a struggle. I struggled to identify the “right” research questions that matched my skill-set, that would help me produce research that engaged the real world and real people, i.e. “make an impact”.
In my first year, my supervisors (all from the Global North) suggested that I conduct fieldwork in West Africa because there was a “research gap” there. I felt strongly that I was not the right person to do this, as I had zero knowledge of African culture, and I thought that it would make much more sense to fund an African student to do this work, which would also enable them to develop more locally grounded research capacities. Besides, there were ample research gaps in Southeast Asia, where I was from, and I expressed as much to my supervisors.
Thus, I pushed forward with plans to conduct social science oriented fieldwork in Malaysia, my home country. But even at the research design stage, already, I was struggling to apply participatory or co-production research methods, (1) because I hadn’t yet (or didn’t have time to) establish close relationships with my local partners, (2) because the research interests of sustainability academics are simply of little interest to local farmers and indigenous communities (or even NGOs), who have far more pressing issues to deal with. And then the pandemic happened so I ended up not following through with this fieldwork. I ended up writing my final PhD chapter on equity and inclusiveness in farmer engagement in a multi-stakeholder sustainability initiative, and I am glad to at least be able to bring an equity lens to part of my thesis.
Positionality: I am deeply aware that as a middle-class, ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia to parents who spoke English, I have enjoyed many privileges that indigenous, working class, and/or non-English speaking students have little access to. For example, I received scholarships to pursue higher education in the USA and UK. As a Grantham scholar, I have also enjoyed many privileges and opportunities which I am deeply grateful for. For example, I was able to attend COP26 in Glasgow as a delegate with all expenses covered. During COP26, I attended the Global Action for Climate Justice March, and joined other Malaysian students in the Indigenous Peoples bloc (which led the march). Ironically (and tellingly), there was not a single indigenous Malaysian in our group. Hence, in my future career, I would like to be able to help empower the indigenous and underprivileged communities to access more opportunities and define their own terms for ‘sustainable development’.
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