By Eqbal Ahmad
Eqbal Ahmad gave this speech on November 4, 1975 at the University of Michigan during the closing session of the three-day “Bicentennial Dilemma: Who’s in Control?” teach-in.
Towards decolonising research methods training: the development of a locally responsive online learning course on research methods for mental health in war and conflict for researchers and practitioners in the Gaza Strip
By Nancy Tamimi, Hanna Kienzler, Weeam Hammoudeh, Hala Khalawi, Mathias Regent and Rita Giacaman
Background
Concerns exist that online learning directed at non-Western settings to strengthen research capacity imposes Western-centric epistemology, provides unidirectional transfer of knowledge, and neglects local paradigms and expertise. We argue that a plurality of voices, histories and epistemologies are essential to strengthen research capacity. We share our experience developing and teaching an online course for mental health professionals and researchers in the Gaza Strip.
Methods
Birzeit University and King’s College London developed and delivered the course equally, focusing on the intersection between qualitative research methods, mental health and conflict, and addressing local research needs. We incorporated local case studies and expertise, encouraged interaction in English and Arabic, and stimulated critique of Western theories. Seventeen participated, 12 completed the pre-course questionnaire, 15 completed the post-course questionnaire and four undertook semi-structured interviews.
Results
Our pre-course survey showed participants most needed coding and qualitative data analysis skills. Post-course findings showed improved qualitative research skills. Most agreed the course was comprehensive and well delivered, with relevant case studies. Three themes were identified: (1) the course was locally contextualised and met students’ needs; (2) the course fostered dialogic and multi-directional learning and (3) suggestions for improvements. Several participants wanted some topics in greater depth and further specialised training. A few suggested the course be in Arabic.
Conclusion
Fostering multi-directional learning is key for non-Western knowledge, epistemologies, and languages to gain prominence in Western academia. A social transformation would see local researchers and educators engage with and use local methods and paradigms in mental health in war and conflict.
Read more here.
Decolonizing Thought and Action – and Higher Education
By Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative
Explore here the module which forms part of a toolkit, with several activities, videos, and questions.
How do we reorient ourselves away from the idea that communities that are not attached to the university don’t have cultural wealth, or knowledge to bear? How do we disrupt this notion, and participate in a practice of decolonization by recognizing the distorted relationships that exist as a result of colonization and colonialism? What does it mean to engage with decolonization in community-based inquiry and engagement? What is the significance of this engagement to how the concept of global citizenship is used and understood?
CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers
Co-authorship by Devin G. Atallah, Caesar Hakim, Hana R. Masud, Yousef al-Ajarma, Aya Darwish, Abeer Musleh, Rayyan Alfatafta, Nihaya Abu-Rayyan
This workbook was designed to support community workers in Palestine towards deepening our understandings and our relationships for ongoing resistance and healing. There are five chapters, organized around a series of our beloved native trees and Indigenous knowledges rooted in our Palestinian lands and communities.
The authors hope you can utilize this workbook to engage in any activities that feel meaningful and supportive as you build communities of care and co-resistance. In particular, they hope that Palestinian community health workers (CHWs), organizers, health care providers, counselors/therapists, educators, and grassroots activists in Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora will find their decolonial healing guide to be helpful in this time of impossible grief and colonial genocide by the Zionist settler nation-state.
They offer this workbook to Palestinian communities as an enactment of hope and decolonial love. We, as Palestinians, face massacre, apartheid, segregation, persecution, mass incarceration, and are condemned to annihilation in so many ways.
This current online version is NOT the final copy, but it is a draft that they wanted to share right now with the wider public because of the current situation of unspeakable settler colonial violence that our Palestinian people are facing.
Resource available in English and Arabic here.
From decolonizing knowledge to postimperialism A Latin American Perspective
By Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
To open new disciplinary imaginings, we must reinvigorate the relationship between utopian and anthropological thought. This is already underway in efforts to decolonize knowledge. Though such efforts have different emphases, they are located within a field of ideological and utopian struggles that must be understood in the context of imperialism-colonialism, of subalternized subject positions, and of the armed and cognitive struggles that imperialism-colonialism has entailed. Based on my Latin American positionality, I analyze the decolonization of anthropological knowledge as part of this wider field and of the discipline’s history of reexamining itself. In a critical dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial thought, I propose postimperialism as a framework that aims to deimperialize the world, overcoming the hierarchical positions between hegemonic and nonhegemonic anthropologies. Moreover, a postimperial research program would entail studying how global elites’ power affects those who struggle to end an unfair regime that is destroying the planet.
Read more here.
Working With Embroideries and Counter-Maps: Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks
By Puleng Segalo, Einat Manoff, and Michelle Fine
As people around the world continue to have their voices, desires, and movements restricted, and their pasts and futures told on their behalf, we are interested in the critical project of decolonizing, which involves contesting dominant narratives and hegemonic representations. Ignacio Martín-Baró called these the “collective lies” told about people and politics. This essay reflects within and across two sites of injustice, located in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa, to excavate the circuits of structural violence, internalized colonization and possible reworking of those toward resistance that can be revealed within the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the brunt of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. Using visual research methodologies such as embroideries that produce counter-narratives and counter-maps that divulge the complexity of land-struggles, we search for fitting research practices that amplify unheard voices and excavate the social psychological soil that grows critical analysis and resistance. We discuss here the practices and dilemmas of doing decolonial research and highlight the need for research that excavates the specifics of a historical material context and produces evidence of previously silenced narratives.
Read more here.
Decolonize Museums
By Shimrit Lee
The idealized Western museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for over a century: a rarified space of cool stone, providing an experience of leisure and education for the general public while carefully preserving fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representation and ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed their interest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both their adaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing society.
With Decolonize Museums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the colonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans’ atrocities were reimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for the occupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues, remain integral to the authority—and even the aesthetics—of the contemporary museum.
Read more here.
Rethinking and Decolonizing Theories, Policies, and Practice of Health from the Global South
By Oscar Feo Istúriz, Gonzalo Basile, and Neil Maizlish
This article states the need to decolonize the theories, policies, and practices that dominate health, and reflects on the necessity for a new epistemology built from the Global South. This allows rethinking health with a new categorical framework, which incorporates socially determined health and life, with the optic of reaching the highest conceivable degree of living well/well-living. We put forth that the epistemic bases of epidemiology and the implementation of health systems tend to reproduce a coloniality of power and of established health knowledge. Health systems are viewed as an accumulation of reforms based on theories and policies of the Global North imposed on Latin America and the Caribbean. These systems have been built as bureaucratic, biomedicalized, treatment-oriented, and commercialized health systems that are perceived as external to societies and that reproduce mistreatment, violence, and racism. We make the argument to rethink, remake, and decolonize the theories and practices that govern both epidemiology and health systems, and, from the South, develop strategic processes for building health sovereignty as the vision for the reconstruction of hope and social justice.
Read more here.
Is it possible to decolonise global health institutions?
By Lioba A Hirsch
In the past year, decolonising global health has gained prominence. Much of this movement has come from students of global health in high-income countries and preceded the recurrence of Black Lives Matter movements after the violent murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter and Decolonising Global Health movements have managed to shake schools of global health if not to their core then at least awake. As a reaction schools of global health have made statements about racial equality and have avowed to address racism, increase staff and student diversity, and to train their staff in the art of decolonisation. I have been involved in these processes of decolonisation at my own institution. Yet I also view such efforts critically.
Read more here.
Decolonial Dialogues
Decolonial Dialogues was established by a small group of researchers primarily based in the United Kingdom. However, many of them also have additional research affiliations, diaspora connections, ancestral ties and other cultural links to Algeria, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA.
It is their hope that the embryonic shared space will be shaped by a much broader network of creative ideas and critical perspectives, expressed and advanced via a growing group of new contributors and co-moderators.
A shared space for exchanging and advancing ideas and information about decolonising [decolonizing] knowledge – through activism, research, inclusive teaching and learning and creativity...
Journey into the site here.
Decolonising Global Health Archive 
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