Resisting the Ecology of Knowledges, Reclaiming an Ecology of Study: Some Notes on Decolonization in Higher Education

Recent years have seen an upsurge of academic and activist texts on decolonization in higher education. A recurring theme in this literature is the politics of knowledge at play in the colonial project, which makes the university an important site of struggle for a decolonial future. It is this particular epistemological claim on the decolonial imaginary that I aim to problematize in this article. Based on a reading of Santos’ ecology of knowledges, I argue that within this imaginary, decolonization tends to denote social justice in the broad sense, but also risks favoring a particular kind of tolerant cosmopolitanism that ultimately closes down the future. The alternative I suggest is to reclaim the university as an ecology of study, thereby shifting the focus from the knowledge being produced at universities to the practices of study that happen within universities. I will demonstrate how the notion of study offers a way out and could be of particular relevance when considering existing experimental universities that re-invent the idea of the university, often together with Black and indigenous movements. Vital to these is an educational understanding of decolonization that stresses the importance of pedagogy in processes of imagining and enacting different worlds and possible futures through study.