Decolonising the university from the Antipodes: Geographical thought and praxis

Abstract

How does geographical thought and praxis challenge intellectual frameworks and everyday practices to seed pluriversal imaginaries? What role can Antipodean geographers play in decolonising knowledge production and the university? This special section centres, invigorates, and refreshes scholarship that embodies fearlessness, interdependence, commitment to epistemic justice, and generosity nourished by collaborative ethnographic research with, not about, vulnerable, marginalised, and racialised bodies. Antipodean geographers committed to decolonising processes illuminate plural knowledge systems in crafting inclusive and just institutions. They argue for the devolution of Indigenous sovereignties to break colonial structures that are perpetuated even when there is an engagement with Indigenous practices (Muller, 2003; Muller et al., 2019; Searle & Muller, 2019). Instead of integrating Indigenous practices into “western” paradigms, there is a strong call to recognise and respect Indigenous knowledge systems and rights and commit to social and environmental justice (Howitt et al., 2012). Likewise, this special section emerged from a conviction that no genuine decolonial thought and praxis can be advanced without a commitment to the primacy of cognitive justice or southern knowledges that emerge through “struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (de Santos, 2008, 2018, p. 1). Indeed, de Santos (2018, p. 16) argues that it is necessary to “refound” the university so that university capitalism and university colonialism cease to be driving forces and a polyphonic university or pluriversity might begin to emerge. We identify the “western” university as the main obstacle to the real valuation of plural knowledge systems and strengthen emerging scholarship within geography that makes an urgent call for engagement with the process of decolonisation (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018; Hunt, 2014; Noxolo, 2017; Radcliffe, 2017; Tolia-Kelly, 2017). Geographers engage in this process of decolonisation in diverse ways. They reject the power of “neoliberal disciplining” (Springer, 2016, p. 286) and the symbolic violence of knowledge production, and question everyday practices that privilege institutional whiteness and centre Indigenous, Black, diasporic, and southern ways of thinking, learning, and doing research. Such scholarship challenges intellectual frameworks and everyday practices, but there has been only limited response to the challenge from geographers in the Antipodes, even though participatory collaborations with Indigenous peoples and racialised minorities might strengthen research agendas or hasten justice aspirations. This special section advances debates initiated in this journal that call for work to recentre relationships in interweaving teaching, research, and service (Wright et al., 2007); acknowledge reflexivity as key in cross-cultural pedagogical practices (Hodge & Lester, 2006); adopt Indigenist methodologies that challenge unethical practices and collaborations that focus on domination and extraction (Macdonald, 2017); and engage in unlearning, relearning, and humility (Nakamura, 2010). Furthermore, our contributions are complementary to debates raised in a special section in the journal from 2007 on Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and rights, which set the conditions for the decolonisation of geography through just, necessarily political, highly respectful interactions with Indigenous knowledge systems, where research agendas are driven by the priorities of Indigenous and marginalised groups (Johnson et al., 2007; Louis, 2007). Fifteen years later, the ground of geography continues to shift and the university has the potential to play an important role in the collective process of decolonisation that values Indigenous, minoritised, and southern theoretical knowledges. Our aim in this special section is to strengthen the process of decolonisation by centring the work of Antipodean geographers who slow down, engage in careful conceptual labour, tread risky ground, and question knowledge production-as-usual through reflexive praxis, despite inhabiting these spaces of vulnerability, rendered even more fragile by the COVID-19 pandemic. As we embark on this collective journey, which calls for affective labour and responsibility, we destabilise the hegemonic social order through affirmative thought and praxis committed to invigorating a just university, convinced that geography and geographers are well placed to advance this agenda. Academic work can and should be both the inspiration and the means for radical thought and praxis (Underhill-Sem, 2017). Western and “westernised” universities are identified as institutions where colonial legacies of knowledge production and racialisation prevail but are also sites where struggles for justice unfold (Castro-Gómez, 2007; de Santos, 2007; Fraser, 2019; Lander, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2016). The decolonial epistemic turn that emerged in the 1990s in Abya Yala (the Americas) followed from work by Quijano (2010), who illuminated the coloniality of being, power, and knowledge (Castro-Gómez, 2007). Mignolo and Walsh (2018) trace the emergence of coloniality to the rhetoric of modernity extant from the sixteenth century and that subsequently has been resisted by decolonial thinkers including Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Sun Yat Sen, and Mahatma Gandhi, all of whom inhabited the many Souths of the world. In British India, dissatisfaction with western educational institutions that regulated ways of being, thinking, doing, and living were resisted through new imaginaries that moved beyond the critique of institutional structures and practices. In the early 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore, the first scholar from the Global South to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, established Santiniketan (Abode of Peace) and Viswa Bharati University in rural Bengal to embody western and eastern philosophies of connection and interdependence with living worlds (Fraser, 2019). In our reading, this focus on the coexistence of multiple worlds resonates with vincularidad—a form of relationality highlighted by Andean Indigenous thinkers that illuminate pluriversal worlds. It also inspires and gives us courage in our struggle to decolonise the university by thinking, feeling, and acting otherwise. It reminds us that decolonising praxis demands reflexivity to question assumptions that scholars and geographers like us hold in our privileged position as producers of authoritative knowledge committed to epistemic justice. The risks are ignoring or displacing the knowledge produced in the pluriversal worlds we do not inhabit and finding that we cannot think–feel [sentipensar] and co-reason with [corazonar] (Cepeda, 2017; Escobar, 2014; Fals Borda, 2009). Both ontological perspectives—beyond reason and emotion—centre on embodied knowledges emerging from relationships that produce that pluriverse. Challenging epistemic injustice is thus both a moral commitment and a recognition of our partial understanding of the worlds we co-produce (de Santos, 2007, 2016). In this context, we are cautious of rather limited understandings of epistemic decolonisation that involve collaboration with Indigenous and other excluded “epistemic agents.” On the contrary, we join Ishizawa (2016) in his call to suspend our preconceived cognitive authority, learn to unlearn, and reflect with, and not about, other epistemologies in a true dialogue of knowledges [diálogo de saberes] (Delgado & Rist, 2016). Likewise, we keep in mind warnings that we should be more than informants who enrich geographical research with the voice of the Other but who might not take risks in the academy in committing to its emancipatory nature because we need to hold on to our paid jobs (Absolon & Dion, 2017; Bawaka Country et al., 2019; Spivak, 1994). As the contributions in this special section emphasise, decolonisation of the university demands radical reform from within. Rather than develop an oppositional consciousness or co-opt decolonisation as an academic buzzword that highlights our scholarly prowess (Lobo, 2020), our aim as geographers is to mutate this concept in ways that proliferate imaginaries of the university as a space of being and becoming otherwise. The contributions challenge unjust institutional frameworks, apolitical commitments to diversity, and brutal academic practices in societies with White imperial histories. This work is urgent given scholarship and diverse modes of activism in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, South Africa and, more recently, Australia and India, that call for accountability, equality, academic freedom, responsibility, and justice (Ahmed, 2012; Bhambra et al., 2018; Connell, 2019; de Santos, 2016; Harney & Moten, 2013; Mbembe, 2016; Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Oishi, 2017). Geography and the voices of geographers are just emerging within such intellectual and everyday activism by feminist, Indigenous, Southern, and Black scholars, which centres a politics of conviviality and solidarity (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018; Hunt, 2014; Noxolo, 2017; Radcliffe, 2017; Tolia-Kelly, 2017). In this issue, we strengthen those voices in ways propelled by research in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ecuador, and India. We include articles that were presented at a session titled “Decolonising the University” organised at the Institute of Australian Geographers Annual Conference in Hobart in 2019. We stay attuned, however, to the success of the neoliberal disciplining project that restricts critical thought in institutions in lock down during the pandemic. Faced with increased casualisation and precarity, demands to produce and “extract” marketable knowledge, persistent competition, and the erosion of academic solidarity, scholars find themselves adopting an academic-entrepreneurial role in the contemporary university (Pascoe et al., 2020). In these spaces of vulnerability, little room remains for more circumspect forms of academic labour that question the nature of knowledge production, the marginalisation of non-western/non-hegemonic ontologies and epistemologies, and the detached nature of service and engagement (Benneworth, 2013). Thus, no transition toward a more just university can ignore or avoid challenging the institutional structures that constrain intellectual freedom and the production of knowledge for and with the members of society. In the articles that follow, Indigenous scholar Vanessa Cavanagh, a Bundjalung and Wonnarua Aboriginal woman, works with White settler academics, Laura Hammersley and Michael Adams, to explore the lived experience of intercultural doctoral supervision. Their moving stories highlight respect, discomfort, trust, and intercultural learning as geographers and open up safe and culturally appropriate places for Indigenous students. Rather than focus on Indigenising the curriculum, which places a burden on low ranked and poorly paid Indigenous scholars, the authors take the collective responsibility to unsettle institutionalised racism and colonial pressures within the university. Haripriya Rangan then draws on the radical decolonial vision of Frantz Fanon to embark on a comparative study of universities underpinned by liberal education in different colonial geohistorical contexts in the Global North and South. Her focus is on South Africa, India, and Australia, and she explores the economy of knowledge production in higher education, the idea of liberal education in shaping modern universities, and the mobilisation of ideas in postcolonial moments since the 1960s. While Rangan illuminates how universities resist liberal conservatism, neoliberalism, and majoritarian nationalisms, she argues for a further push so that governments and corporate university administrators strengthen their commitment to social equity and to knowledge production for public benefit and academic freedom. Richie Howitt, a non-Indigenous person, Leanne Holt, a descendant of the Worimi and Biripi peoples, and Michelle Locke, a Boorooberongal woman of the Dharug nation, then illuminate the ambiguous legacy of Governor Lachlan Macquarie that is mobilised to promote Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. They explore the challenges to and emerging responses involved in decolonising Macquarie University, a site of White settler power and privilege that rendered Dharug peoples invisible and attempted to erase their cultural landscapes. Rather than call for some tokenistic renaming of the university, the authors invite engagement in uncomfortable reflections, actions, and partnerships with Dharug and Indigenous peoples to bring about transformative change. Recognising the institutional challenges of weaving together Indigenous and western epistemologies, Sharon McLennan, Margaret Forster, and Rand Hazou exemplify a decolonial approach to curricula and pedagogy in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on their experiences of dealing with the messiness of decolonial pedagogy, they highlight how collective reflection, action, and commitment to Māori perspectives can reframe neoliberal understandings of rights and responsibilities to better engage with critical global citizenship education. In work based in Tasmania, Australia, the late Stewart Williams, Robert Anders, Roger Vreugdenhil, and Jason Byrne reflect on pathways to Aboriginalise the geography curriculum that might transcend a dark history and cultural politics of extinction. They argue that an ongoing process of reconciliation between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal peoples needs to be at the core of this decolonising approach in Australia and elsewhere. As result of their process of negotiating decolonising alternatives, the authors centre on several key principles: a commitment to integrate Aboriginal knowledge and practices in geography and planning curricula, thus avoiding (mis)appropriation, learning to live lawfully on Country, and unleashing the potential of unlearning and transformative change in communities of practice. With a similar focus on engaging with plural knowledges in epistemic communities, Denisse Rodríguez calls for a reconceptualisation of university extension programs—service and engagement—as spaces capable of promoting interontological dialogues and transdisciplinary knowledge co-production with “situated experts” outside academia. Rodríguez argues that such collaborations are important to reveal the mosaic epistemologies rendered invisible by “westernised” universities in Latin American. Michele Lobo, an Australian of Indian heritage, then focuses on the possibility of socially just and diverse futures in the neoliberal Australian university in ways that go beyond the celebration of diversity. Inspired by ethnographic research with ethnic/ethno-religious minority migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Paris and Detroit, she focuses on breathing spaces of fearlessness and generosity. These everyday spaces ventilate the White settler university and are crucial in navigating institutional racism when academic bodies of colour are overlooked, silenced and “moved on” if they seek to be more than “quiet achievers” (Oishi, 2017, p. 46) or institutional ornaments (Samatar, 2015). Communities of practice, epistemic communities, transdisciplinary encounters, and Indigenisation of curricula are increasingly becoming decolonising practices by which to contest knowledge hierarchies, encourage dialogues among different cosmovisions, develop socially relevant and emancipatory research agendas, and democratise knowledge production (Klenk & Meehan, 2017; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2007; Rist et al., 2004). Together, the contributions in this special section centre geography in the thought and praxis related to decolonising the university and challenge the epistemic injustice reproduced in them (de Santos, 2007, 2016). The special section centres, invigorates, and refreshes the discipline of geography in ways that seek to advance decolonial thinking by inviting thinking, feeling, and acting otherwise—it is a struggle! Michele Lobo, the lead for this special section, senses this feeling of struggle as a first-generation ethnic-minority migrant academic of Indian heritage. But the force of the struggle also surfaces as she listens to the lecture on contemporary African geographies and defiant scholarship by Daley and Murrey (2021), sponsored by the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference. Inspired by Walter Mignolo’s concept of epistemic disobedience, Daley and Murrey emphasise the need for a defiant approach in the crucial, collective work of decolonising knowledge and dismantling the colonial university. This defiant work is dangerous, difficult, and risky because it requires decoupling from and unlearning knowledges that sustain employment in the “western” university. Defiance is perhaps easier for those who easily inhabit or are “chosen” to occupy the safe zone of Anglo-White privilege where jobs are negotiated and careers are often fast-tracked. Among Indigenous peoples, this defiance through expressions of outrage might be welcomed given the guilt and anxiety that linger in the shadows of the university. Geographers know these safe zones and other shadow zones and nourish collective responsibility to foster the former and banish the latter, a collective motivation evident in the contributions to this special section. Another dimension of struggle is experienced by Denisse Rodríguez, an Afro-Ecuadorian woman and co-editor of the special section. By teaching geography subjects in the Antipodes using a decolonial approach, she has found ways to deal with her own internal and intellectual colonisation (González Casanova, 2006; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018, 2020; Rodríguez, 2021). Nevertheless, there is a constant struggle to find in her mestizaje [ethnic and cultural mixing] the strength perpetually denied by a Latin American education system, which aspires to be “western” and negates the true richness and potential of plural Indigenous epistemologies. The contributions in this special section focus on the when, how, and where of institutional and everyday practices of knowledge production in the Antipodes and beyond. First, the authors question colonial legacies that live on and are a struggle to erase in universities in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and Latin America, reflecting on concrete pathways to transcend them. Second, they highlight how Geography opens up moments of living with and learning with Country, kin, custom, and lore that challenge academics as the only producers of legitimate knowledge. Third, they call for scholarship that embodies fearlessness, interdependence, and generosity nourished by collaborative, ethnographic research with, not about, vulnerable, marginalised, and racialised bodies. Fourth, they question the internationalisation of universities, focus on geohistorical moments of resistance, and call for stronger commitments to social equity and justice. And fifth, they challenge tokenistic apolitical moments of diversity in their own teaching and research practice, which is founded on reflexivity, action, intercultural learning, and solidarity. This plural movement of thought and praxis from Antipodean geography enables decolonial geographies to emerge and breathe from the subterranean commons where they collectively struggle to seed pluriversal imaginaries. We would like to thank the contributors to this special section—you materialise our collective dreams to decolonise the university. We appreciate the careful work and guidance provided by Editor-in-Chief Elaine Stratford and the team at Geographical Research. None.