Rehumanising the university for an alternative future: decolonisation, alternative epistemologies and cognitive justice

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on the shifting landscape of higher education, this discussion highlights how inequality is entrenched within the university, largely as a result of Western-inspired, commodified knowledge production processes. The article grapples with scholarship on cognitive justice and builds a case for transformative resistance that is simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-neoliberal, within, against and beyond the Westernised university. The discussion concentrates specifically on epistemic hegemonies and internationalisation, and argues that substantive decolonisation as a counterhegemonic project must entail an intellectual element that is aimed at transforming the knowledge structures that facilitate dehumanisation. The pursuit of more equitable, anti-racist futures must thus involve the identification and obliteration of deeply embedded epistemic hegemonies, which have been created through the dehumanising processes of capital expansion and colonisation. This article offers a hopeful approach that encourages the collaborative creation of a counter-university that actively pursues epistemic diversity as a pathway to alternative futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonisation
• cognitive justice
• alternative epistemologies
• global neo-colonialism
• internationalisation of higher education
• alternative futures

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the guest editors for the opportunity to submit this piece to the special issue. The conference from which this submission emerged was an enormously valuable experience, and I am grateful to the organisers for their generous invitation to attend.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.