Against the Tactical Lie of Coloniality: Personally-at-Stake Academic Dialogues as Decolonial Methodology

• In Event: Methodological Reworlding: Working through (De)Colonial Entanglements

Abstract

Objectives
This paper theorizes and enacts personally-at-stake academic dialogues as a decolonial methodology that bridges the subjective/personal and the objective/scientific in knowledge production. It builds on Mignolo’s imperative to “delink” from Northern-centric epistemologies (2011), which impose a false divide between the personal self and the academic self. This work forms part of a broader project aimed at restoring and sustaining an ecology of decolonial research—one that heals researchers, participants, and our interconnected local-global communities through an ethic of relational accountability.
Theoretical Frameworks and Warrants
By reimagining and renaming every stage of research—literature review, data collection, analysis, and writing—as personally-at-stake academic dialogues, this paper foregrounds how knowledge production and circulation are always already entangled with who we are and how we relate to others. Even a statement such as “this is strictly professional” implicates the personal through its denial, or erasure. To illuminate this entanglement, I engage a praxis of rememorying—an enactment of connectivity as/of self that brings together fragmented and often conflicting aspects of the embodied self, which are also connected to particular places (Rhee, 2021). These fractures have rendered our identities legible and our stories digestible within the colonial knowledge regime (Romero, 2022).
Consequently, rememorying—a process of both remembering and forgetting—facilitates a way to both hold and refuse our own legible identities and digestible stories. Through this practice, the connectivity as/of self not only exceeds but also disrupts the colonial structure and organization of knowledge. Moreover, rememorying reveals how each individual is always already connected to multiple intersecting local-global communities across time and space—relations obscured by dominant colonial categorizations. These acts of tracing and reconnecting unveil nearly forgotten decolonial traditions, rituals, and epistemologies that make personally-at-stake academic dialogues possible.

To recognize these nearly forgotten decolonial inheritances in the thickness of coloniality is, in itself, a gift. Drawing on Indigenous notions of the gift—not as privatized property but as a source of relational responsibility (Kimmerer, 2013)—this paper frames personally-at-stake academic dialogues as a form of reciprocal practice. Such dialogue can cultivate joyful, responsible, and healing research and scholarly relationships. While acknowledging that no space remains untouched by coloniality (Mignolo, 2018), the gift reminds us that coloniality has never fully conquered our ancestors, memories, knowledge systems, or relationships. The supposed completeness of colonial domination is, in fact, a tactical lie. Through the connective practice of rememorying, we recall that we have always already lived, albeit in fractured ways, within decolonial relations, epistemologies, and inquiry traditions.
Scholarly Significance
The habitual colonial onto-epistemology—structurally valued and institutionally rewarded—is difficult, if not impossible, to transform through conventional methodologies. This paper proposes personally-at-stake academic dialogue as a methodology that cultivates researchers to remain open to receiving and responding to the gift/inheritance. While it challenges dominant logics that render coloniality and decoloniality as “homogenous, atomic, separable categories” (Lugones, 2010, p. 742), it can support researchers to get in touch with our diverse, situated, and interconnected decolonial inheritances—that have long sustained research and knowledge making outside colonial academic legitimacy.

Author

• Jeong-Eun Rhee, Long Island University - C.W. Post Campus