Decolonise, but from whence?: Interrogating knowledge production practices from within the Global South

Abstract

My doctoral work attempts to map how knowledge production practices in the Global North interact with and are encountered by epistemic and political projects in places beyond its geonational borders, particularly in India. The focus on geoepistemology is not to argue for a simplistic territorialisation of knowledge or for methodological nationalism, rather it is an entreaty to be more alert to the fraught journeys that produce and legitimise knowledges. Based on in-depth interviews with Indian doctoral scholars engaged in feminist knowledge production in universities in the US, and whose research fields are in India, this paper examines the implications of the recent repeated and insistent calls to decolonise epistemologies and methodologies as articulated from within the global North university. It asks what identities are privileged in the discourse of decolonisation and what does it occlude? How can the call to decolonisation be read alongside simultaneous claims of being legible within imagined ‘global’ contexts; what assumptions underlie these claims? It hopes to unpack the fraught relationship between the idea of decolonisation and South Asian elites – both within universities in the global North and therefore racialised, and elite academics within global South universities, who are very privileged in comparison to people inhabiting their immediate surrounding but not when compared to many colleagues in global North institutions.