To write or not to write? Reflections on decolonising knowledge production from the margins

Join us for another exciting seminar online or in person.

Researching about people’s lives is an exercise often met with suspicion due to how knowledge may be perceived as extractive and potentially exploitative. As African scholars interested in writing about the lived experiences of marginalised people, we are beleaguered amid calls for decolonising research epistemologies. What constitutes a decolonial approach of doing such studies? What struggles remain visible? Who are we to decide, and does this process not often betray who we are doing it for? If our answers to both these questions come from our positionality, could it not be that we are speaking for others, simply because some have spoken for them before us, in ways that we have decided were not humane? Today, we are compelled to return to questions of the agency of those we write about in negotiating their own lives in-between allegedly marginalising situations. In this seminar inspired by his forthcoming book Can Migration Studies be Decolonized? (Bristol University Press), Dr Kudakwashe Vanyoro comes into conversation with Dr Duduzile Ndlovu and Dr William Mpofu. He invites us to reflect on the idea of decolonising knowledge production from the margins and engage in necessary self criticism about limitations and drawbacks of a decolonial vocabulary and praxis, as we seek to locate ourselves in ongoing debates about what it means to write and think from the margins.

Add event to calendar