Decolonization and Social Worlds

In the face of enduring global inequalities and colonial legacies, social scientists in the Anglo-Caribbean navigate complex challenges in their research and career-making. This book reveals how academics in the Global South negotiate these asymmetries in their daily work. Through fieldwork and interviews with senior scholars, the author explores how Anglo-Caribbean social scientists creatively work towards a regional science system. The book emphasises the creativity and collective action of scholarly communities. This work is essential for rethinking global entanglements in academia and working towards critical perspectives on social science knowledge production.

This volume brings together key scholars from across the globe to explore anti-colonial and anti-imperial perspectives to help transform our ways of the looking at the world. Collectively, these chapters introduce new frameworks and methodologies that challenge the dominance of Western paradigms while highlighting the multiplicity of issues and themes emerging from colonialized countries, past and present. By rethinking the foundational assumptions of European history and society, this book offers new frameworks to comprehend the past and future of social science and humanities, while inspiring readers to approach knowledge about human societies through a truly global, anti-colonial lens.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, this book analyses how Indigenous peasant women who have experienced reproductive violence describe the harms of forced sterilization and the complexities of using human and reproductive rights frameworks to make their experiences visible through law and activism. The author argues that the focus on individual choice and fertility creates dissonances and hierarchies of discourse that ultimately displace women’s embodied experiences of reproductive violence that do not fit within a repronormative framework. Introducing dissonance as a decolonial feminist methodology, the book explores how colonial, racialized, and gendered histories shape legal and experiential incommensurability. As the first ethnography on sterilization cases in Peru, it contributes to social studies of reproduction, Latin American studies, and decolonial feminisms.

Despite the urgency to understand how 'other' cultures encounter 'the West' in academic and political spheres, feminist economics has yet to tackle critiques from postcolonial and decolonial feminists about Western-centric modernism in the field. This book introduces a decolonizing approach to feminist economics, offering insights that move beyond the boundaries of modern Eurocentrism. The author explores the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and ecological degradation, while offering critical feminist and decolonizing tools. By investigating global struggles, the author illuminates our hijacked present and imagines a decolonizing feminist economic landscape that is under transformation. Transdisciplinary and innovative, this book fills a vital gap by exploring the interplay between decolonization and feminist economics, challenging the growth logic, capitalism and Western-centrism, and imagining new possibilities for more just futures.

This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia's educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when 'decolonization' has become a buzzword, the book demystifies 'critical anti-racism praxis,' advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches. Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms. Chapter 17 is available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies. The author focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialism and critical race theory to explore how self-identified progressive White residents perceive their gentrifying neighborhood and how they make sense of their positionality. Using the extended case method, as well as in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis and visual/media analysis, the author reveals how systemic racialized inequality persists even in a politically progressive borough.

This book rethinks meritocracy as a form of coloniality, namely, a social imaginary that reproduces narratives of ethnic and racial difference between European centres and peripheries, and between Europe and its others. Drawing on interviews with working and middle class, white and Black Italians who moved to Britain after the 2008 economic crisis, the book explores the narratives of Northern meritocracy and Southern backwardness that inform migrants' motivations for moving abroad, and how these narratives are experienced within classed, racialised and gendered migrations. Connecting decolonial theory with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this book provides innovative insights into the relationships between meritocracy, coloniality and European whiteness, and into the social stratification of EU migrations.