Moves towards an anticolonial academy: Exploring post and decolonial epistemic options - ASG, Pufendorf IAS

The project is an Advanced Study Group at the Pufendorf Instituted of Advanced Studies, at Lund University.

Over the past few years, a transnational and transdisciplinary conversation has been taking place, on the relationship between academic work and the global history of colonialism. This ASG takes as its starting point the fact that the university in its modern form has been shaped by the Enlightenment philosophy of seventeenth century Europe. It therefore follows that the structures and disposition of academic work, ordinarily cater to a Eurocentric approach. This Eurocentrism is manifested in different forms within different disciplines.
Since the 1980s, the field of postcolonial studies has gained prominence within the Humanities and Social Sciences. This broadly stands for an approach that seeks to democratize the process of knowledge creation by centering actors and voices from marginal positions. More recently, a movement to ‘decolonize’ has gained force. This has expanded beyond particular disciplines and has targeted the larger systems and practices within academic fields.
In the context of these developments, this ASG seeks to collectively understand the nuances of postcolonial and decolonial thinking. It further aims to develop transdisciplinary collaborations that can transform teaching and research within Lund University. In keeping with this aim, the members of the ASG are drawn from three different faculties - Social Sciences, Humanities, and Juridicum. They represent a wide range of fields and disciplines including geography, gender studies, political ecology, history of religion, sociology of law, and area studies. The members are like-minded scholars with a political commitment towards creating an anti-colonial academy - i.e. working towards research and teaching practices that do not reproduce colonial modes of thinking and doing.