Colonialism was a direct political control of people of a given territory by a foreign power. Usually, if not always, colonialism was accompanied by permanent settlements, or occupation, by people from the colonizing power, such as the British, French, or Germans. The colonized people were mainly in the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At the experiential level, colonialism was really the political control of one race by another, with the colonial settlers invariably being ‘Western’, ‘European’, and ‘White’, and the colonized being the ‘Other’. But colonialism was also, simultaneously, about the production of ideological justifications of such control, which justifications involved the creation of a perception in the ‘Other’ of the superiority of the colonizer, hence the asymmetrical power relations that characterized the relationship between the two agents’. This condescension encompassed all aspects of the ‘Other’s’ systems (i.e. the economic, cultural, political, legal, etc. systems), including the epistemologies and methodologies on which such systems were predicated. All these aspects required total eradication and a root and branch replacement with a Western European world view. The result was a systematic marginalization and undervaluation, if not total eradication, of the ‘Other’s’ worldview (Chilisa, 2012). The impartation of this worldview constituted the ‘process of civilization’, a process that necessarily involved a unidirectional transfer of information, skills, understanding and civilization from the European to the ‘Other’ (Serpell, 1993). This is how the Western European colonial epistemologies and methodologies came to inform and shape the development and trajectory of the social sciences, and are today regarded as the essential ingredients in the process of production of knowledge. The main objective of the proposed session is to call for the emancipation of the social sciences from Western, European epistemologies and methodologies in the production of knowledge. It is a modest attempt to reinsert African epistemologies and methodologies in the discourses of the social sciences, with a view to making the social sciences more relevant to the African context. This would constitute an exercise in decolonization of social sciences knowledge production and curation.
Papers in the proposed session will based on following assumptions:
(1) That there is an inherent bias in theoretical, problem selection, methodological and research priorities in research in the social sciences in Africa, which emanates from European and American foundational social sciences literature.
(2) That instead of being displaced during the postcolonial phase, these foundational works and their inherent biases were further entrenched and perpetuated globally, yielding a social sciences thinking out of sync with contemporary realities in Africa.
(3) That the significance of these biases and systematic silencing of the ‘African voice’ denied a “voice of its own” to the post-colonial subjectivity. Accordingly, papers in the proposed session would include indigenous post-colonial methodologies and epistemologies. Furthermore, emphasis will be on the heterogeneous and plural methodological tradition, meant to critique and displace the global hegemony and privilege of Eurocentric/Colonialist and Orientalist discourses. We affirm that such attempts constitute a reformulation of Social Science discourse that will pave the pay for the development of fresh concepts, theories, methodologies and research agendas appropriate to the African context.
Two goals would guide such an important and urgent academic mission: (a) it would problematize the notion of ‘value-free’ (objective) research that is entrenched in Eurocentric conceptions, and, in the process, contemplate producing knowledge that is relevant and engaging, and that (b) such alternative methodologies do not call for a willy-nilly rejection of extant canons, but rather seeks to put emphasis on regional and local historical experiences and cultural practice i.e. contextualization. This session will carter for papers from different social science disciplines, e.g., Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology etc.