Courageous Conversations, hosted by the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion presents Decolonizing Disciplines and Structures of Inequality. This event in the Courageous Conversations series featured Dr. Gurminder K. Bhambra of the University of Sussex and Dr. Yolande Bouka of Queen’s University.
Dr. Gurminder K. Bhambra:
“For a Reparatory Social Science”
The social sciences are implicated in the reproduction of the very structures of inequality that are also, ostensibly, their objects of concern. This is, in part, a consequence of their failure to acknowledge the ‘connected histories’ from which they abstract one of their primary units of analysis – that is, the modern nation-state. In this talk, Dr. Bhambra argued for the need to account for colonial histories as central to national imaginaries and to the social structures through which inequalities are legitimated and reproduced. In the process, she put forward a framework for a reparatory social science, one that is oriented to global justice as a reconstructive project of the present.
Dr. Yolande Bouka:
“A Manifesto of Decolonial Justice in African Studies”
The paradox of decolonizing institutions and disciplines whose main function has been to perpetuate hierarchies between the “producers” and “subjects” of knowledge is one of the reasons why decolonizing the academy continues to be challenging. In the case of African Studies, in addition to deconstructing colonial ideologies of Western superiority in a field of academic inquiry that was mainly created to subjugate the Black Other for imperial purposes, we are also asked to reimagine approaches to studying Africa, a place and idea that is radically different from how it was “invented” and imagined, which seems to be an antithesis between the object and the objective. Yet, the decolonial project remains necessary given the continued prevalence of colonial thoughts and practices in the discipline. This presentation first aimed to take stock of the struggle that scholars of African descent and intellectual comrades have waged to reclaim African Studies. Then, in the footsteps of scholars who have tackled issues of coloniality, Dr. Bouka took aim at descriptive decolonization and explained the injustices of colonialism in social sciences as a result of brutal ontological and epistemological violence. Finally, she offered a manifesto of decolonial justice which offers potential pathways towards a sustained decolonial praxis.
Dr. Malinda Smith, Vice-Provost (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) hosted and co-moderated the questions from the audience.
About the Speakers
Dr. Gurminder K Bhambra is a Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the British Sociological Association (2022-25). She is the author of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (2021) with John Holmwood, Connected Sociologies (2014), and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (2007). She is also co-editor of Decolonising the University (2018) and runs the Global Social Theory site, is editor of Discover Society, and directs the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project.
Dr. Yolande Bouka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner whose research and teaching focus on gender, violence, decoloniality, race and international relations, and African affairs. The key questions driving her multidisciplinary research agenda are how vulnerable groups understand and navigate structural and political violence and how these experiences influence the post-conflict social and political landscapes. Dr. Bouka’s research has received support from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Association of University Women, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
