Relations between Namibia and its former coloniser, Germany, are impacted by ongoing negotiations about reparations for a brutal and violent past. The 1904-8 genocide that decimated large parts of the indigenous population continues to cast a shadow in…
Category: Decolonising Knowledge
3 Challenges for a reparatory social science
Reflecting on work uncovering the colonial genealogies of foundational works in the social sciences, Gurminder K Bhambra argues for a reparatory social science and highlights three challenges that any reparatory project must face in order to be success…
Book Review: Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt
In Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries, editors Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt bring together contributors to explore the variety of creative initiatives undertaken by academic libraries and archives to open their do…
Book Review: Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory by Heather Love
In Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, Heather Love explores how queer theory was shaped by the Cold War-era world of deviance research. Presenting a careful, close reading of deviance studies, this book invites queer theorists to reconsider t…
We cannot take library collections at face value. We need to confront the biases that exist within those collections and, often, ourselves
Drawing on his chapter in the collection Narrative Expansions (edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt), LSE Library’s Academic Liaison and Collection Development Manager Kevin Wilson discusses the impact of decolonisation on collection development an…
Expanding the narrative in libraries and archives
Jess Crilly introduces the new collection Narrative Expansions (Facet Publishing), co-edited with Regina Everitt, which brings together contributors to document recent work to decolonise the library and archive. This blogpost originally appeared on LS…
We won’t get to a more equitable knowledge ecosystem if we don’t have more equitable ways to assess research and knowledge
The ways in which research quality and research impact are defined and measured are deeply embedded in practices and concepts derived from the Global North. Drawing on examples from the Global South, Jon Harle argues that a fundamental shift is require…
Book Review: Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
In Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick positions Black storytelling ‘as a way to hold on to the rebellious methodological work of sharing ideas in an unkind world’. Exploring how Black creatives have always used such interdisciplinary …
The Cycle of Decolonisation: A tool for applying anthropology to policy and practice and achieving social justice
Anthropology as a discipline is not always one that is closely associated with social policy and directly contributing to domestic policymaking. In this post, Suriyah Bi describes how through founding The Equality Act Review, she successfully united, r…
Book Review: Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation by Fadi A. Bardawil
In Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, Fadi A. Bardawil uncovers the archives of the Marxist Lebanese Left from the 1950s to the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, taking this history of revolutionary thought as a premise to explore the relation between theory and practice, the making of intellectuals and the … Continued