Decolonising Science

The course is divided into three segments, each engaging with critical aspects of doctoral research: theory, methodology, and fieldwork. The course also includes a day-long field trip in the Netherlands to understand how colonialism shaped the development of Western science and a screening of a docu-film that opens up questions on modernity and development in the context of the dispossession of Indigenous people and the erasure of plural knowledge traditions.

How scientific knowledge is produced is still strongly affected by colonial structures of power.

The dominance of Anglo-Eurocentric knowledge and the marginalization of other knowledge traditions in the formerly colonised world have set the stage for a global knowledge hierarchy. This is evident in how economic and environmental ‘problems’ in the former colonies – mostly in the Global South/majority world – are often framed by Northern researchers, who also develop corresponding ‘solutions’. The Global South has become a site where researchers from rich countries collect data and test and validate theories, models, and products.

Such colonial legacies deepen North-South knowledge inequality and produce socio-ecological harm. For example, the application of colonial river engineering approaches to exploiting rivers through dams and embankments for economic growth has devastated the lives of indigenous communities through forced eviction and displacement. It has also impaired riverine ecology and livelihoods, and marginalised knowledge traditions related to labour and practice.

Scientists are increasingly being called to reflect on how their research replicates colonial attitudes towards people and landscapes, and actively undo them. The concern is not just about equal participation in scientific knowledge production between the Global North and South, but what kind of “science” needs to emerge from non- Western societies. How can science celebrate diverse knowledge traditions and practices instead of subjecting them to epistemic violence? How can decolonisation navigate concerns of caste, class, race and gender and resist new forms of nationalist appropriations? How can we reimagine the scientific method?

Undoing colonial legacies requires scientists to cultivate a decolonial approach to their research, including the recognition that knowledge sits in different places with different people and that scientific research cannot be impervious to concerns of justice.

• Amitangshu Acharya, Lecturer, Water Governance, IHE Delft
• Margreet Zwarteveen, Professor of Water Governance, IHE Delft
• Ashish Kothari, Environmentalist and Author, India
• Banu Subramaniam, Luella LaMer Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College, USA
• Madhusudan Katti, Associate Professor, Leadership in Public Science, Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University; USA
• Rolando Vazquez Melken, Professor of Post/Decolonial Theories and Literatures, University of Amsterdam