When decolonial perspectives ground your research, they completely transform questions, methods, analyses, modes of representation, proposed interventions, and political commitments. A thread...
Decolonial perspectives transform research questions by centering longstanding power relations in analyses of contemporary challenges, including racial inequity, poverty, labor exploitation, misogyny, heteronormativity, transphobia, trauma, migration, & ecological instability.
A normative research question vs. one framed from a decolonial perspective: What are the causes of educational achievement gaps? vs. How can “achievement gaps” be understood in relation to modes of accumulation & dispossession mainstream schools were designed to facilitate?
Methodologically, decolonial perspectives challenge positivist approaches to data collection that legitimate colonially constituted categories, boundaries, modes of governance, ways of knowing, and societal hierarchies.
As compared to normative Western scholarly methodologies, approaches informed by decolonial perspectives include collaborating with members of colonially marginalized communities as co-theorists to analyze & respond to the historically constituted challenges they face.
Whereas normative analytical logics narrowly frame what counts as legitimate evidence to make particular kinds of claims, decolonial analyses question conceptions of truth that have parsed the world in service of toxic modes of accumulation & dispossession.
While an analysis that presumes the legitimacy of normative scientific truth might seek to use evidence to disprove racial inferiority, a decolonial approach rejects such debates, instead investing in imagining and enacting forms of racial redress and reparation.
Whereas normative scholarly work adheres to rigidly defined representational genres & is often restricted to paywalled journals, decolonial approaches seek to fashion new modes of representation & strategies/platforms for circulation that redefine & redistribute knowledge.
Canonical anthropological uses of “thick description” often result in exoticizing & pathologizing representations of race, gender, & class; decolonial approaches enact a politics of refusal, challenging the demand for ethnographic disclosure, particularly in Indigenous contexts.
Normative scholarship often proposes interventions that focus on modifying individual behaviors rather than transforming institutions; decolonial scholarship challenges the fundamental legitimacy of prevailing societal structures that have led to the misdiagnosis of problems.
Normative scholarship might propose interventions encouraging civic participation to strengthen US institutions in the face of perceived threats to democracy; decolonial scholarship seeks to reimagine governance because the US never was nor could ever be a legitimate democracy.
Normative scholarship often seeks to establish objective facts & eschews explicit political commitments, thereby explicitly committing to political reproduction; decolonial scholarship owns its politics & engages in knowledge production to imagine & enact sustainable worlds.
Normative scholarship might seek to document, analyze, & even revitalize Indigenous languages; decolonial scholarship engages in Indigenous language revitalization as part of broader political struggles over sovereignty, historical trauma, dispossession, & sustainable ecologies.
In short, whereas normative scholarship invites you to accept, reproduce, or slightly modify the existing world, decolonial scholarship insists that otherwise worlds have always existed & demands a radical reimagining of possible pasts, presents, & futures.
