In Decolonization is not a metaphor, Tuck and Yang remind us that “decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools” (2012, p.1). If decolonization is an action that involves nothing short of returning land, why should we even talk about decolonizing or coloniality in the context of PhD research? (We discuss this in further detail here)
Adebisi (2020) argues that “this is where people confuse the passing away of political colonial structures with the permanence of the colonial logics that drove the process and continue to drive and structure our institutions and our world”. One way to understand this is through distinguishing between colonialism and coloniality.
Colonialism is a policy of control over people and areas, often through establishing colonies, with the aim of economic dominance (Lokot, 2021). While colonialism is an age-old phenomenon, in this guide we focus on the consequences of European colonialism in the ‘modern’ period, from the 16th century. Colonialism is underpinned by coloniality, conceptualised by Latin American thinkers, including Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo.
Coloniality functions through systems of racialised hierarchies, dominance of eurocentric knowledges, and cultural systems which naturalise colonialism, making it seem inevitable (See Maldonado-Torres (2016) for more in-depth explanations on coloniality and decoloniality).
Decolonisation involves reckoning with the world that colonialism created, which means reckoning with coloniality. This section argues that HEIs played a key role in creating the colonial world by providing the justification and tools for colonisation, and that they themselves were built by colonisation. As PhD students, we should understand the coloniality of knowledge production, in order to address the power dynamics apparent in our own research.
Universities are key sites where colonial knowledge is “produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised” (Bhambra et al., 2018, p.5). It was here that the justification for colonisation was generated, particularly through the development of theories of racism which provided the ethical and intellectual grounds for colonisation (Bhambra et al., 2018).
The racialisation of people and the construction of hierarchies of race were used to argue that Indigenous people lacked the knowledge/ability to do certain things like manage land, think, and create institutions (Lokot, 2021). Phrenology, for example, aimed to predict characteristics of people based on the shape of their skulls, and was used to assert the superiority of caucasian people (University of Bristol).
Equally, the representation of ‘Other’ places through academic writing and/or literature was a form of colonisation (Driver, 1992). Edward Said (1978) showed how imaginative geographies of the Orient, which compared the rational and mature ‘West’ against an irrational, abnormal and backwards ‘East’, didn’t just reflect colonial expansion but also inspired it.
Such racist knowledge construction justified ‘civilising missions’, which were argued to be necessary to spread Christianity and Enlightenment ideals and bring order to ‘uncivilised’ places (see Afagla (2016) for a clear explanation of colonial civilising missions, and this blog focusing on the experience of 19th century Africa). This was however, experienced as dispossession, due to the enforcement of law & concepts of private poverty (Jones, 2019). Racist ideals persisted beyond British rule in the Americas; Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in 1830 drew on theories of race to legitimise removal of Native Americans from their Indigenous lands.
The use of academic knowledge in colonisation raises important questions about how our work relates to, and represents, people and places today.
Beyond legitimising, teaching and research at universities further enabled colonialism. Colonists were trained in universities (see interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos), and researchers developed tools for colonisation across the disciplines. In geography for example, cartography facilitated colonisation and legitimised European colonial interests. Unmapped places (meaning unmapped by Europeans) were portrayed as uncivilised voids, and the act of mapping authorised and communicated colonial titles on land (Hill, 2020).
Anthropology, and in particular ethnographic methods, were used to produce detailed knowledge about Indigenous populations in order to control them (see statement by Penn Anthropology). Institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society providing information on the defence and management of the British Empire (Driver, 1992). Even the study of medicine was weaponised to support colonisation. Following his work on tackling the malaria that killed many colonists, Sir Ronald Ross said, “in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope” (Roy, 2018).
Adebisi (2020) thus reminds us that colonisation was “operationalised by and as an epistemic project... knowledge hierarchies and epistemicides formed a major mechanism by which colonisation was achieved – at home and abroad. Not a by-product”. This means that the destruction of knowledge and ways of knowing was a core tool of colonisation. This epistemic violence (the erasure of non-Eurocentric knowledges, epistemic meaning knowledge) continues through the way that knowledge was transferred after colonisation through language in education (wa Thiong'o, 1992), and certification (Sperlinger et al., 2018).
Universities were also in large part built in through colonisation. The knowledge that they produced enabled colonisers to extract resources in colonies and build huge wealth, which often flowed back to universities.
For example, ecological science/scientific forestry discredited local knowledge and dispossessed local communities of their livelihoods and economies. Instead, colonisers enforced colonial management of monocultural agro-industries such as sugar, rubber, cotton, opium, and tobacco (Trisos et al, 2021). Many British universities, such as the University of Bristol, were funded by philanthropists that amassed their wealth through slavery and plantations in the Caribbean or other colonies (Adebisi, 2019).
Colonists also ‘collected’ vast quantities of specimens and artefacts, which formed the basis of natural science and historical studies. The collections of just one explorer, Sir Hans Sloane, make up core collections of the British Museum and Natural History Museum (Das and Lowe, 2018), and could only have been acquired through the violence of colonisation. Therefore, the institutions that we operate in as PhD students are fundamentally shaped by colonialism.
This section has illustrated some of the ways in which HEIs are sites in which colonial knowledge is “produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised” (Bhambra et al., 2018, p.5), and showed why this is relevant to us as PhD students. But universities are not only implicated in the history of colonialism, coloniality continues to shape knowledge production today. The following section demonstrates how “the content of university knowledge remains principally governed by the West for the West” (Bhambra et al., 2018, p.5), and why an additive model focusing on diversity and representation isn’t enough. We need to approach knowledge in a new way.
“Diversity is a fact of life that cannot be promoted without explaining why it has been demoted.” (Adebisi, 2020).
What is the history of my discipline? What critiques of my discipline should I be aware of?
Is the underlying logic of colonialism in my discipline acknowledged in my thesis/outputs?
How have the methodologies that I use been structured by imperialism?
What colonial assumptions might be underpinning the theories that I utilise?
Where do the specimens or artefacts (for example texts, maps, specimens) that I work on come from and how were they acquired?