When it comes to thinking about the coloniality of research, ask yourself:
Questions adapted from PhD researchers associated with Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.
As Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues, colonists were trained in academic research across the disciplines, making universities foundational sites for colonial and epistemic injustices.
Decoloniality in research is a context-specific endeavour which involves not only actively unlearning and dismantling dominant Euro-American centric ways of thinking and understanding the world, but also rebuilding and re-worlding forms of knowledge-making that exist outside these dominant epistemic norms (Mignolo, 2017).
As Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (building on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's work) argues,
"Hyphenating “research” into “re-search” is very useful because it reveals what is involved, what it really means, and goes beyond the naive view of “research” as an innocent pursuit of knowledge.
It underscores the fact that “re-searching” involves the activity of undressing other people so as to see them naked. It is also a process of reducing some people to the level of micro-organism: putting them under a magnifying glass to peep into their private lives, secrets, taboos, thinking, and their sacred worlds."
Researchers are encouraged to be critical and reflexive throughout the research process and question the standpoints and power relations from and through which their work is produced, mediated and accessed. Decolonial research practice reminds scholars that many assumptions about knowledge, truth and rationality are drawn from literature and practice developed at a particular time and place and through unequal and unjust power and knowledge relations.
Library collections are organised using metadata including subject headings. Subject headings are a set of controlled terms set by the Library of Congress (other controlled vocabularies exist) that appear on many records on Library Search. They are usually a useful tool for finding specific items or determining the scale of a particular subject in a collection.
These classification systems and subject headings reflect the male, white, western, Christian, heterosexual and non-disabled orientations of their originators, as well as the time and place in which they were constructed. As a result, groups of peoples and ideas that fall outside of what is represented by these classifications are ‘othered’ and marginalized. In terms of library services, this can negatively impact the ability of students and researchers to successfully retrieve information on these topics. On a larger scale, biased classification systems and subject headings reinforce dominant hierarchies of knowledge.
The University of Sussex Library is engaged in a continual effort to practice critical cataloguing which is part of a broader effort in librarianship to make the catalogue and the terms we use within it more inclusive. The work involves removing or amending terms from the Library of Congress Subject Headings that we consider offensive or inappropriate and changing cutter numbers in the classification scheme that are codes for similar outdated or undesirable terms. This work will not decolonise the catalogue or classification schemes, but it is important to change the things we do have the means to change, however small they are.
Researchers can incorporate this approach into their own practice by critically examining the codes and classifications used in secondary research data, and by taking active steps to avoid the replication of exclusionary descriptions in created datasets.
University of Sussex Library predominately uses the Library of Congress classification system for its collections. Below is a fascinating documentary called Change the Subject (2019), about a group of Dartmouth students in the US who challenged anti-immigrant language in the Library of Congress subject headings.
The academic publishing industry is dominated by companies and presses in the global North. The history of academic publishing has its roots in Europe, and while the infrastructure has dramatically changed over time there are undoubtedly systemic inequalities ingrained in the industry. Academic publishers profit from the distribution of knowledge and make decisions about which research to publish, effectively validating some types of knowledge and marginalising others.
Authors from Global South institutions are underrepresented in a great many ‘high profile’ and internationally recognised outlets. This creates a situation that reinforces hierarchies of knowledge, language, research topics and methodologies. The role of academic publishing is rarely at the forefront of decolonial discussion and debate, but it has an impact directly on research careers.
The Open Access movement aims to reduce publication costs, to speed up the dissemination of research, to ensure the visibility of research and, crucially, to remove barriers to access research. The project is broadly supported by researchers and libraries; however, critics observe that some models of Open Access, specifically the pay-to-publish or Gold models, actively reinforce or create new inequalities.
Researchers can make active choices about where to publish. Consider where work will be disseminated or promoted and how accessible it will be. The Library's Open Access team can help researchers identify publication options.
Publication metrics can be used to 'measure' the impact of a researcher or their outputs. Some institutions have used them in recruitment, probation, promotion or other processes. They also form part of the calculations used in university rankings. By their nature, research performance metrics can replicate and reinforce inequalities within academic institutions and academic publishing infrastructures. A number of widely used publication metrics rely on citation data, however critical race scholars have demonstrated that inequality is reproduced by racially biased citation patterns. Citation is political.
Metrics cannot provide a complete picture of the impact, or potential impact, of a researcher or their outputs. Quantitative methods alone cannot do justice to the richness of research culture. There is growing consensus that researchers and institutions should use metrics responsibly. The University of Sussex is a signatory to The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) which sets out principles for assessing and evaluating research quality in a responsible way.
Initiatives like DORA can contribute to a shift in research culture but research assessment methods remain contentious. Institutions can critically examine the use of metrics and hold metric tool developers accountable for their products.
This collection of databases includes resources we subscribe to as well as open access ones that cover literature and data from diverse global voices. Research has shown that dominant databases such as Scopus and Web of Science have a Global North and English language bias, so this collection is designed to encourage you to look for information from more marginalised sources to re-centre knowledge from the Global Majority. With thanks to Sally Dalton from University of Leeds Library for crowdsourcing many of recommendations in this collection. If you have suggestions of databases to include, please contact library.training@sussex.ac.uk