Tag: Colonialism

Osiris (Vol. 39): Disability and the History of Science

Edited by Jaipreet Virdi, Mara Mills, and Sara F. Rose

Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge.

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai.

Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.

Read the book here.

Developing an agenda for the decolonization of global health

By David McCoy, Anuj Kapilashrami, Ramya Kumar, Emma Rhule , Rajat Khosla

Colonialism, which involves the systemic domination of lands, markets, peoples, assets, cultures or political institutions to exploit, misappropriate and extract wealth and resources, affects health in many ways. In recent years, interest has grown in the decolonization of global health with a focus on correcting power imbalances between high-income and low-income countries and on challenging ideas and values of some wealthy countries that shape the practice of global health. The authors argue that decolonization of global health must also address the relationship between global health actors and contemporary forms of colonialism, in particular the current forms of corporate and financialized colonialism that operate through globalized systems of wealth extraction and profiteering. They present a three-part agenda for action that can be taken to decolonize global health. The first part relates to the power asymmetries that exist between global health actors from high-income and historically privileged countries and their counterparts in low-income and marginalized settings. The second part concerns the colonization of the structures and systems of global health governance itself. The third part addresses how colonialism occurs through the global health system. Addressing all forms of colonialism calls for a political and economic anticolonialism as well as social decolonization aimed at ensuring greater national, racial, cultural and knowledge diversity within the structures of global health.

Read the article here.

Dark Emu

Directed by Allan Clarke

Thought provoking, revelatory and inspiring – this feature length documentary from Blackfella Films tells the story of Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 best-selling book, Dark Emu, which challenged thinking around Australian history.

It’s been said that ‘Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the ‘hunter-gatherer’ tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession.’

Critics at the time praised the book, Marcia Langton for the Australian wrote “This is the most important book on Australia and should be read by every Australian.”

Watch the documentary here.

On writing Soviet History of Central Asia: frameworks, challenges, prospects

By Botakoz Kassymbekova and Aminat Chokobaeva

The article reviews major frameworks for re-evaluating Soviet Central Asian history in anglophone scholarship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It tackles recent popular concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ for analysing the Soviet past in the region. It questions the analytical value of the terms as well as their ability to capture the complexity of social, political and economic changes that Central Asia underwent in the course of seven decades between the October Revolution and the dissolution of the USSR. The article furthermore provides an overview of novel themes and approaches in the field and suggests themes for further research.

Read the full article here.

Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain

By Arunima Datta

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia.

Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, Arunima Datta illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment.

In doing so, Datta re-imagines the experience of waiting. Waiting is a recurrent human experience, yet it is often marginalized. It takes a particular form within complex bureaucratized societies in which the marginalized inevitably wait upon those with power over them. Those who wait are often discounted as passive, inactive victims. This book shows that, in spite of their precarious position, the travelling ayahs of the British empire were far from this stereotype.

Read the book here.

Palestine: Spaces and Politics

By Arab Urbanism (Dena Qaddumi, Nadi Abusaada , Majd Al-Shihabi , Ammar Azzouz , Samia Henni , Lana Judeh , Faiq Mari, Aya Nassar, and Omar Jabary Salamanca).

Palestine: Spaces and Politics (PSP) is an open-access project that offers resources for education and research on Palestine’s built and natural environments through a critical lens. This initiative is a response to the growing demand for grounded academic resources on Palestine that offer depth and context beyond immediate colonial destruction. 

The PSP Introductory Curriculum positions Palestine as a complex space inhabited by people who are producers of its own knowledge, rather than a mere object on which perpetual violence is inflicted. It situates Palestine as a conceptual site to reconsider core ideas in the fields of architecture, geography, urbanism, and planning. Particularly, by foregrounding Palestinian voices and perspectives, PSP presents substantive and vivid understandings of Palestine’s past, present, and potential futures. Ultimately, the curriculum considers Palestine as imperative for analyzing the critical intersections of spaces and politics at large. 

The bilingual curriculum comprises several themes that include an opening text, key questions, key cases, and open-access readings. We also provide further readings and audiovisual material and have aimed to include resources useful for both academic and non-academic users.

Access their site here.

Because its power remains naturalized: introducing the settler colonial determinants of health

By Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, Yara Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, and David Mills

Indigenous people suffer earlier death and more frequent and severe disease than their settler counterparts, a remarkably persistent reality over time, across settler colonized geographies, and despite their ongoing resistance to elimination. Although these health inequities are well-known, they have been impervious to comprehensive and convincing explication, let alone remediation. Settler colonial studies, a fast-growing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field, is a promising candidate to rectify this impasse. Settler colonialism’s relationship to health inequity is at once obvious and incompletely described, a paradox arising from epistemic coloniality and perceived analytic challenges that we address here in three parts. First, in considering settler colonialism an enduring structure rather than a past event, and by wedding this fundamental insight to the ascendant structural paradigm for understanding health inequities, a picture emerges in which this system of power serves as a foundational and ongoing configuration determining social and political mechanisms that impose on human health. Second, because modern racialization has served to solidify and maintain the hierarchies of colonial relations, settler colonialism adds explanatory power to racism’s health impacts and potential amelioration by historicizing this process for differentially racialized groups. Finally, advances in structural racism methodologies and the work of a few visionary scholars have already begun to elucidate the possibilities for a body of literature linking settler colonialism and health, illuminating future research opportunities and pathways toward the decolonization required for health equity.

Read the article here.

Why Do You Make It About Race? Epistemic Disobedience of a Public Health Doctoral Trainee

By Satrio Nindyo Istiko

In Australia, racism remains a challenge to dismantle within public health institutions. In this paper, Satrio Nindyo Istiko examines the pressures he experienced from some public health scholars and practitioners to conform to colonial and positivist approaches in knowledge production that still dominate the field. To challenge this hegemony, he aligned his research practices with what Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience,” an approach to delink from Western ways of producing knowledge. Based on this experiential learning process, he argues epistemic disobedience should not be overlooked in the discussion of decolonizing research and antiracist pedagogy in the context of doctoral training. Through this reflection, he encourages public/global health PhD students from the Global South/Global majority to resist colonial perspectives as they navigate Western systems and cultures of producing knowledge.

Read the article here.

The Question of Palestine

By Edward Said

With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile’s passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied–as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the Gulf War, and the ongoing MIddle East peace initiative. For anyone interested in this region and its future, The Question of Palestine remains the most useful and authoritative account available.

Read more here.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

By Walter Rodney

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today.

Read more here.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑