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.

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