The Epistemic Line: What Counts as Decolonial Research?

ABSTRACT

A research team can hand its budget to partners in the Global South, list those partners first on the paper, and let them set the research questions. The concepts, methods and terms that decide what counts as a finding stay in place. More manuscripts now claim to be decolonial, and editors and reviewers judge those claims one at a time, without a shared basis for deciding what the word should require. One question concerns who holds the resources of research and who receives credit for it. A separate question concerns who holds the authority to determine what qualifies as knowledge. Redistributing resources is necessary: it changes who participates, controls funding and receives credit. But it does not necessarily change who has the authority to define knowledge. That authority can still rest with a dominant tradition that sets the terms by which evidence and rigour are judged. Work becomes decolonial when knowledge from outside the dominant tradition is judged by its own criteria for what counts as evidence and sound reasoning, rather than against European‐American method as the default measure of rigour. What editors and reviewers decide, manuscript by manuscript, is which of these two things a paper has done. The word will come to mean whichever one they reward.