Decolonizing Social Science Methodology – Towards African Epistemologies (Deadline 31.05.2021)

Session “Decolonizing Social Science Methodology – Towards African Epistemologies

Session Organizers: Monageng Mogalakwe and Shamsul Alam (Botswana and Bangladesh)

Colonialism was a direct political control of people of a given territory by a foreign power. Usually, if not always, colonialism was accompanied by permanent settlements, or occupation, by people from the colonizing power, such as the British, French, or Germans. The colonized people were mainly in the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At the experiential level, colonialism was really the political control of one race by another, with the colonial settlers invariably being ‘Western’, ‘European’, and ‘White’, and the colonized being the ‘Other’. But colonialism was also, simultaneously, about the production of ideological justifications of such control, which justifications involved the creation of a perception in the ‘Other’ of the superiority of the colonizer, hence the asymmetrical power relations that characterized the relationship between the two agents’. This condescension encompassed all aspects of the ‘Other’s’ systems (i.e. the economic, cultural, political, legal, etc. systems), including the epistemologies and methodologies on which such systems were predicated. All these aspects required total eradication and a root and branch replacement with a Western European world view. The result was a systematic marginalization and undervaluation, if not total eradication, of the ‘Other’s’ worldview (Chilisa, 2012). The impartation of this worldview constituted the ‘process of civilization’, a process that necessarily involved a unidirectional transfer of information, skills, understanding and civilization from the European to the ‘Other’ (Serpell, 1993). This is how the Western European colonial epistemologies and methodologies came to inform and shape the development and trajectory of the social sciences, and are today regarded as the essential ingredients in the process of production of knowledge. The main objective of the proposed session is to call for the emancipation of the social sciences from Western, European epistemologies and methodologies in the production of knowledge. It is a modest attempt to reinsert African epistemologies and methodologies in the discourses of the social sciences, with a view to making the social sciences more relevant to the African context. This would constitute an exercise in decolonization of social sciences knowledge production and curation. Papers in the proposed session will based on following assumptions: (1) That there is an inherent bias in theoretical, problem selection, methodological and research priorities in research in the social sciences in Africa, which emanates from European and American foundational social sciences literature. (2) That instead of being displaced during the post-colonial phase, these foundational works and their inherent biases were further entrenched and perpetuated globally, yielding a social sciences thinking out of sync with contemporary realities in Africa. (3) That the significance of these biases and systematic silencing of the ‘African voice’ denied a “voice of its own” to the post-colonial subjectivity. Accordingly, papers in the proposed session would include indigenous post-colonial methodologies and epistemologies. Furthermore, emphasis will be on the heterogeneous and plural methodological tradition, meant to critique and displace the global hegemony and privilege of Eurocentric/Colonialist and Orientalist discourses. We affirm that such attempts constitute a reformulation of Social Science discourse that will pave the pay for the development of fresh concepts, theories, methodologies and research agendas appropriate to the African context. Two goals would guide such an important and urgent academic mission: (a) it would problematize the notion of ‘value-free’ (objective) research that is entrenched in Eurocentric conceptions, and, in the process, contemplate producing knowledge that is relevant and engaging, and that (b) such alternative methodologies do not call for a willy-nilly rejection of extant canons, but rather seeks to put emphasis on regional and local historical experiences and cultural practice i.e. contextualization. This session will carter for papers from different social science disciplines, e.g., Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology etc.

Submission of Papers

All sessions have to comply with the conference organization rules (see below). If you want to present a paper, please submit your abstract via the official conference website: https://gcsmus.org until 31.05.2021. You will be informed by 31.07.2021, if your proposed paper has been accepted for presentation at the conference. For further information, please see the conference website or contact the session organizers, Monageng Mogalakwe and Shamsul Alam (mogalakwe@mopipi.ub.ub; Shamsul.alam1956@gmail.com).

About the Conference

The “Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability” (GCSMUS) together with the Research Committee on “Logic and Methodology in Sociology” (RC33) of the “International Sociology Association” (ISA) and the Research Network “Quantitative Methods” (RN21) of the European Sociology Association” (ESA) will organize a “1st International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods” (“SMUS Conference”) which will at the same time be the “1st RC33 Regional Conference – Africa: Botswana” from Thursday 23.09 – Sunday 26.09.2021, hosted by the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana. Given the current challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference will convene entirely online. The conference aims at promoting a global dialogue on methods and should attract methodologists from all over the world and all social and spatial sciences (e.g. area studies, architecture, communication studies, educational sciences, geography, historical sciences, humanities, landscape planning, philosophy, psychology, sociology, urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning). Thus, the conference will enable scholars to get in contact with methodologists from various disciplines all over the world and to deepen discussions with researchers from various methodological angles. Scholars of all social and spatial sciences and other scholars who are interested in methodological discussions are invited to submit a paper to any sessions of the conference. All papers have to address a methodological problem.

Please find more information on the above institutions on the following websites:

Rules for Session Organization (According to GCSMUS Objectives and RC 33 Statutes)

  1. There will be no conference fees.

  2. The conference language is English. All papers therefore need to be presented in English.

  3. All sessions have to be international: Each session should have speakers from at least two countries (exceptions will need good reasons).

  4. Each paper must contain a methodological problem (any area, qualitative or quantitative).

  5. There will be several calls for abstracts via the GCSMUS, RC33 and RN21 Newsletters. To begin with, session organizers can prepare a call for abstracts on their own initiative, then at a different time, there will be a common call for abstracts, and session organizers can ask anybody to submit a paper.

  6. GCSMUS, RC33 and RN21 members may distribute these calls via other channels. GCSMUS members and session organizers are expected to actively advertise their session in their respective scientific communities.

  7. Speakers can only have one talk per session. This also applies for joint papers. It will not be possible for A and B to present at the same time one paper as B and A during the same session. This would just extend the time allocated to these speakers.

  8. Session organizers may present a paper in their own session.

  9. Sessions will have a length of 90 minutes with a maximum of 4 papers or a length of 120 minutes with a maximum of 6 papers. Session organizers can invite as many speakers as they like. The number of sessions depends on the number of papers submitted to each session. E.g. if 12 good papers are submitted to a session, there will be two sessions with a length of 90 minutes each with 6 papers in each session.

  10. Papers may only be rejected for the conference if they do not present a methodological problem (as stated above), are not in English or are somehow considered by session organizers as not being appropriate or relevant for the conference. Session organizers may ask authors to revise and resubmit their paper so that it fits these requirements. If session organizers do not wish to consider a paper submitted to their session, they should inform the author and forward the paper to the local organizing team who will find a session where the paper fits for presentation.

  11. Papers directly addressed to the conference organising committee (and those forwarded from session organizers) will be offered to other session organizers (after proofing for quality). The session organizers will have to decide on whether or not the paper can be included in their session(s). If the session organizers think that the paper does not fit into their session(s), the papers should be sent back to the conference organizing committee as soon as possible so that the committee can offer the papers to another session organizer.