Decolonial “And”

This blog post is part of the symposium “The Rooms We Wanted: What a Year of Decolonisation Seminars Revealed about a Law School”, reflecting on the Decolonisation Seminar Series at the University of Edinburgh.

Decolonial theory, like any other school of thought, does not exist in isolation. Indeed, a critical engagement with the decolonial toolkit involves understanding what it brings to light and what it obscures. This careful understanding of how decolonial theory can add to one’s research design or intellectual landscape comes with an in-depth discussion of how decolonial theory overlaps with and distinguishes itself from other critical intellectual traditions.

To this end, our day-long workshop explored three different strands of decolonial theory. First, in a panel which Ms Hilda Tizeba (University of Edinburgh) chaired, Dr Siddharth de Souza (University ofWarwick), Dr Natalie Tegama (University of Oxford) and Dr Deval Desai (University of Edinburgh) discussed the ways in which digital spaces and technologies are built upon and entrench global wealth inequalities, and how digital technologies can be used to bridge this gap. A second panel on intersectional decoloniality followed, chaired by Ms Matilde Masetti Placci. The discussion took place between Professor Tanya Serisier (Birkbeck University) and Dr Leila Ullrich (University of Oxford) and explored the ways in which feminist theory can be enhanced when brought into dialogue with decolonial thought, which emphasises the continued effects colonial encounters have had upon Western understandings of civic freedom (including feminism). The workshop ended with a reflection on how writing can itself be an act of decolonial knowledge production. Chaired by Ms Fangyi Li, Dr Francisco-José Quintana (University of Edinburgh), Dr Nora Jaber (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Leila Ullrich explored the personal costs and potential benefits which come from explicitly writing from a decolonial or critical perspective.

The two reflective notes below come from different points in the day, Hilda Tizeba writing from the first panel, on decoloniality and the digital, and Kağan Sürücü from the third panel, on writing as a form of decolonial praxis. The first one asks whether decolonial praxis is possible at all within digital infrastructures built on extraction, while the other note shows how that same lens can resolve a concrete problem in the governance of international protection. This blog posts concludes with the programme organisers’ brief reflections on the workshop’s impact.

Hilda Tizeba

Can a digital world built on extraction ever truly be decolonial? If so, how might this be achieved in practice? These are some of the questions that Dr Natalie Tegama, Dr Siddharth De Souza, Dr Deval Desai and I found ourselves discussing at a roundtable on the 16th of March 2026, as part of the ‘Decolonial Research Methodologies’ series. As chair, I was rather excited to hear from academics who had endeavoured to incorporate decolonial methodologies in their past and current research. Moreover, learn how they navigated the rapidly evolving as well as conceptually uncertain terrain of decoloniality in the digital age.

Decoloniality and the Digital Era: Nuts and Bolts

The tensions that lie between recognising the potential of AI as a useful tool for knowledge production, and its potential to perpetuate extractive research practices and epistemic inequalities shaped the direction of the discussion and informed the questions I posed to both the panel and the audience. What did they consider as meaningful integration of a decolonial methodology in research and its interaction with the digital world? Could they provide concrete examples of how they integrated decolonial methodology in their own research praxis? What challenges did they face while doing so? And what would they advise an aspiring researcher who wants to integrate decolonial praxis into their research without risking the very extractive and colonial structures the movement seeks to confront? A rather interesting set of issues was raised in response to these questions.

• The discussion revealed that attempts to integrate decolonial methodologies into digitally mediated research are inevitably constrained by the very infrastructures through which knowledge is produced, disseminated and funded. This particular point reminded me of Foluke Adebisi’s blog piece ‘Why I Say Decolonisation Is Impossible’, where she argues that decolonisation is not possible as long as we do not confront the “colonial logics of commodification of labour and space”, which dominate scholarship evaluation systems and disregard systemic forms of epistemic exclusion. Focussing on what we are fighting against, rather than discussing what we are fighting for, ensures that attempts to create more inclusive academic spaces genuinely disrupt the way in which universities continue to function: the system must be challenged, it cannot simply be modified.
• A recurring theme included the politics of digital data itself. Who produces digital data and whose realities become legible within data sets? Do contemporary forms of data extraction merely reproduce older colonial hierarchies under technical guises?
• The integration of decolonial practice requires a critical account of the historical context, are cognition of the structural disadvantages, and epistemic biases that inform your area of research and prospective research participants.

Conclusion

Upon the end of the roundtable, I found myself feeling hopeful, but still somewhat conflicted. To my understanding, decolonisation involves the undoing of a world created by colonialism which relies on the ongoing logics of coloniality and sustains similar power structures in the present. I therefore conclude by posing a question for further reflection: to what extent can genuinely decolonial praxis be realised within digital structures that are themselves rooted in coloniality? Perhaps the challenge lies in our willingness to rethink the epistemic foundations upon which digital systems are built and what this means for research.

Kağan Sürücü

From the workshop of the Decolonial Research and Methodologies Seminar Series, a key notion that particularly resonated with me as an asylum researcher was decolonial praxis. Decolonial praxis, as I understand it, involves centring a multitude of perspectives within your writing, while paying attention to their respective contingencies. Decolonial thinking within research, as was discussed in the workshop, included opening myself up to diverse methods of writing and producing knowledge.

For my research I have carried out many interviews with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) staff members in the field. The field officers have often cited how correspondence from the organisation’s headquarters in Geneva becomes the final arbiter for establishing legal positions and policy decisions in the field. The hierarchical supremacy of these opinions issued by the headquarters led to the erasure of expertise in the field, instead establishing the expertise and authority of Geneva above local epistemologies and practices in areas with large percentage of refugee populations, which are often in the Global South. This is compounded by the long-running problem of
the differences in the perceptions and organisational treatment between the local field staff and the international diplomats.

Subsequent to attending this session, I recast this phenomenon not as a bureaucratic challenge, but as a problem that can be identified and approached with decolonial research and practice. As demonstrated in the literature, expertise in international organisations is not neutral or passive but instead constructed and preserved significantly on colonial legacies. The lack of decision-making capabilities, and the absence of real prospects for local staff to provide input regarding the provision of protection aims of theUNHCR is a direct manifestation of inequality of expertise in its practice. I was affirmed in my understanding through this session, which led me to view this phenomenon more comprehensively, and gained a deeper understanding of how expertise as a colonial enterprise does not only exist in the making of knowledge, its sources and constituting its authority. It also manifests in the exercise of this expertise as praxis and policy, the perceptions and status that is vested in the individual experts, and how there are inherent inequalities between the individual practitioners of expertise, their image and authority in organisations divided on colonial lines.

In a similar vein, the non-human manifestations of expertise could also highlight the significance of decolonial praxis. Looking through the example of the correspondence or reports issued by the headquarters of the UNHCR to the many field offices of the organisation, these texts do not exist as ordinary artifacts but instead are exerting colonial power dynamics on the field, emphasising the dominance of the centre (UNHCR headquarters) over the margins (UNHCR field offices). The practice of issuing correspondence, from sterile, detached offices in the centre of Europe, and the materiality of the correspondence itself repackaging knowledge into annotated papers, written concisely and sternly tobe relayed, emerges as a symbol or a particular technology that furthers colonial hierarchies. While the dynamics specifically in the UNHCR might have already begun to change with the decentralisation of the organisation, nonetheless the workshop was immensely useful for me to fully understand the necessity to reconstruct the individual and non-human practices of expertise through a decolonial lens.

Reflections from the Event Organisers

As Kağan’s reflection implies, decolonial thought can capture the previously hidden politics which underpin a particular phenomenon. Rather than the centralisation of the UNHCR appearing as the result of technocratic politics, it becomes a troubling phenomenon rife with colonial history and, as a result, becomes a more prominent, if unexpected, aspect of his research. What his account draws out with clarity is that this politics is carried not only in decisions but in objects like the correspondence issued from Geneva, the materiality of the annotated paper relayed to the field. The decolonial praxis, for him, extends to the very texts through which expertise is exercised.

Hilda’s reflection pulls in a different direction, and the two are worth reading against each other. WhereKağan finds decolonial thought as the solution to an intellectual problem, giving him the language to name what he encountered in the field, Hilda finds decolonial theory as a means of surfacing a thorny problem. Hilda’s question, whether a digital world built on extraction can ever be decolonised, or whether the attempt merely decolonises systems that remain extractive at their root, is very important.Hilda’s scepticism, that some infrastructures cannot be reformed from within, and that a decolonial account which arrives too quickly at reassurance would be reproducing exactly the confidence it sets out to question, raises important discussions about the limits of decolonial thought. The value of Hilda’s contribution lies in that refusal; it is an attempt to keep the tools being used honest about their own limitations.

The two reflections show decolonial theory doing the range of things this workshop set out to explore, functioning, in one case, as a working method that reorganises what a researcher already knows, and, in the other, as a provocation that refuses the reassurance of a settled answer. This is the “and” of the title to this blog post, decolonial thought is not a finished position to be adopted, but something that becomes usable when it meets a specific research problem and conscientiously incorporated into one’s intellectual landscape. And, as these reflections reveal what decolonial thought yields, it depends on who is doing the asking.