SGO9210 – Emancipating knowledges and socionatures: anticolonialism and decolonisation debates
Course content
Calls for anticolonial practices and scholarship are growing from around the world. Scholarship emerging from Africa, South Asia and South America several decades ago laid important foundations for rethinking the conceptual and methodological basis for anticolonial thinking. Similarly, Latin American activist groups and scholars are now at the forefront of articulating what taking an anticolonial approach to scholarship and socionatural change might look like. In other parts of the world, calls for decolonisation are strong, but with somewhat different emphases and vocabularies. In this course, we read across conversations from different parts of the world on epistemological hegemonies, more-than-geographies and the emergent climate crisis. We emphasise situating conversations in their historical and geopolitical context and asking how these conversations demand that knowledges produced in Global North universities need to take seriously these critiques. These conversations lay a foundation for new imaginaries for an emancipated world.
Course leaders:
Andrea J. Nightingale| University of Oslo, Professor of Geography, Department of Sociology and Human Geography
Andrea J. Nightingale is Professor of Human Geography, University of Oslo and Research Fellow, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Her current research passions seek to account for power and politics within dynamic and unpredictable environmental change. Her interests cross between climate change adaptation and transformation debates; collective action and state formation; the nature-society nexus; political violence in natural resource governance; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to development, transformation, collective action and cooperation. She has worked in Nepal for over thirty years on natural resource governance and maintains a vibrant research collaboration there. Her work has expanded in the last ten years to collaborate on projects in Kenya, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Peru. While living in Scotland, she did research on in-shore fisheries management. Her recent book is Environment and Sustainability in a Globalizing World, Routledge, 2019.
Rahul Ranjan| University of Edinburgh, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Geography School of Geosciences
Rahul Ranjan is a writer and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of "The Political Life of Memory", Cambridge University Press 2023. He recently also edited "At the Crossroads of Rights" (Routledge 2022), which presents collective writing on the advocacy of human and forest rights in India. Between 2020-2023, he held an appointment as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the "Riverine Rights" project funded by the Research Council of Norway and based at the Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo (Norway). Broadly, his work is on the intersection of emotion, climate change, rivers and disasters.
Additional Lecturers:
Liisa-Rávná Finbog (She/her/hers) | Tampere University, Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Liisa-Rávná Finbog (PhD) is a Sámi Indigenous scholar, duojár, author, and curator affiliated with Tampere University, Finland. She is the author of 'It Speaks to You: Making Kin of People, Stories, and Duodji in Sámi Museums (Dio Press, 2023). She holds a position as an external curator at KORO, the Norwegian government's professional body for art in public spaces as well as the position of curator of discursive programming at MUNCH museum in Oslo. Moving between Sámi aesthetics and the materiality of creative practices, she navigates the dynamics between fine art and politics of indigeneity in her work, both as an academic and duojár, but also in her curatorial practice.
M. Isabel Kamlongera | MyGlobalEd.org, Post-doctoral Research Fellow
M. Isabel Kamlongeraearned her Ph.D. from Oslo Metropolitan University, focusing on critical approaches in gender, media, and development studies. She embraces a decolonial methodology in her scholarly work, prioritizing narrative sharing and collaborative knowledge creation with marginalized communities. Isabel has contributed to various fields through her publications in journals such as Qualitative Research, Research Ethics, and Gender and Education. Her forthcoming edited text, "Decoloniality in Gender Discourse and Praxis: Views from the Margins," underscores her dedication to exploring decoloniality in knowledge creation within gender studies. Isabel's academic path is marked by a commitment to blending local insights with global frameworks to support underrepresented voices in education and research, always striving to learn from and with the communities she engages with.
Maka Suarez | University of Oslo, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Anthropology
Maka Suarez is an assistant professor at the department of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. Her work moves across political, economic, and multimodal anthropology. Before coming to Oslo, she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and the cofounder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography - Kaleidos at the University of Cuenca, Ecuador where she developed various multimodal ethnographic projects, including the platform EthnoData for the critical analysis of statistical and ethnographic material on violent deaths in Ecuador. For the past decade and a half, she’s been an activist with the Spanish social movement for the right to housing, La PAH.
Learning outcome
The course will provide students with a broad overview of emerging global debates around anti-colonialism and what it means to decolonise our research. Students apply critical theoretical approaches to think together about how to write and design research methodologies in anti-colonial ways. The lectures will combine the creative use of texts and visual materials (documentary) to understand the situated forms of knowledges upon which scholarship rests. It enables participants to engage with conceptual lenses useful to case studies in non-western worlds. They will acquire skills to engage with their peers through closed group reading and receive feedback by mentors/peers.
Admission to the course
The course is open to all PhD students who are doing research on questions that broadly pertain to the course themes. Although most suited to students working in the traditions of geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental humanities, political science, cultural theory and related disciplines, applicants from all disciplinary backgrounds will be considered. Likewise, applications are welcomed from across the globe, and from PhD researchers looking at anti-colonialism in any form. Applicants can apply at any stage of the PhD process, but may find it most rewarding if they have already conducted some of their own empirical research. Note that due to the popularity of this course, applicants must be enrolled in a PhD degree program.
PhD students at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography register for the course in StudentWeb.
Interested participants outside the Department of Sociology and Human Geography shall fill out this application form.
The deadline for registration is 10th June 2024. After the deadline shall all applicants receive a note about if the application is approved by the end of June.
The course itself is free of charge. It is an in-person course and digital participation is not possible. We have no funds available for supporting PhDs travelling and staying in Norway, unfortunately.
Teaching
The course is run over 4 days August 20-23, 2024. It is expected that students will have read for the course BEFORE the in-person sessions begin. It is also required to turn in a paper draft before the course begins.
Examination
The course earns 5 ECTS. Students are expected to read course material and write a 4000-word essay BEFORE the course begins. Students will receive feedback on the essay during the course. A final version of the essay is due October 30th 2024.
To pass students must: turn in a draft essay by August 15th, 2024, participate in all lectures and group discussions, provide feedback on essays written by peers, turn in a final draft of the essay October 30th 2024.
Essays to be sent to katalin.varga@sosgeo.uio.no.
Essay topic: Drawing from your own PhD research, discuss how anti-colonial debates are relevant for your work. You can present an on-going article or chapter draft that engages decolonial thinking, discuss methodological challenges to implementing anti-colonial research, or reflect on how your work changes when taking an anti/de-colonial perspective.
Examination support material
All exam support materials are allowed during this exam. Generating all or part of the exam answer using AI tools such as Chat GPT or similar is not allowed.
Grading scale
Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale. Read more about the grading system.
More about examinations at UiO
- Use of sources and citations
- Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
- Withdrawal from an exam
- Illness at exams / postponed exams
- Explanation of grades and appeals
- Resitting an exam
- Cheating/attempted cheating
You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.