Decolonising the Humanities: A Smash-and-Grab Approach

Chasi, Colin

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70443-2_3

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The decolonial epistemic turn against engineered racial bigotry straddles all fields of study (Zeleza 1997;Ntarangwi et al 2005;Willems 2014;Mutsvairo 2018;Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018;Chasi 2018;Chasi and Rodny-Gumede 2018;Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). Quite often intelligentsia of African descent reclaim their humanity through validating and legitimising the knowledge systems of their own communities and people.…”

Section: Critical Scholarship As Public Duty Against Racismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting Epistemic Vigilance Against Racist Attacks on Africans on Mediatised Permanent Education Sites

Mhiripiri¹

2021

ASR

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This paper analyses how tropes of racism against people of African descent manifest in public texts (permanent education sites) of different genres and forms. The selected permanent education sites include the mediatisation of the public and private lives of the British royal family’s Prince Harry and Meghan’s break away from royal duties, the FIFA World Cup and the English Premier League, the Chinese Museum in Hubei, and other public incidences that provoked racial controversies. These activities, controversies and exhibitions are vehicles through which racism is reproduced as part of the historical global capitalist system. This is the ubiquitous public pedagogy of permanent education. The porous but multifarious dominant sitesdiffuse diverse forms of pedagogical address to put into play a limited range of identities, ideologies, and subject positions that both reinforce neoliberal social relations and undermine the capacity for democratic politics. Critical scholarship has a normative duty to be mindful of all cultural activities and productions, their processes of signification, and implications for humanization and democracy. After conveniently selecting specific mass mediated permanent education sites, this paper theorises and historicises the colonial foundations of racism and the European construction of an imagined racial hierarchy. It then problematises China as an emergent global economic powerhouse located in this gradation, and its contemporary self- identities – both official and public – given notable allegations of incidences of Chinese racism against people of African descent. Popular sites of mediation are not studied for their own sake, but to develop a radical pan-African scholarship strategically positioned to influence public education sites for social transformation and justice. Such vigilant critical decolonial scholarship makes necessary com onse to insidious sites ocultural education.

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Section: Critical Scholarship As Public Duty Against Racismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting Epistemic Vigilance Against Racist Attacks on Africans on Mediatised Permanent Education Sites

Mhiripiri¹

2021

ASR

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“…Schoon et al (2021) call for the "Positioning of African Digital Experiences as Epistemic Sites of Knowledge Production" as opposed to privileging Global knowledge flows from the West. Chasi (2018) demonstrates how research methods originating from the West can be appropriated and adapted to the unique African contexts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Multiplicity of Coloniality: A Focus on the Agency of Internet Prosumers in the Global South in the Coloniality Project.

Ooko

2023

SPIR

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This paper provides a critique to the limitation of decoloniality discourses which take a unilateral approach in which hegemony is seen as originating from the Global North and resistance as located in the Global South. The article therefore aims to “voice” out the silent ways in which internet users in the Global South could be enhancing coloniality and thwarting attempts at decolonisation. Consequently, it seeks to contribute to the theorization of coloniality by privileging the concept of hybridity not as a logic of resistance but as a hegemonic site in which power inequalities and othering is perpetuated. To support the arguments made in this article, two political WhatsApp communities (East Asembo Development Forum and Kabula Forward) in Kenya imagined around the rural physical communities from which members originate, were purposively selected. The goal of both communities is to hold their political leaders accountable and agitate for development. Adapting netnography as a method which allows for researcher immersion in online spaces, data was collected through background listening, interviews and Focus Group Discussions. Data was analysed through a Discursive Material Analysis in which both the WhatsApp technology affordances/constraints and human actors’ actions, were read as text. Findings show that despite the plurality (hybridity) of the composition of the WhatsApp communities, participation is defined through hegemonic capitalism discourse, through which political participation is metaphorically substituted by materialism.

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“…The symposium was underpinned by Brian Larkin's (2008) provocative but telling question in his study of Nollywood-what might Media Studies look like had it primarily developed on the African continent? Equally we can ask, as a number of seminal studies have done over the past five or six years (Chasi 2018;Chasi and Rodny-Gumede 2020;Willems 2014;Willems and Mano 2017), what it actually means to adapt existing digital media research methods from the Global North to the diverse contexts of Africa, and whether this might require a simple rejigging to account for parameters such as access to the internet, or indeed an entire epistemological shift to recognise African "ways of being" and knowledge production. These contestable questions have been incorporated into this Special Issue, which features some of the papers presented at the Rhodes University symposium, submissions from an open call for articles, as well as a special reflective overview of the articles by Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns.…”

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confidence: 99%

Decolonising Digital Media Research Methods: Positioning African Digital Experiences as Epistemic Sites of Knowledge Production

Schoon

Mabweazara

Bosch

et al. 2020

African Journalism Studies

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This introductory essay argues for a decolonial approach that privileges qualitative methods in ways that position African digital experiences as "epistemic sites" of knowledge production in their own right in digital media scholarship. In proffering this argument, we challenge and confront elements of the global knowledge system, which are driven by an implicit "civilising mission" in which methods and intellectual approaches drawn from the West are seen as sacrosanct, while approaches and concepts emerging from the Global South are deemed to have a lower ontological density in the hierarchical ordering of knowledge. We explore methodological questions that relate to the studies carried in this Special Issue and consider various strategies for aligning digital media scholarship with Southern epistemologies-whether these are found in the "epistemologies of everyday" popular culture or epistemologies emerging through the work of African activists and artists. Equally, we emphasise the value of methods that pay attention to issues of power and economic extraction to understand the very different roles of social media platforms in various African countries. The paper also considers how the precarious and contingent nature of infrastructure and African cities in general demands methods that pay attention to issues of digital materiality and infrastructure. Finally, we discuss Big Data methods and the need for African researchers to establish themselves more firmly in this space.

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Decolonising the Humanities: A Smash-and-Grab Approach

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Promoting Epistemic Vigilance Against Racist Attacks on Africans on Mediatised Permanent Education Sites

Promoting Epistemic Vigilance Against Racist Attacks on Africans on Mediatised Permanent Education Sites

Exploring the Multiplicity of Coloniality: A Focus on the Agency of Internet Prosumers in the Global South in the Coloniality Project.

Decolonising Digital Media Research Methods: Positioning African Digital Experiences as Epistemic Sites of Knowledge Production

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