Convenors: Tanja Dittfeld DittfeldT@ukzn.ac.za and Shauna Mottiar Mottiar@ukzn.ac.za
Connell (2020, p. 50) observed that ‘most theoretical texts in the social sciences are written in the global North, and most proceed on the assumption that this does not matter.’ This encapsulates what Posholi (2020) termed the ‘epistemic crisis’ of Eurocentrism, whereby Eurocentrism as an epistemological system produces ‘a persistent exclusion of marginalised subjects from contributing to collective epistemic resources for interpreting the world’ (Posholi, 2020, p. 296). The epistemic crisis also pervades most social movement scholarship, given its predominant focus on socio-political movements in Europe, North and South America (Eckert, 2017).
Research, according to Edward Said (1979, p. 2), is one mode of the many ‘institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles’ that supported the entrenchment of Eurocentrism and thus the epistemic oppression of the Other/ed. As one of the ‘modes’ of Eurocentrism, social science research/ers and their institutions are implicit and complicit in ‘epistemic violence.’ Decolonising research is a twofold project; a negative and a positive (Landström, 2024; Mitova, 2020; Pohlhaus, 2020; Posholi, 2020). Where the negative project involves critically exposing and eliminating the unreflective and latent Eurocentrism embedded within dominant knowledge production practices, the positive project entails proactively re-centering epistemic agency, authority, and resources of marginalised knowers and their knowledge systems in the advancement of knowledge (ibid.).
Panels in this stream will include:
Social Movement Praxis and Decoloniality
This panel invites submissions that explore the decolonial insurgency of Africa/ns’ social movements in the processes, and practices that disrupt, mobilise, propose, provoke, activate, and construct epistemic freedom for, by and with Africa/ns.
Decolonising Social Movement Research
This panel invites submissions that explore the praxis of decolonising methodologies to move against the extractivist ‘knowing-about’ to the reciprocal ‘knowing-with’ (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Santos, 2018b, p. 147; Smith, 2021). Following decolonial thinkers, this would include research that privileges African peoples and communities’ concerns and values
