Researchers from institutions of higher education who conduct studies in the Caribbean often rely on local knowledge and support to produce scientific publications that could inform resource management. However, such research remains largely inaccessible to local communities because of the proprietary nature of the current knowledge ecosystem in academia. This commentary proposes knowledge repatriation as a means of advancing decolonial research efforts within higher education. First, we highlight the intersecting features of epistemic and environmental (in)justice with examples from the Caribbean context and discuss how knowledge repatriation efforts can counter extant environmental and epistemological exploitative practices. Second, we identify how academic institutions are specially positioned to challenge traditional research practices and advance knowledge repatriation. Third, we explore one example of how knowledge repatriation can unfold within a Caribbean context and some related challenges.
This special issue examines the novel as a tool of political engagement through which women writers have challenged prevalent notions of the American West as masculine, anti-modern, and untouched. These pervasive master narratives present unique challenges to scholars attempting to uncover and recover women's writing that resists or undermines popular and pervasive notions of the American West. Even thirty years after Annette Kolodny's foundational study, The Land Before Her (1984), more recent work by Nina Baym, Krista Comer, Melody Graulich, Cathryn Halverson, and Victoria Lamont has shown there is considerable work to be done to account for women writers' engagement with the West as an imaginative and political space. And for good reason. The preoccupation with the American West as the frontier and promise of Anglo-American supremacy has given rise to the scholarly preoccupations of legitimacy and reinvention. Scholars seeking to study and recover literature that resists longstanding notions of the American West are therefore faced with the unique challenge of establishing the legitimacy of their subjects of study, as well as the expectation to "reinvent" the scholarly landscape. For example, Annette Kolodny, whose feminist and ecocritical interventions in western literary studies are now considered central to the field, faced critiques early in her career that, in Victoria Lamont's words, "dismissed her feminist work as 'faddish' and 'not really literature'" ("Big Books Wanted" 312). Critical works such as Kolodny's
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