#decolonizingmethodologies

In this excerpt from Smith (2012) there is reference made to “colonizing the disciplines” (p. 65), which connects (in my interpretation) to the way in which decentralized silos as knowledge segment thought, creating discrete boundaries where intuitive thinking sees none.  This has the practical effect of marginalizing some areas of knowledge that have less currency in the dominant culture.  Take, for example, astronomy and gender studies.  On face, we can understand why these two would be spaced out across a prominent University. One roots their research in complex tools manufactured to a degree of great precision, housed in massive labs; the other depends more than anything else on the abstract scalpel of introspection (and historical and sociological investigation).  Yet, when a female astronomical researcher contemplates leaving behind the work she loves because she feels compelled to “pass as a White man” in order to continue, the gap between disciplines becomes a dispiriting void; even finding comfort in a diversity center does little to effect change in the everyday within the science lab.  Carrying that precious knowledge spoonful by spoonful between colonized disciplines is a painful and inadequate remedy; and perhaps the very design of the University ensures that this is the case?

Additionally, in another course on “place” as the defining characteristic of segregation and inequality in education, we addressed the incomplete approaches of departments within a local, state, and federal government (or really, a patchwork complex of entities that aggregate under the seemingly continuous umbrella term ‘government’).

In that moment, I saw that “colonizing the disciplines” might be connected to a similar “colonizing the departments” within government, so that resources, planning, and thinking (ways of knowing or epistemologies) are not shared between these organizational boundaries; the way people are counted, what data matters, and other decisions create a relative ‘tower of Babel’ that makes “solving” issues of inequity nigh impossible.