Black scholars participate in a retreat on Decolonial Feminist Ethics

Sanja Begic — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:44:59 +0000

A group of professors from an interdisciplinary research cluster focusing on adaptive knowledge, response, recovery and resilience in transnational Black communities joined community members to generate and promote new policy data.

Earlier this academic year, the overcoming epidemics in transnational Black communities' research cluster organized a retreat on Decolonial Feminist Ethics (DFE), a guiding principle of the cluster's community-based research activities. The retreat attracted York and international partners.

A drumming performance was included as part of the academic discussions, to help generate new ideas. Considered as an opportunity for reflection, participants were encouraged to express themselves through movement and words during the drumming. They were free to express thoughts on DFE in relation to innovation, specialty and knowledge systems.

Academics from five different countries participated in the event. York professors Gertrude Mianda, Sylvia Bawa, Mohamed Sesay, Jude Kong, Nathaniel Ojong and Godfred Boateng were in attendance. In addition to international and internal scholars, community partners like Cheryl Prescod of the Black Creek Community Health Centre joined discussions.

Three key issues emerged at the retreat:

A feminist ethical commitment to decolonizing knowledge production as an intervention to promote health equity.
Continued efforts to learn to decolonize research.
New knowledge-generating activities within the DFE perspective.

DFE as an intervention to promote health equity

The DFE retreat enhanced social interactions across health and justice boundaries and between academic and practitioner communities leading to discussions on health disparities arising from overlooked interactions between health and legal norms originating from colonial and subjugated thoughts.

The DFE committed to cementing the relationship between practitioners and the academic community to brainstorm intersections of health disparities and generate community methodologies. For Cheryl Prescod, "this [DFE platform] is the first-time being part of research we are all starting from the same place of understanding about what the research is about, how it is being led and the values and principles we are working from."

Professor Gertrude Mianda is with the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. She pointed to the importance of including community partners. "DFE [exhibits] epistemic humility towards meeting those who know better about the situation than us [researchers]," she said.

Continuous efforts to decolonize research

The DFE signified an awareness that persistent efforts are needed to learn to decolonize research practices by looking through community methodologies that are more likely to reflect local realities, agency, resistance to injustice and hegemonic worldview. Encouraging concrete connections with local conditions, values and traditions will help to expose biases and challenge us to examine our thoughts against injustices. Doing so could demonstrate humility towards all those involved in knowledge-generating activities.

Sociology professor Sylvia Bawa highlighted the importance of DFE in reimagining old systems. "DFE embraces new ways of doing things beyond what we have been thought," she said, "through systematically unravelling, revealing and challenging colonial systems". Assistant professor and coordinator of the African Studies Program in the Department of Social Science, Mohamed Sesay, echoed this thought. "This status quo is not working [for Black communities] so there is little to lose if we disrupt it radically".

New knowledge-generating activities within DFE perspective

DFE acknowledged awareness of the need to decolonize research is hardly the research norm in Black communities. Decolonizing research is a site of struggle for social justice practice and ideas to create a locally informed health model against epidemics affected by issues internal and external to communities. Decolonized language is needed to translate scientific discourse in collaborative community research. It is essential to re-enforce DFE practices to affirm local humanities for generating and informing a research agenda through solidarity and appreciation of community research agency.

In self-reflection amidst drumming sessions, professor Mianda said, "We need to think about decolonizing our own coloniality of being at all levels: macro and micro".

Alhaji N'jai is the founder of Project 1808 and an associate professor at the University of Sierra Leone. He called for action, warning that "(neo)colonial systems [present] cosmetic development [an unreal development for Black communities]. [To dismantle these systems] require sacrifice, boldness, bravery, and disruptive innovation".

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