Decolonised Knowledge

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End date: 1979

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Non-formal adult education as an entry point for community organisation
    (0000) Ginny; Shrivastava, Om
    How can adult education be leveraged to organise communities? Non formal adult education, by virtue of its flexibility and close alignment with local needs, offers a strong entry point for community organisation. In this article, Ginny and Om Srivastava outline how adult education can be operationalised not merely as a literacy intervention but as a participatory process rooted in people’s lived realities aimed towards individual and social development. They emphasise that the core aim is not limited to reading and writing, but to enable individuals to understand their social conditions, develop critical awareness, and begin to act collectively. Literacy, functional knowledge, and consciousness raising are seen as interconnected pathways through which people can recognise their own potential and organise for change. The article further details how such programmes must be grounded in the community through immersion, participatory methods, and locally relevant materials. Adult education centres, when designed as shared spaces of dialogue and reflection, can evolve into forums for collective decision making and action. In this sense, adult education becomes not an end in itself, but a starting point for building confidence, leadership, and sustained community organisation.
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    African studies, the formation of knowledge and political commitment
    (University of Ottawa, 1978-05-04) Hall, Budd L
    This knowledge resource is a keynote address delivered by Dr. Budd L. Hall at the University of Ottawa in May 1978, at the joint conference of the Canadian Association of African Studies and the Institute for International Cooperation. Hall raises two central questions: what responsibilities do African studies scholars carry within the Canadian political economy? And how does a genuine commitment to oppressed peoples reshape the practice of research? In his view, academic knowledge production has largely come to serve state and market interests, at the expense of the knowledge systems held by working and indigenous communities. Based on Gramsci, Cabral, and Freire, Hall challenges the neutrality of mainstream research and points toward participatory and activist alternatives, citing community-led examples from Kenya and Tanzania. The address stands as an early and enduring contribution to participatory research thought, speaking directly to present-day debates on knowledge democracy and the decolonization of research practice.
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    Participatory research: An approach for change
    (International Council for Adult Education, 1975) Hall, Budd L
    How can research be imagined as an educational and transformative process rather than an extractive one? In this reflective essay, Dr. Budd Hall examines the shortcomings embedded within dominant principles of social science research. Drawing from his experiences as a researcher and his interactions with local education officers in the 1970s, he reflects on how research practices often alienate communities from the very processes meant to understand them. The essay explores key concerns around the ideological foundations of research, the ways in which social problems are oversimplified, and the distance from adult education principles. In doing so, it invites researchers to reimagine research as a dialectic, dialogic and ongoing educational experience which is oriented towards the liberation of human creative potential rather than the production of “neutral” knowledge.
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    Participatory research meeting in India
    (1979-02) Tandon, Rajesh
    This report documents a Participatory Research (PR) meeting held in February 1979. It was attended by 35 activists, field workers, researchers, and practitioners from across India. It describes case studies shared at the meeting, including West Bengal's Operation Barga sharecropper registration drive, a tribal-led irrigation scheme in Rajasthan, and the mobilization of landless labourers and tribal women through Maharashtra's Shramik Sangathana. The report then turns to debates that emerged on PR's relationship to social action, the overlapping roles of researcher and activist, the risk of fostering dependency, and possible entry points for PR work, along with a comparison of PR and classical research across five guiding principles. It closes by reflecting on the empathy and self-awareness needed in a participatory researcher.