Remooring Academia: Postcolonial and Infrastructural Challenges Open Access
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Published:June 2025
Angela Okune, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Aalok Khandekar, Maka Suarez, Kim Fortun, 2025. "Remooring Academia: Postcolonial and Infrastructural Challenges", Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency, Leandro Rodriguez Medina, Sandra Harding
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To remoor is to configure things and relations differently when aware that current configurations no longer work. This chapter asks what epistemic decentering and decentralization look like in practice—as processes of remooring—across different geographies. It also introduces examples of novel academic infrastructures that are, by design, counterhegemonic. Based on our individual and collective experiences, we interrogate the everyday life of universities’ internationalization agendas, the contradictions of academic publishing, and the constraints of contract-based research. The chapter also offers insights into so-called peripheral academic infrastructures (in Ecuador, Turkey, and Kenya), highlighting emerging research spaces that aim to reconfigure the process of knowledge production otherwise. Our chapter argues for the need to remoor academia, persistently loosening ties to colonial logics and infrastructures while slowly weaving alternative connections. We argue that any talk about decolonizing academia will need to be tied to practice and supported with new infrastructure.