“Our survival, our humanity, our worldview and language, our imagination and spirit, our very place in the world depends on our capacity to act for ourselves, to engage in the world and the actions of our colonizers, to face them head on.”
– Linda Tuhiwai Smith
The resources page is meant as a collection of relevant texts, ideas, and interventions.
This page collects concrete actions YOU can implement in your context and practice.
As a result of a Science Summit session on decolonizing science, the panelists came up with a number of activist guidelines that might be helpful to you:
Depending on who you are, your actions might of course look different. Mirroring the structure of the guidelines above, the following lists give suggestions for the personal, institutional and international levels. They have been synthesized from the many sources listed here. If you want to add more suggestions, please reach out here!
Ideas to implement an anti-colonial practice in your research group or as an individual:
- Interrogate your function within science
- who benefits from your research? in what way?
- who profits monetarily?
- whom do you communicate your findings to?
- who decides what you research?
- (how) can you make your research more participatory?
- how is the culture of collaboration? are your colleagues actually your rivals?
- Analyze who benefits – especially in North-South collaborations
- did you get permission from the keepers of the land?
- is everyone – people and researchers as well as the land and the more-than-human world –adequately cited and acknowledged?
- does your research leave the land and people in a better state than you found them in?
- Experiment in the classroom and incorporate student expertise
- how can you disrupt hierarchies to get closer to a student-teacher and teacher-students dynamic?
- how can you center the students curiosity, needs, and expertise and make yourself available to them?
- Make research more inclusive and participatory
- can you explain your work to a child?
- learn about storytelling, science communication, and oral traditions
- host or participate in events to communicate your findings to your local community
- alternatively, work with people who are good at communicating science
- Organize yourself in bigger groups and movements with similar goals
- Start dialogues about scientific colonialism and decolonization
- Do not be afraid!
Suggestions, which areas institutions can tackle:
While the individual level is very important, it is also crucial for the struggle to reach the institutional level if it is to stick around.
- Analyze who does research and for whom
- do private or public interests benefit equally?
- are the people in your institution representative of the wider population or are there disproportionate imbalances regarding class, gender, race, sexuality, dis/ability?
- Make places of learning safer and more welcoming, accessible spaces
- especially marginalized students often face uphill battles within learning institutions and drop out as a result. That is assuming they even had access in the first place.
- Preventing the “Leaky Pipeline” effect by focusing on everyone’s safety and being aware of their challenges, apart from the moral imperative, can also make research more innovative
- is your institution a place where people from all walks of life would feel comfortable visiting?
- Respect Indigenous communities and honor Indigenous practices
- many communities act as guardians of the knowledge in their area, they should be consulted in processes of research and publication
- on whose land is your institution currently situated?
- Refresh curricula to reflect local contexts
- many institutions around the world essentially teach the same curricula around the world, ignoring local differences
- especially in former colonies, re-indigenizing the curriculum can be a powerful antidote to beliefs around western supremacy
- Fund fundamental needs-based research, interdisciplinary work and diversify fields
- prevent researcher only being interested and versed in their own field of study by encouraging interdisciplinary work
- to the extent possible, orient research directions around the expressed needs of the public
- Increase inclusive and open access to knowledge
- translate academic texts to local languages
- translate academic language, encourage science communication
- enable open access
A broader perspective – what to do on a global level?
- Connect initiatives for decolonization
- Address colonial legacies via reparations and funding
- Pursue metrics other than publications and citations
- Focus more on South-South collaborations
- Focus more on fundamental research in North-South collaborations
- Accelerate the current move towards open access
- Journals, reviewers, and publishers: ensure licenses and permissions are obtained from all parties involved
- Challenge exclusionary hyper-nationalism
- Free movement of people and knowledge
Decolonize Science 