Decolonised Knowledge

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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.
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.
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.
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.
Creating knowledge: Breaking the monopoly
(1982) Hall, Budd L
Creating Knowledge: A Monopoly? Participatory Research in Development
(Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 1982-06) Hall, Budd L; Gillete, Arthur; Tandon, Rajesh
Zapatistas in Chiapas
(1984-03-23) Tandon, Rajesh
At a moment when Mexico was entering a new era of economic liberalisation under NAFTA, an unexpected uprising in Chiapas reshaped debates on democracy, land, and indigenous rights. This paper examines the Zapatista movement within the longer history of indigenous struggle while drawing attention to its distinctive way of combining traditional claims with new tools of communication and solidarity. The research also considers how the movement’s vision travelled beyond Chiapas, raising questions about development, autonomy, and cultural survival. In doing so, it argues for seeing the Zapatistas not only as a regional rebellion but as a reminder that struggles over dignity and self-determination can unsettle dominant ideas of governance in ways that remain unresolved.
Participatory research-Popular knowledge and power
(1984-09) Hall, Budd L
The democratization of the production of knowledge
(1988-05-03) Hall, Budd L
Dr. Budd L. Hall delivered the opening address at a participatory research workshop held at the University of Calgary in May 1988. In this address, he reflects on his journey in participatory research, beginning with his work in Tanzania in the early 1970s, where he met Paulo Freire, to his role in founding the International Participatory Research Network in 1977. By the time of the address, he headed the International Council for Adult Education. . Participatory research is framed through three connected dimensions: a theoretical grounding aimed at building popular hegemony rather than serving ruling classes, an epistemological understanding of knowledge formed through the interaction of research, education and action, and a political practice built on working directly with communities. Feminist, Indigenous, and worker perspectives run through the address, including a Montreal poultry workers' union that studied its own workplace health conditions instead of relying on outside experts, illustrating that there are many ways of knowing beyond formal Western science. John Gaventa's observation appears too that social movements often falter either by rejecting research altogether or by depending too heavily on outside experts. A six-step method developed by Joao Francisco de Souza runs from context and justification through to the collectivization of the knowledge produced. Participatory research is presented, in the end, as a difficult but necessary strategy within the larger struggle over who controls knowledge and power
Education for all as determined by the few?
(Society for Participatory Research in Asia, 1989-12) Tandon, Rajesh
Higher education, the politics of knowledge and the challenges of popular education and social movements
(1993) Hall, Budd L
Dr. Budd L. Hall reflects on the politics of knowledge in higher education, drawing on his own experiences across adult education, participatory research, and academic life. The paper departs from conventional academic arguments. It moves through personal narrative and engagement with other scholars to examine how universities continue to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge. Hall grounds these reflections in specific encounters from his career, particularly the 1991 Paulo Freire Birthday Conference in New York, where a question from a Latina community educator pushed him to rethink how universities relate to the communities they claim to serve. He traces participatory research back to challenges against positivist paradigms in adult education and international development research, noting that even as the field gains recognition inside universities, systems of tenure, promotion, and academic reward continue to favor individual scholarship over collaborative and community-rooted work. Eco-feminist, cultural-historical, and adult education voices, including Vandana Shiva, Mechtild Hart, and Edmund Sullivan, widen the critique further. Hall also points to community-based research centres, PRIA among them, and popular education networks across Latin America as spaces sustaining knowledge outside university walls, closing with a call to reinvent the academy in more democratic and non-extractive terms
An emerging global civil society? Implications for learning and work
(2000) Hall, Budd L
What role can adult education play in strengthening global civil society and democratic social change? In this paper, Dr. Budd Hall explores the meanings, uses, and utility of global civil society as both a concept and a lived political practice, tracing its emergence alongside the deepening contradictions of economic globalization. The author argues that global civil society is not an actor itself but a space where social movement organizations, international advocacy networks, non-governmental organizations, and citizen groups interact, resist, and reimagine world politics. Based on theorists including Lipschutz, Hyden, Boulding, and Gramsci, the paper examines why this concept has gained urgency now, pointing to the erosion of state sovereignty; the proliferation of NGOs across the majority world, the growing disillusionment with market-driven globalization, and the shipwreck, as Latouche puts it, of the grand society that has left hundreds of millions as castaways. Networking emerges as the defining practice of global civil society: informal, flexible, decentralized, and capable of rapid mobilization across borders. The paper then turns to adult education, arguing it has a distinctive and underutilized role in strengthening the learning dimensions of global civil society. Transformative adult education, the author contends, supports shifts away from consumerist growth models toward life-affirming, democratically produced visions of collective life, making it not peripheral to global civil society but central to its survival.
Seeing like a citizen’ re-claiming citizenship in a neoliberal world. November 28-29,2005
(Institute of Development Studies, 2005-11-29) Gaventa, John
What does it mean to be a citizen, and how is that meaning shifting under neoliberalism? In this paper, Prof. John Gaventa discusses how citizenship has increasingly moved away from a rights centered approach towards a more consumption-based approach. Depoliticised notions of citizenship have taken precedence under neoliberalism, where individuals are framed as consumers, users, voters, or beneficiaries rather than as rights bearing actors in their own right. He situates this shift within broader transformations of the state as well, which is not simply withdrawing but is being reconfigured to actively advance market logics, often weakening its role as a guarantor of rights. Through this paper, Gaventa proposes “reversing the telescope” by centering the perspectives of citizens as actors in development processes. This approach foregrounds what he terms thick forms of citizenship, where participation, contestation, and collective action are central. Moving beyond market, state and democracy first forms of citizenship, he argues that placing citizens first enables a re-politicisation of citizenship, strengthening claims to rights, accountability, and more meaningful democratic engagement.
Beyond epistemicide: Knowledge democracy and higher education
(UNESCO Chair, 2015) Hall, Budd L
As universities grapple with their role in a world marked by inequality and ecological crisis, the question of whose knowledge counts has become impossible to ignore. This paper situates higher education within a longer history of epistemicide, the systematic erasure of indigenous and marginalized ways of knowing, and examines how knowledge democracy offers a path toward repair. By drawing on examples of community-based research and indigenous scholarship, it argues for reimagining universities as sites of dialogue rather than dominance, where multiple epistemologies can coexist. The study underscores both the transformative promise and the unresolved tensions of this shift, positioning knowledge democracy less as a finished framework than as an unfolding experiment in rebalancing power and voice.
Global thematic review on training in community-based research: Indigenous people and perspectives in Latin American
(Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) and Unversity of Victoria, 2016) Haffenden, Johanna Andrea
The review examines CBR in Latin America regarding indigenous people and indigenous perspectives around the core themes of democracy, water governance and sustainability. In Latin America as a result of decades of continuous political activity and in the name of democracy indigenous populations have been recognised with an active political role without having to abandon their cultural identity (Korovkin, 2001) to the point that it has also become a tool of power to change existing structures. In addition, it is argued that the current political participation of indigenous peoples in Latin American constitutes the development of postliberal citizens (Jorge Hernandez Díaz, 2010). Within this context CBR involving indigenous people and indigenous perspectives in Latin America frequently refers to the idea of recovering indigenous identities and discourses that intend to subvert systems that still serve privileged and white social classes over indigenous people. It is in this context that CBR, encompassed by universities and intellectuals committed to alter the current dynamics, develops and shapes social initiatives. Within the CBR framework indigenous peoples are visible actors who possess perspectives that are part of a culture that can offer solutions to environmental issues created by the ‘other.
Decolonization of knowledge, epistemicide, participatory research, and higher education
(UCL Press, 2017) Hall, Budd L; Tandon, Rajesh
This article raises questions about what the word ‘knowledge’ refers to. Drawn from some 40 years of collaborative work on knowledge democracy, the authors suggest that higher education institutions today are working with a very small part of the extensive and diverse knowledge systems in the world. Following from de Sousa Santos, they illustrate how Western knowledge has been engaged in epistemicide, or the killing of other knowledge systems. Community-based participatory research is about knowledge as an action strategy for change and about the rendering visible of the excluded knowledges of our remarkable planet. Knowledge stories, theoretical dimensions of knowledge democracy and the evolution of community-based participatory research partnerships are highlighted.
Partnering with higher education institutions for SDG 17: The role of higher education institutions in multi-stakeholder partnerships
(2018-04) Tandon, Rajesh; Chakrabarti, Kaustuv
Regional report: Open science & the decolonization of knowledge international webinar series
(2020) Piron, Florence
Against epistemicide: Decolonising higher education
(2020) Hall, Budd L; Tandon, Rajesh
How have knowledge systems been shaped by histories of enclosure and dispossession? In this reflective essay, Dr. Budd Hall and Dr. Rajesh Tandon examine how colonisation and the enclosing of knowledge are embedded within the same paradigm through which capital was accumulated by dispossession, as theorised by David Harvey. Drawing parallels with the enclosure movement in England, they argue that common lands were gradually privatised, displacing those who depended on them. In a similar way, wealth extracted through colonisation helped build universities that enclosed knowledge within their walls, regulating who could access it and who could legitimately produce it. These enclosures determined which knowledge systems were recognised and legitimised and which were dismissed as irrational, reinforcing distinctions between knowers and non-knowers. The essay traces how these processes continue to shape contemporary academic institutions and their authority over what counts as legitimate knowledge. In response, the authors describe the establishment of the UNESCO Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education as a deliberate effort to reverse the colonisation of knowledge systems by creating structures and processes for the co-creation of knowledge with social movements and civil society partners, grounded in a commitment to epistemic justice.
50th anniversary edition of pedagogy of the oppressed
(2020) Hall, Budd L
Why has Pedagogy of the Oppressed remained one of the most influential works in educational thought for more than five decades? In this review, Dr. Budd L. Hall critically examines the 50th Anniversary Edition of Paulo Freire’s foundational work and explores the reasons for its enduring global impact. Drawing on personal recollections from his time in 1970s Tanzania, Hall reflects on how Freire's philosophy shaped early radical adult literacy initiatives. The review emphasizes that the strength of Freire’s work emerged from its close connection to the experiences of marginalized communities and literacy movements in Brazil, where dialogue and collective reflection became tools for understanding and challenging oppression. This is further enriched by contributions from Donaldo Macedo and Ira Shor, whose writings in the anniversary edition highlight the continuing relevance of Freire’s ideas in a world marked by inequality and political polarization. Ultimately, the review concludes that Freire's work remains significant because it demonstrates how education can enable marginalized communities to understand, challenge, and transform oppressive social conditions.