Can We Decolonise the Academy from Within?

In this talk, Dr Zoe Marks (University of Edinburgh) examines the implications of complicity for researchers and educators engaged in oppressive knowledge systems in the context of efforts to decolonize African Studies. She asks if and how we, who partake in and are carved from partial and unequal knowledge hierarchies, can transform them in a way that is truly emancipatory.

Audre Lorde invokes the fundamental challenge for transforming systems of inequality and oppression when she observes “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. We know that power-keepers cannot emancipate those they have oppressed, but in academia we have also seen that change is difficult, if not impossible, without cooperation and collaboration from institutional powerbrokers. 

 

For further details, please see the source article here.