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“higher education institutions today are working with a very small part of the extensive and diverse knowledge systems in the world;”
Academic publishing
The Decolonising the curriculum section of the University’s Quality and Standards Framework, states "decolonising the curriculum is the process of recognising, challenging and dismantling the white-western male-elite domination of knowledge taught in the academy. This process leaves open the potential to reconstruct knowledge in partnership with diverse cultures and create inclusive ways of knowing and teaching."
Integral to this is consideration of the role of traditional academic publishing, and exploration of other sources of knowledge. This aligns to the final question in Evaluate your reading list: "What kinds of sources do we perceive to be of most academic value and why?"
Academic publishing is dominated by a handful of mega-publishers, all based in the Global North. They continue to privilege white-western viewpoints and experiences. The metrics used to evaluate academic outputs reinforce this privilege and bias.
Three useful introductions to these issues are:
- Decolonization of knowledge, epistemicide, participatory research and higher education by Budd L. Hall and Rajesh Tandon.
- Decolonizing scholarly data and publishing infrastructures by Angela Okune.
- Open Access, the Global South and the Politics of Knowledge Production and Circulation by Leslie Chan.
Books and articles are valuable sources of information, but should be considered as just one facet of knowledge creation and exchange. A reading list that supports the 3Ds looks beyond these sources.
Academic practices - considerations
How will widening the range of sources used in your teaching affect your students’ accurate, critical, and ethical use of information?
Will your students need to develop new skills and practices? If so, how will they do this, and how will you support them? How will they know what progress they are making?
You may find it useful to refer to the elements of knowledge management and the source reliability section of the Finding books and journals SkillsGuide.
When you are selecting books, chapters, articles and reports, consider whether the citations are obscuring the identity of the author(s). See Citation justice for more information.
Citation justice
Citations are an essential part of academic practice and a key element of knowledge management but they hide an individual's identity and characteristics.
Citations make it difficult to know whether sources are contributing to the decolonisation, democratisation, and diversification of knowledge creation and transfer. Or whether those sources are perpetuating inequality and injustice.
The following works explore citation justice and how it can be achieved.
In March 2022, Nature published a news item about the emerging movement aiming to push researchers to pay more heed to inequities in scholarly citations. See The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer .
This LSE blog notes the increasing evidence that women, people of colour, and other minoritised groups are systematically under cited in academic work, and suggests how academics and students can contribute to redressing this: Aspirational metrics – A guide for working towards citational justice.
The blog links to the UM Citation Guide, created by the blog's authors. The guide encourages everyone in academia to question why certain authors are “leaders in the field” and why they are the ones most quoted and referenced. The authors ask you to think about how you can increase the visibility of work by women and other historically marginalised people in the production of knowledge.
More recently, Lancaster and King have explored publishing policies and style-guide conventions to identify where citation injustices may occur in scenarios with shared first authors and equally contributing authors.
Beware of the Internet
The internet can be a rich source of information, and a useful way to find voices and knowledge minoritised and marginalised by traditional publishing.
However, like many aspects of society, the internet is biased and unequal. In addition, search engines work in different, and not always obvious or transparent ways.
A useful introduction to the challenges of searching for information on the internet is Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. [University of Hull login required.]
In Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight Alexander Monea explores how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet, hidden in algorithms, keywords, content moderation, and argues that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not. [Edited extract from the DOAB description].
Race after technology by Ruha Benjamin investigates how emerging technologies, from everyday apps to complex algorithms, can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. [Edited extract from the book description].
